Pod Insights Criminology Amy Bradley Part 2 About this episode In the spring of 1998, 23-year-old Amy Bradley boarded a Royal Caribbean cruise with her parents and brother. Just a few days into the cruise, Amy vanished. Her father, Ron, said he last saw her on the balcony early in the morning after a night of partying. But when the family woke up, Amy was nowhere to be found. Join Mike and Morf for part 2 of 2 on the disappearance of Amy Bradley. This case has been followed closely for years by amateur sleuths on sites like Reddit and Websleuths. In part 2, we are going to lay out some of the possible sightings of Amy following her disappearance and dive more into the theories and possibilities of what happened to Amy. You can help support the show through Patreon. We'd love to connect with listeners on social media. We are available on the following platforms: Facebook - Facebook Discussion group - Instagram - Threads - X Formerly Twitter - Blue Sky - Twitch - Tik Tok Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised.
0:37 Speaker 01 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 373 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson.
0:43 Speaker 00 And this is Mike Morford.
0:45 Speaker 01 Morf, how's it going this week, buddy?
0:47 Speaker 00 Doing good. How you doing?
0:48 Speaker 01 I'm doing great. I can tell that back to school was right around the corner, though, because, you know, my wife being a teacher, a few weeks before school starts, she starts to get in back to school mode. And that's where we're at right now.
1:05 Speaker 00 And it's funny because down here in Florida, my kids just are completing their first week as of the time we're recording this, so a little bit of early start.
1:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, now, my oldest daughter, she did start this week, and this is her first real job, and she's a speech language pathologist in a school. So they've already started, but my wife starts a couple of weeks later.
1:29 Speaker 00 And I don't know how teachers feel about getting summer vacation, but I don't know if there's a benefit to starting early or starting later. It depends, I guess, who you're.
1:38 Speaker 01 Well, I can tell you this, they don't want to go back, most of them. This is my thought. And so who would?
1:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, they have that in common with the kids.
1:47 Speaker 01 Let's go ahead and give our Patreon shout outs. We had new support from Joe Parker, so we really appreciate that.
1:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, thank you so much, Joe, and thank you to everyone else that supports the show. It really helps us out. For anyone else that would like to, you can do so by going to patreon.com/criminology.
2:04 Speaker 01 All right, it's time to jump into part two of the Amy Lynn Bradley case. Last week in part one, we detailed how Amy had gone missing on a Royal Caribbean international cruise ship, The Rhapsody of the Seas, while on vacation with her family in the early morning hours of March 24th, 1998. We also talked about how one man she spent time dancing with that night in the ship's disco, a man named Alister Douglas, AKA Yellow, raised the suspicions of some people, including his own daughter. We also talked about the possibility, but complete lack of evidence supporting that Amy somehow wound up falling or jumping from the ship.
2:49 Speaker 01 In part two, we're going to lay out some of the possible sightings of Amy following her disappearance, and some of the witnesses in the sightings seemed credible and confident that they saw Amy.
3:02 Speaker 00 A taxi driver in Curacao remembered interacting with a young woman who he believed to be Amy after the ship docked the morning she vanished. He said she walked right up to him as he was sitting in his cab and said that she needed a phone, but when he pointed in the direction of the payphones, she walked away in the opposite direction. Though this sighting is generally treated as credible, it doesn't make a lot of sense to some people. If Amy needed help and the ship was docked, she should have been able to get help from her family, another passenger, or the security onboard. Also, by the time this cab driver came forward, there was a sizable reward being advertised on Amy's missing posters. So some people think he was motivated by the reward.
3:44 Speaker 00 People that believe his story point to the fact that him coming forward was because he genuinely thought he had seen Amy, because the details he provided were hardly enough to expect that he'd be given a reward.
3:55 Speaker 01 And we're going to talk about a number of possible sightings, but you have this a lot of times, right? In cases that are unsolved. And there's always a number of possibilities about the person giving the tip or, you know, reporting what they saw, ranging from, you know, it could have been the person that we're talking about, it could have been somebody completely different. You also have the aspect of, as you just mentioned, Morf, is someone trying to come up with something that would possibly garner them some reward
4:36 Speaker 01 money? Now, again, here, it's not a lot of information, certainly not enough to where someone would expect to get reward money. So you have to look at the motive. What is the motive for coming forward?
4:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think sometimes people are motivated by reward money to come forward. You know, you would hope that they would do the right thing and just help because they want to help a family. But some people are motivated by money. So if they're providing real information and it's not fake, something they made up, and they want the reward, that's one thing. But if they're making stuff up and wasting police time and resources, that's something else altogether.
5:21 Speaker 01 But that's what police have to vet through, as well as the family, right? Because the family sometimes gets tips, or at the very least, they find out about. On April 2, 1998, the man called the tip line, which had been set up for Amy's case with information. The man who spoke only Spanish, said that he saw Amy being forced into a taxi by a man wearing a baseball cap on March 28, at the terminal in San Juan. This was four days and multiple stops after she was last seen on the cruise ship. So the implication here, if this tip is true, is that she was somehow held on board Rhapsody of the Seas until
6:04 Speaker 01 the ship arrived at its final location and the crews ended. If this witness was correct, this would seem to indicate that someone on the ship, whether a crew member or traveler, might have played some role in what happened to Amy. And I think this tip right here is kind of at the crux of why people are so fascinated with this case. You know, we talked about some of it in episode one, but you think about all of the different possibilities or theories ranging from Amy jumping overboard, falling
6:43 Speaker 01 overboard, someone, her meeting foul play on the ship, meeting foul play off the ship. There are just a lot of possibilities here and the tips just kind of reinforce that.
6:58 Speaker 00 If there's any way for the police to verify that even one of these tips was 100% reliable, it would really help them a lot to make a timeline and a verified spot to search, to start searches. So, you know, sorting through these tips, I think is an important job in a case like this, but how do you find out which ones are 100% legitimate and accurate? And which ones are maybe cases of mistaken identity or that kind of thing?
7:28 Speaker 01 The trouble I have with this tip is, you know, first of all, you have to figure out how and where someone would keep Amy hidden on this cruise ship with so many different people looking for her. And maybe more importantly to me, how they would get Amy off the ship in San Juan. You know, I can remember the cruises that I've been on. You know, obviously there is a, a big production getting on the boat the first time, but then every time you dock, you get off, you get back on, you have to show your, your card. I don't know
8:13 Speaker 01 how they would have gotten Amy off in San Juan without someone noticing her or her having to show her ID or her ship card.
8:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, the ID would be one thing that you think would help them to spot her. But short of that, I think of when I'm on, you know, traveling or at tourist sites. How many times do you really recognize or pay attention to all the people around you? You know, it's possible she could have had a baseball cap on or something and just slipped by people without being noticed. She chose to do something like that. Or, you know, one possibility, maybe she was, you know, in a suitcase. She was pretty small, as I recall. So, you know, maybe she was stashed away in some kind of luggage or one of those giant duffel bags and someone walked right past security off the ship and nobody thought, you know, twice about it.
9:10 Speaker 01 Well, that's a good point because I don't remember them checking luggage getting off, but they did seem, at least the ones I've been on, to be pretty strict about making sure they knew who was getting on and off the boat.
9:28 Speaker 00 Yet another man named David Carmichael, who wasn't on the cruise, recalled seeing who he believed to be Amy with two men on the beach in Curacao in August 1998, five months after she was last seen. Carmichael was doing some scuba activities when a woman accompanied by two men began walking towards him. Carmichael said that the woman he saw was tan and in good shape and smoked cigarettes, which all do match what we know of Amy at the time. She had a tattoo on her shoulder that looked like the Tasmanian devil, and Amy did indeed have a similar tattoo. Carmichael later told People Magazine, "She looked frightened, like she was about to say something, when one of the guys motioned her away and gave me a menacing look."
10:11 Speaker 00 What made David Carmichael's account so interesting is that he had never heard of Amy Bradley or her disappearance prior to this sighting. It was only after he returned home from his trip and saw a segment about Amy's disappearance on America's Most Wanted that he was confident that he had absolutely seen Amy Lynn Bradley. He also said he believed that one of the men he saw with Amy was Alastair Douglas, the bass player from the cruise.
10:36 Speaker 01 One reason most people believe Carmichael's account and some of the others that we'll discuss is that he described Amy's tattoo specifically mentioning a Tasmanian devil. Now, it is important to note that Amy does not have a Tasmanian devil tattoo. Her tattoo is of a different cartoon character, Dizzy Devil, who is purple, not brown. He has a colorful cap and the Taz doesn't have anything on his head. The characters certainly look enough like each other for a witness to mistake them. But either way, the fact that there was a girl out there in that area at the time, fitting Amy's overall description with such a tattoo was pretty compelling.
11:21 Speaker 00 The young woman who Carmichael saw didn't try to run or ask for help. And the theory that is getting more and more popular is that Amy was a victim of human trafficking. Many believe that Alistair Douglas somehow smuggled her off the ship or lured her to someone who did. But this honestly has to be one of the hardest settings to plan a kidnapping in. There were tons of people around all the time, many of them taking pictures. And there was a list of every person on the ship. And Alistair was one of the last people seen with Amy. His room was searched soon after it was realized that she was missing. If he had anything to do with Amy vanishing, he'd be taking a major chance or putting himself in the crosshairs of investigators. Another possible theory is the one that I mentioned earlier is that Amy was somehow taken off the ship.
12:06 Speaker 00 She may have been put in a suitcase or some kind of duffel bag. Amy was five foot six and 120 pounds when she vanished. So that scenario is certainly possible.
12:15 Speaker 01 And more, if we'll talk about each of our theories, what we think happened to Amy. But you know, when you, you mentioned the human trafficking angle. That one for me is up there. Now you still have to look at all the facts, the timeline and all of that and figure out, okay, how did Amy either leave the ship or how did someone get her off the ship? But this sighting by Carmichael.
12:46 Speaker 01 A lot of people point to this one and say, this, this could have been Amy. You know, she's with a couple of people, you know, are these people her captors? Does she start to act like she wants to say something to this David Carmichael? And the people that she's with shut that down because they don't want her talking. And he also said, he, he believes one of them was Alistair Douglas.
13:16 Speaker 00 Yeah. And this Carmichael guy was in the documentary and he came across, at least to me, as a pretty reliable witness. And somebody that had some pretty good details. And if he is correct in what he saw, it, it would, it seems like it would have to be Amy or, you know, just some other girl who looked very similar to, had a devil tattoo. Cause he was very specific about that. And is it possible that there would be a girl with a devil tattoo on her shoulder out there that looked like Amy? It's possible, but it's also possible that it was Amy herself. I think a lot of people say, well, if she saw him and she's just walking around out there, why wouldn't she just run or ask him for help or, or something like that?
14:00 Speaker 00 And I think with human trafficking, a lot of times the people that are trafficked are broken down. They're afraid it's, at this point, it had been months since she vanished. So who knows what she would have endured if she was trafficked? And she might've been afraid of those people. They might've had control over her to where she wouldn't dare speak out, even if there was someone nearby that could help. So I, I think this is one of the very interesting leads sightings in, in this case.
14:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I do as well, because you know, I have to look at this guy's motive. What's his motive for coming forward? Now you, you could argue that someone just wants to be a part of the case. They want to be a part of, you know, a documentary down the road. If it, if it materializes, but I'm with you. This guy didn't come off like that. He came off as pretty sincere. And going back to your point, you know, this was months after, you know, could they have, meaning Amy's captors, if she was being, you know, human trafficked, kept her drugged up?
15:06 Speaker 01 Or something to that effect. Now you also have to wonder, or at least ask the question, why so many months later are they still in Curacao? Because you would think that's one of the places that they would be looking for Amy.
15:22 Speaker 00 Yeah. What I find really interesting is that Carmichael didn't know anything about Amy's case. So that wasn't in the back of his mind to sort of cloud his thinking when he saw this woman, he knew nothing about her. He just remembered this incident so clearly because at the time it stood out to him and the guy gave him a menacing look and it just stuck with him. And it wasn't until he saw that America's Most Wanted segment that it popped right into his head. That was the girl I saw. So I think that's just very, very interesting.
15:54 Speaker 01 One thing that is not in doubt is that Amy's family was not giving up on her. By the spring of 1999, the Bradley family had spent at least $85,000 trying to find Amy. They had to pay for flyers, a 24 hour telephone hotline for tips, private investigators, airfare, and all the other expenses that come with searching for someone in a foreign country. That year, the Bradley family was sadly scammed out of more than $20,000 by people who were not only pretending to search for Amy, but had also claimed they knew where she was being held and that they were willing to go rescue her. The problem was it was less
16:38 Speaker 01 like a home and more like a secure complex with tall walls, barbed wire and armed Colombian guards.
16:46 Speaker 00 This scam all started when a man named Frank Jones contacted the Bradleys and claimed that he was a former US Army Special Forces officer who was in touch with a woman in Curacao who knew where Amy was and had seen her many times. The woman, Judith Margarita, a cook on the island, claimed that she had seen Amy in several places, including the gym and the grocery store, but she was always with a blonde man who seemed to be her handler. Margarita described Amy's tattoos and was able to hum a lullaby that Iva sang to Amy as a child. This removed all doubt for Iva, who believed Margarita. They paid around $8,000 for giving them information.
17:26 Speaker 01 This Frank Jones guy made big promises to Amy's family. Iva told ABC News, he told me that he'd put Amy on his own back and swim her out of there. Then he claimed that he and his team of ex-army Rangers and ex-Navy SEALs were fired upon by an estimated 10 men and were forced off of the island for their own safety. After months of waiting, the Bradley family wanted proof that Jones was working on the case and proof that Amy was really alive. They were sent photos of a woman purported to be Amy and a blond man sitting on the beach. Amy's ankle tattoo was visible in one of the photos.
18:09 Speaker 01 Iva told ABC News, when I got the pictures, I knew Amy was okay and it was just a matter of time. They sent Jones more money for the operation, bringing the total they gave him to $24,000. This is in addition to the $186,000 he received from a missing children's organization. Losing weight on your own can feel like a fight you keep losing. Weight loss by Hers offers access to the FDA-approved Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Wegovy is the first-ever GLP-1 weight loss medication, available in a pill and it also comes as a pen. So you've got options. With Wegovy, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight.
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19:52 Speaker 00 Seeing Amy in these pictures, just sitting on the beach with a man, her rescue felt close for the Bradleys. Obviously, Jones and his team were able to get near enough to take clear photos of her ankle tattoo. Now, all they had to do was save her. The Bradleys flew to Florida to be as close as possible to Curacao when Amy was brought back to the United States. Iva said, "We sat in that hotel for a week, thinking any minute, we were going to get a phone call." Former Army Special Forces sniper, Tim Buckholz, put an end to the scheme after realizing he was being duped himself. Jones had tasked him with watching the location where Amy was supposedly being held, but it was a
20:31 Speaker 00 normal house. No barbed wire, no guards, and most importantly, no Amy. What made it click for him that Jones was scamming the Bradleys was overhearing Jones talking to them on the phone, telling them he had men watching the location at that moment. But Buckholz knew that everyone was out at a local bar. No one was watching this supposed heavily-guarded fortress that Amy was said to be held in. Another man, Jono Senk, admitted that the photo of Amy on the beach had been staged. It was him wearing a blonde wig and walking with a female friend, and the photo was taken in Pensacola, Florida. It turns out that Frank Jones was never in the Special Forces. He had never seen Amy. His men were
21:14 Speaker 00 not attacked trying to rescue her. In April 2002, he pleaded guilty to malfraud. He received the sentence of five years in prison. It was also ordered to pay back all the money he stole. To say that the Bradleys were devastated by these developments is an understatement.
21:29 Speaker 01 And unfortunately, Moore, if this is something that you see all too often in unsolved cases, we talk about people providing tips. And I think, by and large, most of those people are trying to do something good. But there are people out there who see a situation like this and just naturally want to try to scam the poor family who's caught up in it. And this is one of those cases. Obviously, this was a scam from the very beginning.
22:08 Speaker 01 It's hard to believe that someone could prey on, you know, a family who's going something through like what the Bradleys are going through, but it happens all the time.
22:22 Speaker 00 Yes, it's really sad that people will take advantage of a family like this in their most desperate times. And as family members that want to help find your missing loved one, you'll do anything. Is there any amount of money that someone wouldn't spend to try and get her back? Or whatever they can to sell whatever they need to, to raise that money? And we're not talking a small chunk of change. This was a lot of money for 25 years ago. So they really put out a lot of money in the hopes of bringing Amy home. And sadly, there was really nothing at all to it.
22:59 Speaker 01 And maybe that's why, you know, some of these scams are so successful. Because you do have a family, like you said, who would basically do anything. They'd give anything to get their loved one back. And, you know, some of these people are pretty convincing. The photo that appeared to be Amy sitting there, you can see her tattoo. Well, you know, how hard would it be for someone to try to recreate that tattoo? And then make it look as though they were taking a a surveillance photo of that person on the beach. People will go to great lengths in some of these scams.
23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, it wouldn't be that hard if they're going, getting thousands of dollars in this scheme. What would it cost a hundred bucks, something like that to get a tattoo? That was just like Amy's to try and forge this photo? So I could see them investing a hundred bucks to get a tattoo that looks just like Amy's and helping pull this off. And I know there's no playbook for how to handle a situation like this. You just want to do whatever you can as a family. But I think in hindsight, it's 2020, looking back at this, if I was in that situation, the first thing I would have done was gone to the authorities there and said, I have so and so
24:22 Speaker 00 who claims to have information. He's, says he's, you know, an ex ranger. He's, he's got all these credentials and he says he knows. Where Amy is, can you verify that he's telling the truth and get the authorities involved? Because maybe they could have snuffed this out right away.
24:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it's really hard to blame the family, really hard, because you can just put yourself in that position. You're getting this information. It seems credible. The excitement that you might be getting your child back would just be overwhelming. So, you know, I don't blame them at all. I get what you're saying, because obviously, that would have been, in hindsight, the best course of action. But I have to feel like they were just floating on air, thinking, this is it. We're gonna get her back.
25:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's no doubt, because I think in their minds, this was the closest they had come to getting her.
25:24 Speaker 01 The sightings of Amy have never really stopped. There's even a man claiming that he didn't know he saw her until he saw the Netflix series, but that he had seen her living in a house, doing sex work in Irvine, California, in 2004. Now, it's not clear if he legitimately thought he saw her, or if he was just seeking attention. Sadly, most of the sightings have no proof, just a vague memory and someone's word. But in 2005, an email was sent to the Bradley family, containing photos of a woman who was reportedly a sex worker, going by the name Jazz. Whoever sent the email believed that Jazz might really
26:09 Speaker 01 be Amy Bradley. These photos were the proof the Bradley family needed to back up the theory that Amy had been abducted, smuggled off the ship, and forced into sexual slavery. There are at least four different photos of Jazz floating around online. But one of them is used much more often, and is easier to find than the others. The more common photo is definitely the one of the four where Jazz resembles Amy the most. To many people, it does really look like it could be Amy, after a few years had passed, and assuming she lived a rough lifestyle during the time after her disappearance. But the photo quality is not the best.
26:54 Speaker 01 And the woman in the photo is wearing heavy makeup that isn't Amy's style. So it's hard to really compare. But many people are convinced that Jas is Amy. They say the faces in the photo are identical. Others say they have clearly different noses, upper lips and eyebrows.
27:16 Speaker 00 It's usually stated that Jas is strategically positioned in these photos. So that you can't see any of the areas where Amy would have a visible tattoo. Her hair covers her shoulder blade where Amy's dizzy devil tattoo would be. She's not showing the leg with the ankle tattoo that Amy had. You can't see her lower back where the sun tattoo Amy had would be. But one photo that we were able to find while researching this case clearly shows that there is no tattoo on Jas's stomach. Amy has a gecko or lizard tattooed around her belly button. Most times when we see this case discussed, this photo is not included. It makes sense because it's not safe for work. This photo is racy, so it's not easy to find.
27:58 Speaker 00 But it's also the one photo that would give the most doubt that Jas was Amy. In the Netflix documentary, the only photo that is shown of the sex worker named Jas is the one in which most people agree matches Amy the closest.
28:11 Speaker 01 And I'll be honest with you, Morf. I have a really hard time looking at different photos of people and comparing them to see if I think they're the same. That's not a skill, I guess, that I am really good at.
28:30 Speaker 00 I feel the opposite. I feel like I can look at a photo of someone from high school and compare it to them maybe 20 years later when they're an older adult and look for things like ear shape. No shape. Certain things don't really tend to change, I think, as you get older. And usually I can, I can spot them, or so I think.
28:54 Speaker 01 The FBI analyzed this photo using a number of different techniques and tools, and comparisons against known photos of Amy Bradley. And they concluded that JAS was indeed Amy Bradley. This wasn't just a group of FBI agents sitting around a table, sharing opinions either. Analysis was done on the bed frame even, to try and figure out where and when it was made. They tried to trace the website IP, where the photo first appeared on, but were not successful. Since the FBI did their work on this photo, and concluded that this sex worker was Amy, countless people on various websites and discussion boards of Amy's case
29:38 Speaker 01 have done their own examinations in photo analysis and comparisons. While not all of these people online doing this work are pros, a lot are, and they bring a lot of expertise to the table. There are a lot of impressive posts and videos you can find online, diving into these photos. At the end of the day, if the JAS photos really do depict Amy, then it seems to back up sightings like the one of Amy being accompanied, and perhaps being controlled by angry looking men. So I just said, I don't feel like I'm great at comparing photos. But, you know, this is the FBI,
30:20 Speaker 01 and the tools that they have, you know, are unbelievable. So if they come out and say that they believe that this is Amy Bradley in the photo, I mean, that's, that's pretty strong.
30:33 Speaker 00 It's hard to go against the findings of the FBI with all their resources. So I'm not doubting them. And to be fair, the photo, in my opinion, does look like it'd be Amy. And some of the other photos, the ones you don't see as often, to me at least, don't look as much like her. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think just this comes down to. Do you believe the FBI? Do you side with them? Or do you think there's some way that this is red herring? A lot of people point to the fact that this woman, Jas, doesn't have the tattoo that Amy did on her belly button area.
31:16 Speaker 00 But is it possible that she could have had that removed? Or is it even possible that the photo might have been photoshopped? So that they could show her belly area without letting people know that it was Amy? I think those are possibilities. The same year that the Jas photos surfaced, there was another sighting of Amy. This time in Bridgetown, Barbados. There were three men that seemed to be controlling or guarding a woman. And the witness thought this woman was Amy. She was in a shop when this happened. And the men pushed the woman into a restroom where the witness was already occupying. The men warned the woman that she had better be ready for some kind of deal. After the men left the bathroom, this woman was crying.
32:00 Speaker 00 The witness in the stall tried to see if she was okay and learned that her name was Amy. And she thought she said that she was from West Virginia. She came forward after seeing an episode of Dr. Phil that featured the Bradley family. In the Netflix documentary, this woman who witnessed this bathroom incident was interviewed. And she seems very confident in what she relayed. It seems like a reliable witness.
32:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would agree with that statement. I felt as though she was being very truthful in what she she thought she saw. I didn't take her as someone who was coming forward for attention or anything like that.
32:36 Speaker 00 I agree with you, and I think her sighting stood out to her so much because, you know, look at the context of it. She's using the restroom, and I don't know if they were broken down into men's and women's restrooms, but she's in a restroom when two men barge in with another woman. And they seem like they're threatening her. She's scared. And this really implanted something in her mind that something's not right here. She asked this woman if she was okay and she thought she said her name was Amy and that she was from West Virginia and Amy was from Virginia. So that that could be a big clue.
33:18 Speaker 00 And maybe she just misheard her if she said Virginia. So later on, this whole thing was embedded in her mind when she saw that Dr. Phil episode. That incident came right back to clear as day.
33:33 Speaker 01 Another witness who appeared in the documentary was a retired Navy man that claims that when he met Amy in January of 1999 in a brothel, she told him her full name, Amy Bradley, not just Amy, and that she had a Southern accent. As a Navy guy, he wasn't supposed to be patronizing any of the local brothels and carousel while his ship was docked there, but he did. This is where he claims that Amy came up to him and asked him for help. She said that she left the cruise ship to buy drugs and that she was being held there in that brothel because she owed the men $200. He said he didn't take it very seriously
34:15 Speaker 01 because he had heard many different stories like this from the women he was at brothels to see. He didn't report this until 2002 because he didn't want anything to affect his retirement. By then, the building that he was going to when he saw Amy had burned down. There was nothing left to search and no one there to question.
34:37 Speaker 00 Unfortunately, any reports of sightings of Amy Bradley that included tattoos or details of an accent came after TV segments, articles, and interviews had already been released detailing descriptions of Amy's tattoos. And they played footage of her family speaking with Southern accents. It makes it difficult to know whether these sightings are real at all. And there's no way to know for sure that these people aren't just trying hard to be helpful, that they end up filling in some gaps with bits of information they've learned about Amy over the years. For example, the woman that came forward after seeing the Dr. Phil show said that she thought the woman said West Virginia. Is it possible that she saw a different woman from a different state and thought she could be in danger?
35:21 Speaker 00 Or did she mishear or misremember that detail when she really talked to Amy from Virginia? That's not a judgment or any kind of blame. It would be hard not to want to help the Bradley family when you hear them talk so passionately about Amy.
35:34 Speaker 01 A lot of focus has been placed on the sandals. Amy left on the balcony, knowing her shoes were still in the room. People assume that any sightings of Amy that were truly her would have had to be that of a shoeless woman. And also they limit where Amy would have gone or what she would have been doing with no shoes on. However, Amy's family have stated that they have no idea which, if any, of her shoes are missing. So that detail wouldn't be very helpful either. After all, when you go on vacation as a family, would each family member really be paying attention to which shoes and how many pairs another family member was packing? Even if Amy somehow did get off the ship with no shoes, it wouldn't be hard to find
36:19 Speaker 01 another pair. Or perhaps someone bought them for her. And the other thing I think we need to talk about more, and it's brought up heavily in the documentary, we mentioned it in the first episode, you know, this balcony. Well, obviously, these cruise ships make it so that, you know, people just aren't falling off of these balconies, right? The railing is, is pretty tall, but there was a, like a little table on this balcony. And some people have said that they thought the table was moved possibly so that Amy could have stepped up on it. So you have the shoes on the balcony, you have this table on the balcony.
37:03 Speaker 01 It's just more information. But information to do what with, right? That's, that's the whole thing. What do you make of it? Now, you can use the information to further a theory, try to...
37:19 Speaker 01 Disprove a theory, but you know, it it's just that, right? That's what we have at this point. There's just a lot of different theories.
37:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that the table is possibly an important clue. But then again, what really muddies the water is that room wasn't controlled. It wasn't shut down. The cleaning staff had come in and out and cleaned everything presumably on the deck, too. So is it possible that they moved that when they were cleaning? And you know, that's sort of a red herring. And there was nothing to that table being in the position it was found in. Amy doesn't seem like a very likely target of human traffickers who tend to trap people in their situations. Instead of snatching random people who could bring them unwanted attention from law enforcement. That's not to say that traffickers never kidnap or snatch victims off the street.
38:09 Speaker 00 That can and does happen, but it seems that in many instances, the traffickers prey on victims who may be in vulnerable situations or in at-risk positions like sex workers. In Amy's case, she had her family on board. She was athletic and friends and family say she would have fought back hard if someone tried to abduct her. But despite those things, it's always possible Amy could have been drugged or incapacitated in some way and unable to resist being abducted.
38:37 Speaker 01 There's another possibility that needs to be discussed. If any or all of these sightings were of Amy, it doesn't necessarily mean there was an abduction. There is a possibility that she left the ship on her own for whatever reason. And in that scenario, she still could have ended up in trouble at any point after that. And there are theories that touch on this possibility. This theory leads to more questions, one of them being if Amy did leave the room on her own, why would she leave the balcony door open? Did she simply forget to shut it behind her as she left the room? Does it show that someone abducted her from the room?
39:19 Speaker 01 And in that situation, she wouldn't be able to shut the door. But this doesn't seem likely that someone would enter the room, walk past the rest of the Bradley family and grab her from the balcony and take her out of the room without being hurt. Also, anyone entering the room would trigger the recording of a room entry, and that didn't happen.
39:43 Speaker 01 And we talked in the first episode morph about, you know, how kind of cramped some of these cruise ship cabins are, especially with four people. I just don't see a scenario where she was forcibly taken from that room and no one else in the room woke up or heard a thing. To me, that one, I just put aside.
40:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm with you. I don't see how that could happen with no one else in the room waking up. And plus you have the issue of someone coming through that door to grab Amy would have triggered or recorded the room entry. That didn't happen. So at the very least, we know it's probably likely that Amy either walked out that door on her own for some unknown reason, or she went over the edge because those are the only two ways to get out of that room. Amy's wallet was left in the cabin and the Bradley's still have it today, along with everything else she took with her on her trip. If Amy had left the room or the ship, it seems likely she might want to bring her wallet and ID or any cash or credit card
40:55 Speaker 00 she might have had, but that didn't happen. Even if Amy left the room simply to get a coffee or a souvenir, she'd likely need money or a wallet. So the fact it was left behind is troubling. Unless she was simply going out for a walk or to get some fresh air and was coming back quickly, leaving her wallet behind seems unlikely to most people.
41:15 Speaker 01 Most of the focus in finding Amy has been shifted towards those Caribbean islands where the sightings happened. Even if Amy was on one of those islands, possibly being trafficked, that doesn't answer where she is today. A website called amybradleyismissing.com was set up years ago, focused on Amy's case. On the site, photos and information about Amy and her case were posted. And the owners of the site were able to see that a visitor or visitors to the site with IP addresses based in Curacao and Barbados often visited the site on holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving and important dates like Bradley
41:59 Speaker 01 family birthdays. Whoever is visiting the site from those locations, sometimes will have a page on the site open for 45 minutes. This makes Amy's family think that this is Amy, visiting the site on important and sentimental days, thinking about her past. But if Amy has access to the internet and can view websites about her, why can't she email a tip about her location or reach out to anyone? After all, right on the homepage of the website, there is a spot to provide tips or information. Now, I think the flip side of this, what you could say is that this could be her captors.
42:42 Speaker 01 Looking at the website, maybe seeing if anything new is posted, just trying to stay one step ahead of the investigation.
42:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think the interesting thing and the reason people think it could be Amy is that there's a lot of those appearances by this visitor or visitors happens on sentimental holidays, birthdays, things like that, connected to Amy or her family. So I think that's why people have hope that it could be her and that she's still out there someplace. A lot of people think that Amy Lynn Bradley is dead and their family is just unable to accept the truth. Some of them ask the question, if the Bradley family did have trouble fully accepting Amy's sexuality due to societal pressures at the time and feeling like they had to keep up appearances, they may also have trouble accepting that their loved one
43:38 Speaker 00 may have taken their own life. This isn't uncommon. Sometimes people have lost a loved one to suicide, described it like you walked right past them while they were drowning and didn't even notice.
43:50 Speaker 01 Whatever the cause for Amy going missing, her family is heartbroken over her disappearance and they miss her very dearly. Everything completely changed for them the day she vanished and it's like their lives are on hold, just waiting until they have answers or until Amy comes home. The cake for her birthday party, which was just two months after she was last seen, was left untouched and put into the freezer so that she could eat it when everyone celebrated her return. Her gifts were piled on the bed in her room at her parents' home. A poster that Iva bought on the cruise to hang in Amy's apartment remained unframed and unopened, rolled in its cardboard tube, just waiting.
44:36 Speaker 01 Brad transferred from George Mason University near Washington DC to Virginia Commonwealth University so that he could move back home. He's also stated that he made a conscious decision not to have children after seeing how much pain the loss of a child caused his own parents. He never wanted that to be possible for him, so he simply never had a child so that he could never lose one. Still to this day, Amy's car, a red Miata, is parked in this family's garage. Shortly after Amy's disappearance, the license plate was changed to read, "We miss you."
45:18 Speaker 01 Despite holding out hope that Amy Bradley is still alive, she was legally declared dead in 2010.
45:25 Speaker 00 The year after Amy's disappearance, Ron Bradley won another vacation at work. The company switched from offering paid cruises to land-based trips, like a visit to San Francisco, that Ron declined to accept. The family stayed home instead. The idea of being rewarded a vacation that they'd have to go on without Amy was just too much. The Bradley family sued Royal Caribbean for wrongful death in 1999, but the case was dismissed because the Royal Caribbean International Attorney was able to argue that they committed fraud by not disclosing to the court the many sightings of Amy alive and well, not being held captive, and certainly not dead.
46:07 Speaker 01 This past May 2025 would have been Amy Lynn Bradley's 51st birthday. Her parents are now in their 70s, still hoping for answers. And Amy's brother Brad is very active on social media, trying to keep his older sister's case alive. And in the public eye, the FBI is offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information on Amy's whereabouts. You can anonymously submit a tip online by visiting tips.fbi.gov. So more of as we wrap up this two-parter on Amy Lynn Bradley, there is no doubt that
46:50 Speaker 01 her family has suffered greatly and continues to suffer because they just don't have any answers. Me, you think about some of the things we just talked about. The birthday cake, not eaten. Amy's red Miata, still in the garage. It's like the family is frozen in time. Although they're getting older, they're frozen, kind of waiting for her to return. And unfortunately, you see this in, in many similar cases. Families are just devastated because they literally have zero answers.
47:32 Speaker 01 And they're just never going to give up trying to find out those answers.
47:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think the not knowing is really tough. And I've heard families say that they'd rather get the news that their loved one was dead and have their remains and have some kind of idea of what happened versus never know what happened and have that eating at you the rest of your days, which I'm sure it's done, you know, with Amy's family. I'm sure they're consumed by this and there's probably not a day that goes by that they don't think of what happened and is she out there someplace?
48:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've heard it too, right? The not knowing is the hardest part. I think for me, you know, when we talk about the different theories, I, I don't know that I have one that is more likely than others. For me, it comes down to maybe three. The first being that, you know, Amy somehow either accidentally or on purpose went off the balcony into the water. The second would be that she was harmed by someone on the ship and maybe somehow they disposed of her body by throwing it over the water.
48:49 Speaker 01 And then the third would be the, the human trafficking angle. But each of those has things that point towards it being true, but also has things that point away from it being true. Where you think about Amy deciding to end her life. Well, there was a lot of things that we talked about, you know, a lot of good things going on in her life. Her friend said that she had plans. She seemed happy, but that doesn't mean that it, it couldn't have happened that way.
49:23 Speaker 01 You know, the human trafficking angle is such a scary one because I think we're finding out more and more just how prevalent and pervasive this problem is.
49:36 Speaker 00 So you have three theories. You really covering your base as well?
49:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, it I think it's because I'm not really leaning towards any one in particular. And I think maybe that's the problem with this case. I'm sure some, a lot of people do have their number one theory, but I don't know if I have a number one theory because this case is so convoluted. The waters are so muddied that I just can't go in one direction. I can make a case for a number of different things happening.
50:15 Speaker 00 Well, I don't have a theory per se. I don't know how or why Amy would have left the ship or gotten off the ship. But what I think is that the woman in the photo is Amy because just the the close up examinations I've looked at people doing, they just look remarkably like her. And Amy had a little bit of a lazy left eye and this jazz woman in the photo has that same eye. So for all these different things to to sort of match, and it just looked like an older version of her, maybe she had some rough years based on how she was living.
50:59 Speaker 00 It to me, it looks like an older version of her that's gone through some trauma. And the FBI came to that same conclusion. So for me, I can't get past that photo. I think it's her. I just don't know how she got off that ship to begin with and wound up being able to take those photos. And we also don't know if it is her, she could have met with foul play after that photo was released. So something still could have happened to her where she's not alive today. And, you know, that's still something that would need to be answered for and that part of the mystery solved. If it's ever determined that it was her in that photo, what happened to her after that?
51:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can understand the
51:47 Speaker 01 Kind of sex traffic angle. I really do, you know, especially the fact that the FBI comes out and, and thinks that that photo is Amy Bradley. But to your point, you know, was this sex trafficking, no matter how either Amy got off the boat, or they got Amy off the boat, but then something later happened to her. Maybe they just decided the heat was too much, right? People weren't giving up looking for Amy. I just don't know. I think the mystery angle of this case is what enthralled so many people.
52:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it could be a mystery within a mystery because maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation of how Amy got off the ship. We just don't know what it is. But then if she met with foul play and something to her, happened to her after she got off the ship, then that's sort of another mystery on top of the first one. We don't know how did she get off the ship? And I don't know how you felt about the documentary, Mike, but I thought it was well done. And I'd recommend anyone out there that hasn't seen it yet, if you want to watch it, it's got a lot of good information in it.
53:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did think it was very well done. They were able to get, you know, a lot of people, obviously Amy's family, but also a lot of people from the ship, you know, like the, the activities director, or whatever his title was, people who were working on the ship at that time. Now, some of those people came off better than others, right? We talked about it in episode one. There are a lot of people online who thought that some of the comments made by some people were callous and things like that. But hey, they, they decided to come on and talk about it.
53:48 Speaker 01 I guess, you know, as we end this thing up, I want to go back to Alister because like we said earlier, he is a guy who gets a lot of heat online about possibly being connected to whatever happened to Amy. There's definitely some smoke there, but is there fire? And I think some things have come out about him that, you know, that they don't put him in the, the best light, but did he have something to do with Amy's disappearance? I don't know. I don't know. Where's the evidence?
54:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, his name, no doubt, keeps up, keeps coming up over and over from those that were suspicious of him on the boat to people that thought they may have recognized him as being with Amy in these sightings. So it's hard not to think of him when thinking of this case, but in looking back, if he was being truthful and he had nothing to do with this, you know, only he knows that for sure. But if that's the case, a lot of people have spent a lot of time and energy focused on him. And maybe that's allowed someone else that should have been looked at to go unnoticed.
55:06 Speaker 01 Well, and the other thing would be definitely a cloud of suspicion, right, has been hanging over him for, you know, a very long time, decades, either deserved or not deserved. I don't know. But that's it for our episodes on Amy Lynn Bradley. As always, if you love the show, but you haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, leave us a rating, leave a review. Also, keep telling your friends. Word of mouth about the podcast really goes a long way.
55:38 Speaker 00 If you want to find us on social media, we're on every major platform. Just search for Criminology Podcast. You can also visit our homepage, criminologypodcast.com. And if you want to join a Facebook discussion group with other listeners, check out our group, Criminology Podcast, Discussion and Fans on Facebook.
55:56 Speaker 01 All right, that is it for another episode of Criminology, but Morph and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike And Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.
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