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Hi, it's Katie. I'm excited to let you know that you can watch video episodes of Crime House Daily Night Watch on Spotify. It's the same gripping true crime stories you've been getting here now with added videos and photos that give you even more depth and detail into each case. Search Night Watch on Spotify and hit follow so you never miss an episode. This is Crime House. Tonight we're covering a story that's been making headlines in true crime for over 25 years. The disappearance of Amy Bradley. After vanishing from a cruise ship without a trace, it seemed like Amy would never be found. But with renewed interest in her case exploding after a Netflix documentary this summer, there may be hope after all. Let's get into it. It's the story of a 23 year old woman who went on a Caribbean cruise and then vanished. What happened to Amy Bradley? She's a young woman who disappeared on a cruise 28 years ago while vacationing with her family.
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Authorities have checked out multiple reported sightings.
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But none have ever confir hi, I'm Katie Ring, a true crime analyst, self defense instructor and fierce advocate for victims. And this is Crime House Daily, your essential true crime companion. Every weekday morning and night here at Crime House Daily, we dig into the true crime stories making headlines right now, where justice is unfolding, arrests are happening, and new evidence is emerging. Every morning, First Watch gets you up to speed on the biggest cases. Every night, Nightwatch takes you deeper. If you want to follow a case from the first 911 call to the final verdict, this is the place for you. Follow Crime House Daily wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review and for ad free listening. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. For video, check out our YouTube channel Rimehouse Daily or on Spotify by searching Night Watch True crime Cases Daily in the Search tab. This episode discusses active criminal cases and breaking news. The information we share is based on what's publicly available at the time of recording and may change as new evidence comes to light. We aim to inform, not to decide guilt or innocence. So everyone mentioned is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
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In 1998, a 23 year old woman named Amy Bradley vanished from a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Investigators searched the ship and the surrounding waters for her, but there was no trace of Amy and she is still missing to this day with no trace of her in the water. In a handful of alleged sightings, numerous theories have circulated surrounding her disappearance and what happened to Amy Bradley. Most people, including Amy's family, believe she was kidnapped into sex trafficking. For over 25 years, authorities have struggled to track down new leads. But the attention the Netflix series Amy Bradley is Missing has brought back to this case has also brought back potential new leads and some renewed hope for the family. So who is Amy Bradley and who are the people who refuse to give up on her? Let's begin. Amy Bradley was born on May 12, 1974. She grew up in Chesterfield, Virginia, about 100 miles south of Washington D.C. amy's brother Brad says their family was always extremely close. Amy's parents, Iva and Ron were extremely supportive of their kids, especially Amy and her brother Brad's athletic endeavors. Amy was an incredible athlete who received a full ride scholarship to play basketball at Longwood University and her family was extremely proud of her. Amy graduated in 1998 and is so excited for what the future holds. She lands a full time job, gets her own apartment and even gets an English bulldog puppy which she has wanted her entire life. Amy's dad Ron was an insurance agent and he had won a Caribbean cruise trip for being one of the company's top performers. The trip was supposed to be only for Ron and Ivaan, but the couple wanted the kids to come with them to make some new memories together before the kids are too busy and adulthood gets in the way. Some sources have claimed that Amy wasn't thrilled with the idea, but her brother said that they were both all in and very excited. Despite them both having a fear of flying and Amy not loving the ocean, they were excited for the new adventure. Although Amy was on the high school swim team and was a trained lifeguard, she was more of a pool gal because she liked being able to see what was below her. But she figures she won't actually be going in the ocean all that much. She is also a little afraid of heights. But she puts her fears Aside and on March 21, 1998, the Bradleys Board the Royal Caribbean's Rhapsody of the Seas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's a huge ship with almost 2,000 people on board. Their suite is spacious and Cozy and there's even a balcony with a view of the ocean. Although Amy refuses to look over the edge, the entire family is glad to be there. And for the next two days, the family has a blast together. They eat amazing food and enjoy music and dancing. Plus, they're not stuck on the cruise liner the entire time. They spend some time in Aruba before departing on Monday, March 23 and heading to Curacao. There's a party on the ship that night and the whole family attends. Iva and Ron throw in the towel early, but Amy and Brad want to keep the party going, so they head to the ship's nightclub with other people their age. At the club, the siblings split up and do their own thing. Amy strikes up a conversation with a member of the ship's band. His name is Alister Douglas, but he goes by the nickname Yellow. Amy and Yellow dance for a while. Then shortly after 3:30am on March 24, Amy leaves the club and heads back to her cabin. Once she gets there, Brad is sitting out on the balcony. She joins him. They talk for a while and eventually, around 4am, Brad says he's heading off to bed. Amy tells him that she's not feeling too well and the fresh air is helping, so she's going to hang out on the balcony a little longer. Brad says, I love you. See you tomorrow. And Amy says, I love you back. Then Brad goes inside. Brad now says the fact that these were his last words to his sister gives him some comfort. Sometime before sunrise, Ron wakes up. He can see the balcony from his bed and he spots Amy sitting out there. Then Ron goes back to sleep. A little while later, around 6am he wakes up again. This time when he looks out the window, Amy isn't there. Ron gets out of bed and goes into the kids room. Brad is in bed, but Amy isn't. He notices that her shoes and all of her belongings are still in the room. The only things missing are Amy's cigarettes and her lighter. Ron finds it strange that Amy could have disappeared so quickly. He leaves the cabin and searches the entire ship for her, but he doesn't find her. Now Ron's starting to feel panicked and returns to the cabin to wake up Iva. She gets dressed and together they go speak with the ship's officials. The Bradleys ask them to make an announcement over the ship's speakers, but officials refuse. They say they don't want to create panic among the other passengers. So Iva offers another idea. The ship has just docked in Curacao, so she asks the officials not to let anyone off yet. They want to find Amy while they're still in the contained environment, but officials don't allow this either. However, they do agree to search the ship after everyone's off. Iva and Brad agree and they wait for the ship to empty out. By now, Brad has also gotten out of bed and joined his parents. While the parents are talking to officials, Brad sits down because the realization of how serious this is starts to settle in. That's when the band member who Amy was hanging out with the night before, Yellow, approaches Brad and says how sorry he is about his sister. He then brings a friend over and starts asking Brad questions like when is the last time you saw her? Brad doesn't think much of this comment at the time because he figures that employees were most likely told to stay on the lookout once all of the other passengers get off of the ship. In Curacao, ship officials alert the rest of the crew about Amy's disappearance and ask everyone to help look for her. But after searching for most of the day, they still can't find her. Eventually, it's time for all of the other passengers to get back on the ship. Once everyone's accounted for and there's still no sign of Amy, the Bradleys ask the ship officials if they can remain docked in Curacao in hopes she'll turn up soon. By now, the Bradleys are beginning to fear the worst. They're afraid that someone has kidnapped Amy. I've seen so many people on social media talking about how clothes are getting more and more expensive, but the quality of the fabrics keeps getting worse and worse. 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On March 24, 1998, Amy Bradley's family begins to fear that she's been kidnapped off of their Caribbean cruise ship. They don't know who would want to do something like that, but Amy's not the type of person to let her family worry, so it's the only explanation they can think of. And if they're right, they are not about to leave their daughter behind. However, officials don't allow this either. Instead, they offer up a different theory about what could have happened. They think Amy fell overboard. They say maybe it was an accident. After all, she had been drinking the night before, or maybe she even jumped on purpose. The Bradleys do not believe that Amy would have thrown herself overboard. They also don't think she would have gotten so drunk that she would have stumbled over the railing somehow. But at her height, that would have been extremely hard. Anyways, to the Bradleys, this is still pretty far fetched. They know Amy's afraid of heights and was refusing to even look over the side of the ship. They also say that Amy had so much she was excited about at home and so many plans she was making, they don't think it's possible she jumped at the same time. Ship officials have them convinced that Amy falling is the only explanation. Officials tell the family they can disembark and contact authorities to launch a formal search of the waters. And that's what the Bradleys do. Once they're on the island, they contact the US Embassy and a full scale search ensues. Airplanes fly over the ship's path to see if they can spot Amy out on the water and divers join the search as well. But by March 27, three days after Amy disappears, authorities don't find anything and they call off the search. Professional divers and Search teams believe there is no way Amy fell or was even thrown off the ship because they would have found some kind of remains, whether it was her body or even just a piece of clothing. At this point, they weren't in the middle of the ocean. They were close to the port. However, by this point, the FBI has been brought in to look into whether Amy might have remained on the ship after all. By the time the water search ends on the 27th, the cruise only has about one day left, so the agents have to act fast. Soon they start to wonder if ship officials didn't search for Amy as thoroughly as they had let on. First, agents learned that when the ship's employees conducted a search for Amy, all they did was look inside bathrooms and common areas. Anyone who's been on a cruise ship or has seen the movie Titanic knows there are a lot of small corridors and back rooms that only staff members have access to. In other words, the search of the ship basically only scratched the surface. Agents also speak to a man who was filming a promotional video for the Royal Caribbean. He realizes he caught Amy on camera. She's dancing in the nightclub the night before she disappeared, and she's with the band member Yellow. They show up on the video together a few times until about 3am when agents speak with Yellow, he tells them that he and Amy hung out until about 1am before he went back to his room. But the footage tells a different story, so they keep Yellow on their radar. The Bradleys also catch up to the ship to help with the investigation and search for their daughter. When Brad hears that agents have been questioning Yellow, he thinks back to the day when Amy went missing, when Yellow said he was sorry about his sister. Brad now realizes that at that point, ship officials hadn't told crew members about Amy's disappearance yet. So what did Yellow mean when he said he was sorry? Did he know that something terrible had happened to her? Investigators barely have time to ask Yellow these questions because soon the cruise comes to an end and all of their potential witnesses are scattered. However, they continue to question Yellow, but he is eventually cleared of any involvement. The Bradleys still remain suspicious of him, though. After they returned home to Virginia, two young women who were also on the cruise contact them. The women say that they saw Amy with Yellow at 5:45am and that he handed her a drink. If this is true, it could mean that Amy left the cabin and met up with Yellow before he potentially aided in her kidnapping. Unfortunately, this new information doesn't seem to change the FBI's opinion of him. So the Bradleys try other methods of finding Amy. About a month after they return home, they create a website in hopes of raising awareness about Amy's disappearance. The family is certain that Amy is alive. They can't explain it. But Iva, Ron, and Brad all have a gut feeling that she's out there somewhere. They just need to find her. Over the next year, Ron and Brad return to Curacao a handful of times to search for her. During one of these trips, a man approaches them and says he's seen Amy before. He works as a taxi driver on the island, and he claims that shortly after Amy went missing, he saw her running through the streets in search of a telephone. While this gives the Bradleys hope that Amy is in fact alive and fighting to get home, it also adds to their darkest fears that she was, in fact, kidnapped. By now, both the Bradleys and the FBI believe that Amy was targeted by human traffickers and that she's been forced into sex trafficking. And this theory isn't too far fetched because sex trafficking is actually very prevalent in the Caribbean. And in 1999, about a year after Amy disappeared, they get even more evidence pointing to this possibility. In May of that year, Amy's story is featured on America's Most Wanted. They get a tip from a Canadian scuba diver who says that five months after Amy's disappearance, he was in Curacao and that he saw Amy being walked down the street by two, quote, tough looking men. The caller says there was a moment where it seemed like Amy wanted to speak with him, but the men wouldn't let her. The man describes Amy's distinct tattoos, including a gecko and a Tasmanian devil. After this tip comes in, the FBI sends agents back to Curacao to search the area where the caller said he spotted her. But they don't turn up any leads. The Bradleys are devastated when the search fails to deliver answers. But now that the story is gaining even more public attention, they soon get a new source of hope. That same year, a man named Frank Jones contacts the Bradleys. Frank says he's a former US Army Special Forces officer with a team of ex Army Rangers and ex Navy seals, and he wants to help them find Amy.
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One year after Amy Bradley disappears, a man named Frank Jones contacts her family and says he wants to enlist his team of specially trained former military operatives to try and track her down and rescue her. The Bradleys hire Frank and his team. They pay him with money raised from a nonprofit. Over the span of a few months, Frank contacts the family from Curacao and fills him in on different, seemingly promising leads. He makes it sound like his team is closing in on Amy's captors and will soon be able to bring her home safely. He even sends him photographs of a woman who looks a lot like Amy, with men who look just like the ones described in the Tip to America's Most Wanted. Frank has given the Bradleys renewed hope. But then one day someone calls him and says they're with Frank and Curacao and he's not looking for Amy. He's not even who he says he is. He's just using their money to live it up on the island. In my opinion, if anyone does this and uses a family's grief to make money like this and scam them, they deserve to be in jail for life. Understandably, the Bradleys are devastated. Fortunately, in 2002, Frank is convicted of mail fraud for what he did to the Bradleys. He's sentenced to five years in prison and is required to pay back all of the money he received. The investigation is back to square one. The Bradleys don't hear anything else Until May of 2002, when a US Navy sailor comes forward with a story from years earlier. He says he visited a brothel in Curacao where one of the women asked for his help. He didn't know what to do, so he told her she should go to the naval ship nearby and speak to someone there. But the woman told him she wasn't allowed to leave the brothel before he could ask her anything else. Two Men pulled her away. The sailor never reported it because he was on duty at the time and wasn't supposed to be at the brothel. But now he's seen Amy's story on tv, and he thinks she was the woman who approached him. Unfortunately, when investigators go to Curacao to check out the brothel, they learn that it's since been burned down. Three more years go by, and there's still no sign of amy. But in 2005, the Bradleys find a clue that she may be alive. That year, they get a tip on their amybradleyismissing.com website and are sent pictures of an online advertisement for sex workers in the Caribbean. There's a listing for a woman named Jazz, and she's identical to Amy. The photo is grainy, and the woman's hair is much longer than Amy's was when she went missing. But her face is exactly the same. The Bradleys believe it is Amy. They show the picture to an FBI photo analyst who also agrees. Investigators are able to tie a phone number connected with the website to a man named Alfred Cotton. And get this. Alfred and his wife, Jennifer Cotten, were arrested for facilitating sex tourism by US Citizens to the Dominican Republic through their company, Tropical Adult Vacations, or tav. Their company provided US Citizens with room, board, and the services of prostituted women at their hotel, located in Boca Chica, a small town near the capital of the Dominican Republic. Over the course of hundreds of trips, the couple managed the TAV's business operations from their Florida residents, including posting ads on backpage.com to solicit customers. The even crazier part is someone reported seeing Amy Bradley in San Francisco with a man. And if you're watching, this is the sketch of the man. And this is a picture of Alfred Cotten. Insanely uncanny, if you ask me. After that, leads dry up for another five years. In 2010, Amy is officially declared dead because of how long she's been missing, with no confirmed leads as to her whereabouts. But she remains on the FBI's missing persons list, and the official notice of her death can be reversed if something changes. But unfortunately, nothing does until 15 years later. Then, in July 2025, when Amy's been missing for 27 years. Everything changes by this point. For the Bradleys, it might feel like the world, including US Authorities, have given up. But there are some people outside of the investigation who haven't stopped thinking about Amy. Netflix releases their latest documentary titled Amy Bradley Is Missing. The documentary spends four weeks on Netflix top 10, bringing the story back into the national Spotlight. Pretty soon, the producers of the documentary are flooded with tips from people who think think they've spotted Amy or have information on her whereabouts. As with many cases, many of these tips are unreliable, especially because even before the documentary was released, the FBI posted a $25,000 reward that leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the person or persons responsible for her disappearance. So people have a motive to get involved. However, Netflix producers do receive some valuable information. The first one is an anonymous tip from someone who was on the ship the night Amy disappeared. The source says that on that night, a female bartender was heard yelling, quote, senorita kidnap, repeatedly. It's worth noting that according to the sources, the bartender didn't speak much English. At the same time, the bartender never had a chance to elaborate on what she was shouting about because another employee told her to shut up before taking her to the back. Some outlets have claimed that the bartender has since come forward and is currently speaking to investigators. But Amy's mother, Iva, says this isn't true. Federal investigators also noticed some suspicious activity online. They've been monitoring Amy's missing persons website and believe Amy herself might be visiting the site as a way to feel connected to her family and her old life and not just Amy. They also think her captors may view the site as a way to keep tabs on the investigation. And it seems like that might actually have happened, because after the documentary airs, investigators notice a suspicious hit. They trace the IP address back to a boat off the coast of Barbados. According to federal authorities, a lot of trafficking activity occurs out on the water between countries, so they're not surprised when the IP address points there. But they also have another reason to think the boat and the website hit are connected to Amy. Apparently, an anonymous source has contacted them with claims that they spotted Amy in Barbados as of October 2025. The FBI is still speaking with this witness, which gives many hope that there's a good chance Amy is still alive and could return home. Amy would be 51 years old today. Iva Bradley is now 71 years old, and Ron Bradley is 72. Iva says that not a day goes by that she doesn't think about the day her daughter disappeared. Ron says they still keep her car tuned up in the garage so it will be ready for Amy to drive again. One thing I do want to note that I saw recently in an interview with Amy's brother Brad is that he said that in the Netflix documentary, they focused a lot on her sexuality, but that she had actually come out to the entire family. Years before this trip and that that wouldn't have been a source for her to potentially jump off the boat, he says. She was extremely happy and had so much to look forward to. The FBI is still offering a reward for information. Tips can be submitted via 1-800- call FBI or@tips.FBI.gov what did you think of tonight's case? Drop your thoughts and theories in the comments. See you next time. If you haven't already, subscribe to our YouTube channel at Crimehouse Daily and follow us on social media rimeHouse247 for for real time updates. Because the pursuit of justice never stops.