More than 20 years after Amy Bradley disappeared from a cruise ship while on vacation with her family, investigators may be getting closer to solving her case.
Brad and Amy Bradley are seen in a family photo. (Brad Bradley via Scripps News Richmond)
A private investigator hired by the Bradley family, Jim Carey, tells Court TV that he has narrowed down a list of potential suspects involved in Bradley’s disappearance that he has handed over to the FBI.
Bradley was 23 when she disappeared from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Rhapsody as it pulled into port in Curacao on March 24, 1998. At the time of her disappearance, Bradley was with her family, including her brother, on vacation from their Virginia home. Frantic searches of the ship’s path and surrounding water yielded no clues and her body has never been found.
Netflix released “Amy Bradley is Missing” in 2025, sparking a wave of interest in the case. Carey told Court TV he feels they are getting closer to answers in the case, and to that end, he and the investigative team have identified two persons of interest. They include a clerk at a police department and a cab driver who have claimed to have seen her since her disappearance. Carey said he is confident that Bradley was taken off the ship by a member of a band on board with whom she was seen in the hours before she disappeared.
Carey said every visitor to the website the family created to search for Amy Bradley is tracked, and those IP addresses have apparently revealed potential clues. The website saw several hits from an Aruba casino, specifically computers in the business center. Carey traveled to Aruba and spoke to the manager, who refused to cooperate. “A lot of people who saw her, they’re clamming up now,” Carey said. “They’re nervous now that the Netflix doc came out.”
This isn’t the first missing persons case Carey has been involved in. He was also hired as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. “A lot of the same names are involved in both cases, I’ve found,” Carey said.
Bradley’s family has said in interviews that they believe Amy was a victim of sex trafficking. Carey said the clues he’s managed to find give weight to that theory, including a series of letters he said he found in the Holloway investigation that referred to “the girl from the cruise.”
While some investigators have argued that Bradley may have fallen off the ship or intentionally taken her own life by jumping overboard, her brother, Brad Bradley, flatly denied the possibility in an August 2025 interview with Court TV. “We know she didn’t jump,” Brad Bradley said. “She was never willing to go near the rail at any point during that cruise. We know she didn’t accidentally fall.”
For more information on Amy’s case, visit the family’s website at amybradleyismissing.com. Tips can be sent to amybradleyismissing@gmail.com or 804-789-4269.
