Brother of woman who vanished from cruise 27 years ago reveals critical third witness
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The brother of the missing woman featured in the hit Netflix docuseries “Amy Bradley is Missing” spoke with Fox News Digital to disclose further information in the case that was not discussed on the show.
Amy Bradley has been missing for 27 years since she vanished from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas just before it docked in Curaçao on a March 1998 vacation. The documentary sheds light on Bradley’s case – from the circumstances of her disappearance, to witness sightings, to her family’s grueling decadeslong quest for answers about what exactly happened to her.
The series focuses heavily on Alister “Yellow” Douglas, referred to only as Yellow by those familiar with the case, who was the bassist in the cruise ship’s band and is the Bradley family’s top suspect in her disappearance.
On the night of March 23, 1998, Amy and her brother, Brad Bradley, stayed up late partying aboard the ship. Amy was seen dancing with Yellow, who had taken a keen interest in her, in the Blue Orchid Lounge, a dance club on the ship’s upper deck.
Around 3:35 a.m. on the morning of March 24, Brad returned to the family’s cabin to relax, followed shortly thereafter by Amy, who retired to the room only about five minutes later. The pair spent time on the balcony of their room, smoking cigarettes and talking until Brad went to bed.
At 5:30 a.m., Ron Bradley, Amy and Brad’s father, woke up and saw Amy asleep in a lounge chair on the balcony. The balcony door was closed.
Around a half-hour later, Ron checked on Amy again, but she was gone. The balcony door was slightly ajar and her shoes and the yellow shirt she had been wearing were still inside the room.
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The Bradley’s then started a frantic search for Amy, alerting the ship’s crew that she was missing. Royal Caribbean said all the rooms and public spaces on the ship were checked, but Amy was not found.
The Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard searched for Amy for four days to no avail, and the FBI was dispatched to investigate.
“Let me preface by saying we are forever grateful to Ari Mark and Phil Lott,” Brad Bradley told Fox News Digital, referring to the film’s producers and directors. “The producers did an amazing job. We’re very happy with the show and how much attention it’s garnered around the world. I mean, I’ve said on many interviews, it has literally single-handedly revitalized [Amy’s] name around the word.”
When asked what he wished to convey that was not seen in the documentary, Brad immediately honed in on the FBI’s investigation, or in his view, the lack thereof.
“Making people understand, in my opinion, the failure of the FBI in our case to do their due diligence to investigate the case properly and thoroughly,” he said when asked what he wishes more people knew about the case.
Brad said that the FBI immediately dropped the ball on the investigation, beginning with the most basic investigative procedure: establishing a timeline of the disappearance.
Just before 6:00 a.m. on March 24, two women named Lori and Crystal, who were sitting on the deck of the ship, watched Amy and Yellow ride a glass elevator up to the Blue Orchid Lounge. That was around the time Ron noticed Amy was missing from the ship.
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They reported seeing Amy with a camera, and Yellow handing her a brown drink. Soon after, the women said, Yellow briskly walked past them alone. They were two of the last witnesses to see Amy alive.
They returned to their room just a bit later and were let in by one of the girls’ mothers. Since they did not use a key to get into the room, there was no certain way to know exactly what time they entered, which is critical to piecing together when exactly Amy disappeared.
“On the Netflix series, you’ll hear the agent from the FBI say, ‘unfortunately, we weren’t able to corroborate their timeframe,’ essentially in kind of a dismissive way,” Brad said.
“But we found and have, through even very recent conversations in the past week, my mom has spoken with the mother of one of the two girls who let them into their room just after 6 a.m. … and the FBI never questioned her on the boat, and they never have questioned her to this day. They never interviewed her,” he continued.
“And again, after speaking with the mother the other day, she remains adamant that she let them in just after 6 a.m., and they were out at the time they said they were,” Brad said.
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Also, Brad continued, there was a third witness, who was not mentioned in the documentary, around the 6:00 a.m. timeframe to see Amy.
The third witness, named Elizabeth, later testified before a grand jury that she saw Amy and Yellow in the lounge and watched Yellow make Amy a brown drink. She said she then watched the pair move out of her line of sight, according to Brad.
Then, according to Brad, she testified to a shocking detail that has not widely been made public.
“And then she says a young girl about 18 or 19 years old, she suspected … comes out of the back yelling ‘senorita kidnap,’ ‘senorita kidnap,’ more than one time,” Brad said.
The Bradleys are currently attempting to locate Elizabeth in hopes of gathering more information.
Further, Yellow approached Brad at about 7:30 a.m. as he sat on the deck of the ship. Brad was dejected as the immediate search for Amy was unsuccessful.
He says that Yellow apologized to him about his missing sister, before any public announcement had been made about Amy’s disappearance.
“I don’t know, but I think [Yellow] went and handed [Amy] off to somebody who took her down into the crew quarters,” Brad said, positing a theory about the disappearance. “The two girls that, on the outside, that saw him go up the elevator with her, said that he came down some minutes later by himself and walked directly past them, never looked at him, when he’d been trying to holler at them previously.”
Over the years, there have been several sightings of a woman believed to be Amy.
Tourist Judy Maurer said in the documentary that she witnessed a woman she believed to be Amy while in a public restroom in Barbados, before three men allegedly escorted the woman away.
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David Carmichael, a Canadian diver, also said in the docuseries that he may have seen Bradley while visiting Curaçao, adding that she was “flanked by two people,” one of whom he suspected was “Yellow.” Another Curaçao sighting was reported by Navy veteran Bill Hefner, who believes he saw a distressed Bradley at a taboo local bar, but did not report it because of fear of reprisal from his military superiors.
From 2002 until 2008, risqué photos bearing a striking resemblance to Amy surfaced on the website of what appears to be a now-defunct Venezuelan tourist escort resort, according to a blog dedicated to finding Amy. Those photos were featured in the docuseries.
Other theories have also been posited about her disappearance, mainly that she either fell off the balcony accidentally or jumped off intentionally. The Bradley family vehemently denies either of those explanations.
In his heart of hearts, Brad knows Amy is still alive, and so does the rest of the Bradley family.
“My parents and I have shared kind of an unexplainable gut feeling in this sense that she’s still out there, and I don’t know how to better explain that to people or make it more relatable, because it’s an unrelatable kind of thing,” Brad said.
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“People just don’t understand how we could possibly feel like that, and I can’t really explain it, but we do, we’ve all shared it, we’ve never talked about her in the past tense.”
Royal Caribbean did not return a comment request. Neither did Yellow.
The FBI declined to comment.