Missing: Amy Lynn Bradley
When Amy Lynn Bradley went missing during a cruise to Curaçao in late March of 1998, the Netherlands Antilles Coast Guard conducted a four-day search in the waters where she disappeared. They turned up nothing.
Authorities initially speculated that she may have fallen or even jumped overboard and drowned, but others rejected this theory: Amy was very athletic; she got her degree in Physical Education on a basketball scholarship to Longwood University.
She was from Chesterfield, Virginia, about 20 miles south of Richmond, and attended college nearby at Longwood in Farmville, VA, about 60 miles west.
She was known to be a strong swimmer and had previously worked as a lifeguard. She was also planning to start a new job soon at a computer consulting firm.
To celebrate, on March 21, 1998, Amy and her family boarded Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas to take a cruise en route for Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island under the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Shortly after midnight on Monday March 23, 1998, Amy and her younger brother, Brad, went to the ship's Mardi Gras nightclub party to go dancing.
They ended up drinking with members of the ship's band, Blue Orchid. Alister Douglas, also known as “Yellow,” was drinking with Amy. Chris Fenwick, a videographer on the ship, allegedly filmed Amy and Yellow dancing.
Yellow claimed that he left the party at around 1:00 A.M. Brad decided to return to his cabin at around 3:35 A.M. The ship's computerized door lock system recorded entry into the family’s cabin at 3:35 A.M., and again about five minutes later when Amy followed him.
Brad said that he and Amy sat on the suite's balcony and talked before he went to sleep; Amy stayed awake. Amy's father, Ron Bradley, woke up between 5:15 A.M. and 5:30 A.M. and saw Amy sleeping on the lounge chair of the family cabin's balcony.
He told local papers that he "could see Amy's legs from her hips down [before he] dozed back off to sleep. The balcony door was closed, because if it hadn’t been closed, I would have gotten up and closed it."
He woke again around 6:00 A.M, but this time, Amy wasn’t on the balcony. Her cigarettes and lighter were also gone. He said, "I left to try and go up and find her. When I couldn't find her, I didn't really know what to think, because it was very much unlike Amy to leave and not tell us where she was going."
After Ron searched the common areas of the cruise, he woke up the rest of the family and told them Amy was missing at 6:30 A.M. Amy's family immediately reported Amy missing, begging crew members to make an announcement about Amy and keep the 2,000 passengers from disembarking the ship.
The crew informed the Bradley’s that it was too early to make a ship-wide announcement, and didn’t agree to issue an announcement until 7:50 A.M., after a majority of the passengers had already disembarked.
The announcement consisted of the question: "Will Amy Bradley please come to the purser’s desk?"
Between 12:15 P.M. and 1:00 P.M., the crew searched the ship but did not find Amy. The Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard conducted a four-day search that included three helicopters and a radar plane, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines chartered a boat to continue looking for her.
On the morning of her disappearance, two passengers told Ron that they saw a woman matching Amy's description taking an elevator to the ship's deck with cigarettes and a lighter.
Another witness was a cab driver who said that a woman matching Amy's description approached him and said she urgently needed a phone. This sighting was never confirmed by authorities.
In August 1998, a Canadian computer engineer claimed to have seen Amy walking down with two men on a beach in Curaçao, five months after the disappearance was made public.
He noticed that the woman seemed to be trying to get his attention but he lost sight of her at a nearby café. Her tattoos were reportedly identical to Bradley's; the engineer said he was "two feet away from" Bradley, and he was completely certain it was her.
In January 1999, a U.S. Navy petty officer (reportedly Chief Petty Officer William Hefner from the US Chandler) claimed to have seen a woman at a brothel (reportedly the Stelaris hotel) in Curaçao who claimed to be Amy Bradley.
He said that she told him "her name was Amy Bradley and [she] begged him for help," that she was held against her will and not allowed to leave.
He did not report the incident at the time, supposedly out of fear for his career. The brothel hotel was off limits to Navy personnel. He contacted Amy's family after he retired and saw her picture in a magazine.
There is no evidence besides his testimony to support his claim, though he reportedly passed an FBI polygraph. The hotel burned to the ground in May of 2000.
In the fall of 1999, Amy's parents received an email from self-proclaimed Navy Seal named Frank Jones. Frank told the family that he was former Special Forces and had a team of experienced operators who might be able to rescue Amy.
Jones claimed that his team had seen Amy being held by heavily armed men in a housing complex surrounded by barbed wire, and gave an accurate description of Amy's tattoos.
He even sang the lullaby that Amy's mother used to sing for Amy. Over the next few months, he gave the family regular reports on sightings of their daughter.
When he told them his team was going to attempt a rescue, her family were happy to help support the mission to bring her home. The Bradley’s sent Jones a total of $210,000, but Jones turned out to be a scam artist who made the whole thing up.
In February 2002, federal prosecutors in Richmond charged him with defrauding the family of $24,444 and the National Missing Children's Organization of $186,416. Jones pleaded guilty in April of mail fraud and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Another potential sighting occurred in March 2005. A witness named Judy Maurer claimed to have seen Bradley in a department store restroom in Barbados.
She claimed a woman entered the restroom accompanied by three men who proceeded to threaten her if she did not follow through on a deal of some kind.
She alleges that after the men left, she approached the distraught woman who said that her first name was Amy and that she was from Virginia before the men came back and took her away. Maurer called authorities and worked with a police sketch artist to create composite sketches of three men and the woman.
Bradley's mother and father appeared on Dr. Phil in 2005. An email was sent via the Bradley family website containing two photographs of a woman that closely resembled Amy by a member of an organization that attempts to track victims on sites that feature sex workers.
The photographs were found on the website “AdultVacationGetaway” which is no longer online. The woman in the photo has been said to appear "distraught and despondent" and was a sex worker named “Jas”.
In an interview with People Magazine, Amy's mother said, "I remember watching people watch her admiringly" and later goes on to say "Amy would have been a trophy."
Many internet sleuths suspect that a waiter was also involved; Amy's family was approached by the same waiter repeatedly asking to pass on a note to Amy inviting her to go drinking with him once they reached shore.
A photographer had pictures throughout the cruise to sell to passengers; the family could not find any of Amy's photos, making them believe that the photos had been removed by somebody.
Adult Vacation Getaway was allegedly owned and operated by Alexis Zaglanitis, also known as Alexis Z and Georgios Alexandros Zaglanitis, founding both “Caribbean Fantasy Tours” and “Affordable Adult Vacations” in the 1980s.
Zaglanitis was a Greek immigrant to Canada where he reportedly lived in Hamilton, Ontario with his wife, “Lexy” and three sons. He was arrested in the Dominican Republic for running a prostitution ring in 1995. He died in 2018.
Another internet sleuth theory on her disappearance involves a jawbone that washed ashore in Aruba in 2010. Initially, people thought it might be the jawbone of another missing person — Natalee Holloway.
Once the jawbone was determined not to belong to Holloway, no further testing was conducted despite nine other Caribbean vacationers that were missing at the time, and despite the fact that the bone was human and authorities said that it was likely from a Caucasian woman.
Amy Lynn Bradley was declared legally dead on March 24, 2010, twelve years after her disappearance. The FBI is still offering a reward for any information that leads to the perpetrators of her disappearance or to the recovery of Amy Lynn Bradley.
The family has also offered rewards of $250,000 for information leading to her safe return and $50,000 for information leading to her current location.