Where Is Amy Bradley’s Family Now? All About Their Lives 26 Years After She Disappeared

It’s been 27 years since Amy Bradley disappeared from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, but her family has never stopped looking for her.

The then-23-year-old was traveling with her parents, Iva and Ron, and her younger brother, Brad, when she mysteriously vanished on March 24, 1998, just three days into the family’s Caribbean vacation. Over the years, there have been several reported sightings of Amy, and her family still believes she’s alive.

“My parents and I share this gut feeling that she is still alive, however unrealistic that may be to a lot of people. We’re never going to give up,” Brad said during a July 2025 interview with WWBT’s 12 On Your Side. “If you don’t take opportunities and follow leads, you know you’ve given up on her, and we’re not going to do that.”

Amy’s story is now being told in the Netflix docuseries Amy Bradley Is Missing, which was released on July 16. The Bradley family hopes the series will bring renewed attention to Amy’s case and finally lead to answers about what happened to her.

“We’re gearing up for, hopefully, what will be an avalanche of phone calls and emails from, who knows where, all over the world, trying to help us find her,” Brad said of the series.

So where is Amy Bradley’s family now? Here’s what her parents and brother have said about the case — and why they’re keeping hope alive.

Who are Amy Bradley’s parents?

Amy was born on May 12, 1974, in Petersburg, Va., to Iva and Ron. Two years later, the couple welcomed their son, Ronald “Brad” Bradley.

The Bradleys raised their children in Chesterfield County, Va., where Amy excelled in sports and earned an athletic scholarship to play basketball at Longwood University.

At the time of Amy’s disappearance, Ron was working as an insurance executive and had won the cruise through a sales incentive program.

As her mom later shared in a blog post for InternationalCruiseVictims.org, Amy was looking forward to the vacation.

“Amy took 15 rolls of film with her to make a collage for her coffee table,” she wrote. “While in Aruba, she bought presents for her friends back home and also sent postcards from Puerto Rico to her friends.”

She continued, “On the day before we left for vacation, Amy had adopted a female bulldog, and she was to pick up ‘Daisy’ when we returned from our cruise … She had just moved into her new apartment and was starting a new job on the following Monday. She had so many plans and was so happy about all of them.”

What happened to Amy Bradley?

While aboard the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship, Amy disappeared in the early hours of March 24.

The ship was en route to Curaçao as part of a seven-day Caribbean cruise that kicked off in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on March 21 and included stops in Aruba, St. Martin and St. Thomas. 

Amy and her brother, Brad, had spent the previous night partying at the ship’s nightclub with other passengers and crew members. When they returned to their room, Amy went out on the balcony to get some fresh air.

“She said, ‘I’m going to stay out here on the chaise lounge and a lot of fresh air and wind. I don’t want to go in a closed room right now,’ ” Brad recalled during his appearance on 12 On Your Side. “So, I told her I loved her.”

When he woke up a few hours later, Amy was gone. The family and crew then searched the entire ship, but there was no sign of her.

Some passengers reported seeing a woman matching Amy’s description heading to the top deck early that morning, while others claimed she was seen with an unknown crew member. The Bradleys extended their search efforts to Curaçao and Aruba, posting flyers and appealing to locals for help, but these leads ultimately turned up nothing.

To this day, Amy’s family maintains that she did not jump or fall overboard.

“There’s a lot of haters online that say a lot of nasty things and basically say she’s gone, she fell over, she jumped over. I can guarantee those two things didn’t happen,” Brad said.

Instead, the family believes she was kidnapped or smuggled off the boat and sold into sex slavery, a theory supported by several tips they have received over the years.

“A Navy man, who visited a brothel on Curaçao, he wasn’t supposed to be there, so he didn’t report it because he didn’t want to get in trouble,” Brad recalled. “A couple of years later, he contacted us and said there was a girl in there who said, ‘My name is Amy Bradley. I need help.’ ”

Did Amy Bradley’s family take any legal action?

A year after their daughter’s disappearance, Ron and Iva filed two lawsuits against Royal Caribbean Cruises, alleging negligence, defamation and intentional emotional damage, per Travel Weekly.

“We’re sorry that, despite all these efforts to assist the Bradley family, they’ve apparently decided to direct their grief at the company by filing a lawsuit seeking financial damages,” the cruise line said in a statement at the time.

Both lawsuits were later dismissed by a Florida judge in October 2000, per Law.com.

Where is Amy Bradley’s family now?

Amy’s family has never given up hope of finding her, and they continue to fight for answers.

“The more we got to know the Bradleys in the subsequent months, the more two things became abundantly clear — first, that the family’s belief that Amy is still alive was and continues to be unbreakable and second, that maybe they’re right,” Ari Mark and Phil Lott, directors of Amy Is Still Missing, said in a statement about the project.

“She’s still out there somewhere,” her father said in the trailer for the docuseries. Iva added pleadingly, “We need to have answers.”

The couple’s son now works as a physician’s assistant in Chesterfield, specializing in orthopedics. He’s also in a cover band with his dad and other relatives called Amy’s Brother’s Band, which serves as a tribute to Amy.

“We lost a part of ‘us’ over twenty years ago. We have missed Amy very much and continue to carry heaviness in our hearts, but we go on with our lives as people do … remembering the good times and loving those we still have,” Brad captioned a 2018 Facebook post.

He continued, “Amy so loved music and would surely be a part of this. Amy’s Brother’s Band is a tribute in the truest sense and we play with Amy always on our minds and in our hearts.”