‘Amy Bradley Is Missing’ Breaks Down a Cruise Ship Nightmare

Between last month’s Trainwreck: Poop Cruise and recent true-crime docuseries Amy Bradley Is Missing, Netflix appears to be doubling down on troubling tales from these floating pleasure palaces, with buzzy results. Perhaps ABC should reconsider that Doctor Odyssey pliable cancellation.

Which is not to say that Amy Bradley Is Missing serves schadenfreude-adjacent fun, like Poop Cruise or Odyssey. The three-part series, available to stream now, takes on a far more chilling narrative. In March 1998, a 23-year-old Virginia woman named Amy Lynn Bradley stepped onto Rhapsody of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean International cruise ship headed to Curaçao. But her family trip with her parents and brother was cut brief a few days later, when staffers began searching the ship from top to bottom after her parents said she had vanished. She was gone, without a trace.

This is where these kinds of stories typically end. According to a 2020 study from Bowling Green State University, “Falls overboard or onto lower decks, cardiac incidents, and suicides are the leading cause of passenger deaths” on cruise lines. Amy spent her last known night drinking until around 3:35 a.m., and fell asleep on her cabin’s balcony as opposed to inside the cabin. This suggests the most obvious answer—that she stepped or stumbled into the water—is the true one.

The twist is that after her disappearance, multiple people claimed that they encountered Amy—even years after she’d vanished. Three of them are interviewed in Amy Bradley Is Missing, where they recount—with sort of surprising detail, given that the exchange was decades ago—their encounters with the woman they believe to be Amy. (The FBI investigated those accounts at the time, but was unable to confirm that the women in any of the alleged encounters was actually her.)

Fuel was thrown onto the fire of speculation when the Bradley family was directed to photos on a website that advertised access to sex workers. One of the women in a set of grainy, revealing photos resembled Amy, the Bradleys say. The Bradleys spoke about the photos when they were featured on the November 17, 2005, episode of Dr. Phil. There, host Phil McGraw presented a so-called forensic evaluation of the photos as likely evidence that Amy was trafficked into sex work, and had since been unable to escape.

The series gives significant weight to this possibility, as well as to theories presented by multiple online sleuths. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, filmmakers Ari Mark and Phil Lott say they find many postdisappearance theories credible. In fact, says Mark, they entered into the show thinking, “Ooh, maybe we could find her.”