True-Crime Buffs Have Some Ideas About What Happened to Amy Bradley on the Cruise Ship

In March 1998, 23-year-old Amy Bradley boarded the Royal Caribbean International cruise ship called Rhapsody of the Seas with her parents and her younger brother. Three days after they set sail, Amy went missing. Thanks to true-crime buffs taking on the case themselves as armchair detectives and various documentaries about the disappearance, there are now plenty of theories about what happened to her.

According to CNN and Amy's family's interviews from over the years, she was last seen early in the morning on March 24, 1998, by her father, who reported seeing her legs on a chair on their room's balcony. When he woke up again a short time later, Amy was gone. That was the last time they saw her, and, despite decades of searching for her, Amy has not been found.

Amy and her brother, Brad Bradley, had attended a party by the pool the night before she went missing. She was reported to have danced with a man by the name of Alister Douglas, who was known as "Yellow." In the Netflix docuseries Amy Bradley Is Missing, her family explains how they searched the ship but had to wait for the crew to do a thorough search. Because Amy was never found, there have been a lot of theories over the years about what happened.

Because Amy was seen with Yellow at the party and in another guest's video footage from the cruise, one theory is that Yellow knew something about her disappearance. Amy returned to her family's room after the party, but some people theorize that Amy left the room in the morning before her family woke up. Yellow was questioned by the FBI, but he was never charged with any crime related to Amy's disappearance.

Per Unsolved, another theory among those who have followed Amy's case says that she may have been a victim of sex trafficking. This would mean she was kidnapped on the cruise ship and taken off at some point to be trafficked by someone unknown to authorities. That's another theory that has not been proven.

What others believe happened to Amy, however, was that she got sick and leaned over the balcony railing to throw up, lost her balance, and fell into the ocean. Someone shared on a Reddit thread that they think "she was vomiting over the side of the ship and lost her equilibrium and fell overboard." This does coincide with Brad's account in the docuseries about Amy telling him she didn't feel well when he went to bed and left her on the balcony alone.

Another theory from another Reddit thread suggests that Amy was assaulted by someone when she left the room to buy more cigarettes in the morning, between the time her dad saw her on the balcony and when he woke up again. But no video footage on the ship, and no evidence to prove that someone on the ship assaulted Amy and then killed her has been found.

While some theories about Amy's disappearance point to her accidental death over the balcony, and others suggest she might have been killed on the ship, alleged sightings of her over the years have kept hope alive for others, including her family. A year after Amy's disappearance, a naval officer said, per Medium, that he saw a woman in a Barbados brothel who claimed to be Amy and asked him for help.

In the docuseries, Brad, along with his and Amy's father, Ron Bradley, explains that they briefly returned to Curacao after they got home from their cruise. They share that they were approached by a cab driver who claimed he saw Amy on the island and that she had tried to find a payphone. Another man thought he saw Amy on a beach with two men in Curacao. As of July 2025, Amy has not been found.