In March 1998, 23-year-old Amy Bradley disappeared from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship as it approached the island of Curaçao.
Her parents and younger brother were with her on the trip — a family vacation before she moved into her first apartment. By sunrise on the fourth day of the cruise, she was gone.
Nearly three decades later, her case remains unsolved. Did she fall off the boat, or — as her family believes — did something else happen to her?
“Somebody knows something, somebody saw something, somebody heard something, somebody told somebody something,” her mother, Iva Bradley, says in the docuseries. “Nobody can keep a secret their entire life.”
But for Amy Bradley’s family, time hasn’t dulled the urgency. In “Amy Bradley Is Missing,” a new Netflix docuseries directed by Ari Mark and Phil Lott, her parents Ron and Iva Bradley and her brother Brad Bradley revisit those early days and reflect on what it means to live in limbo — to keep believing, even when answers don’t come.
What has Amy Bradley’s family said about her disappearance?
Before the headlines and investigations, there was just a family of four from Virginia. In the docuseries, Amy Bradley’s childhood friend Erin Cullather describes the Bradleys’ home as warm and welcoming, full of joy. Amy Bradley and her brother, close in age, were especially tight. At the time of the cruise, she was 23 and he was 21.
The trip — a prize their parents won through their work — felt like a final sendoff for Amy Bradley, a chance to celebrate before beginning her next chapter. She had just signed a lease on her first apartment and was preparing to start a new job. It was meant to be one last family adventure before adult life began.
But everything changed in the early hours of March 24, when Amy Bradley vanished from the ship without a trace.
“It’s a really terrible feeling,” Iva Bradley says in the docuseries. “Let’s say you’re going to go shopping and you’ve got your children with you. The children are playing around underneath all the clothes and you look up and one of the children’s not there. It’s sheer panic. And that feeling is something that doesn’t go away.”
Ron Bradley says he replays that day over and over. “You wake up thinking about it, go to bed thinking about it. It’s just, everything around reminds you of her.”
For Iva Bradley, the memory is just as present: “Every day,” she says when asked how often she thinks about her daughter. “Not occasionally, not every other day. Not once a month. Every day.”
The ship’s staff suggested she may have gone overboard, as did officials. At the time of her disappearance, Netherlands Antilles Coast Guard Lt. Sjoerd Soethout said, to reporters, she likely fell from her balcony.
But her family didn’t — and still doesn’t — believe that. Over the years, they’ve chased down sightings, tips and eyewitness accounts across the Caribbean. They’ve appeared on “America’s Most Wanted,” worked with the FBI and hired private investigators.
“Twenty six years of looking for Amy every day,” Iva Bradley says. “It’s a life goal.”
Brad Bradley recalled his sister’s last words to him in a recent interview with WWBT.
“She said, I’m going to stay out here on the chaise lounge and a lot of fresh air and wind. I don’t want to go in a closed room right now,” he said. “So, I told her I loved her.”
Where are Amy Bradley’s parents now?
Today, Iva and Ron Bradley are in their 70s and still live in Virginia. They continue to speak publicly about their daughter’s case and remain actively involved in efforts to keep her story in the spotlight.
In the documentary, they reflect on how the last two decades have shaped their lives — not as a gradual healing process, but as a state of suspended grief. There’s no closure, only the enduring hope that something — or someone — might one day bring her home.
“We’ve lost a lot of years, you know, of our life searching,” Iva Bradley says. “But we won’t stop.”
They’ve saved all of Amy Bradley’s belongings — down to the spare change in her wallet and the keys to her car.
“We keep her car in the garage at home,” Ron Bradley says. “We keep it out of the weather and keep it shined up so it’s going to be pristine when she gets here. And then she’ll get to drive it again.”
The filmmakers behind “Amy Bradley Is Missing” say the Bradleys’ resilience left a deep impression on them.
“How could you not relate to this family or align yourself with their mission, when we all have parents and kids and loved ones,” director Ari Mark told TODAY.com. “It’s unfathomable to think that somebody that you care so much about would just vanish without any type of why.”
Where is Brad Bradley now?
Amy’s younger brother Brad Bradley, now in his late 40s, also continues to speak out about her disappearance. In the docuseries, he recounts the final hours he spent with his sister — dancing at the ship’s nightclub, talking on their cabin’s balcony, planning the next day.
“I don’t know what the hell she could have gotten into to be in this type of situation,” he says in the docuseries.
After Amy Bradley disappeared, Brad Bradley paused college and moved back home.
“Before Amy’s disappearance, life is good, everything’s great, everything’s going well, and then all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out from under us,” he says in the series. “It felt like this depressing period where one of the most important people in my life was gone.”
Brad Bradley and his father flew back to Curaçao shortly after the end of their vacation to search for her themselves, they describe in the documentary series.
They followed a tip from a taxi driver who claimed to have seen Amy Bradley in distress. They visited resorts, walked dangerous roads, and checked abandoned buildings — anything to follow the trail.
Like his parents, Brad Bradley still believes his sister may be alive. “The attention she got on that ship wasn’t normal,” he says in the documentary, referring to cruise staff who appeared to take a special interest in his sister. Some of them even asked if she wanted to go out drinking off the boat — an invitation that now haunts the family.
Years later, the experience continues to shape him.
“I don’t have children,” Brad Bradley says. “I’ll be 48 in December. Subconsciously, I think I’d have to admit, watching my parents lose a child was so traumatic for me that I’m not willing to put myself in a position to go through that.”
Still, he holds out hope.
“We all have this gut feeling that she’s out there,” Brad Bradley says. “The lack of closure or the not knowing allows us to continue to hope. So I actually prefer it that way, you know, than the finality of having an answer.”
Still waiting
Amy Bradley’s case remains open with the FBI. Her family has been searching for her for almost 10,000 days — and they say they have no plans to stop.
“We will never give up on her,” Iva Bradley says. “In the morning when we wake up, we say, ‘Well maybe today,’ and then when we get ready to go to bed at night we have a special little kiss for Amy, and we say, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’”
They still believe the right person might speak up — or that Amy Bradley herself might see something, somewhere, and reach out.
“We put a lot of pictures up online, sentimental things, in case she happens to be able to look at it,” Brad Bradley says. “Hopefully she’d see it and know that we’re still trying and still thinking about her.”
For the filmmakers, the Bradleys’ enduring hope shaped every aspect of the project. “When you meet this family and you hear how present and alive Amy is for them every single second of every single day, the responsibility for getting a show onto the air is about life and death,” director Phil Lott told TODAY.com.
They don’t pretend to know what happened. But they believe the right eyes on the story could change everything.
“Something happened to Amy,” Iva says. “We don’t know what that is, but we have to have answers. If you know something, please give us that one thing that we need.”
