Amy Bradley is Missing | part 1

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie, and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary series Amy Bradley is Missing. Somebody saw her and wanted her and took her." Today we're talking to directors Phil Lott and Ari Mark. In March 1998, the Bradley family were on a Caribbean cruise when daughter Amy vanished. She'd last been seen on the cabin's balcony, and a ship-wide search failed to find her. But in the following years, multiple possible sightings of Amy suggest she didn't go overboard.

0:50Rebecca Lavoie:Instead, she was smuggled off the ship by island traffickers, and all this time has been held against her will. The Netflix documentary series Amy Bradley is Missing explores what really happened to the cruise ship passenger three decades ago. Did she go over the rail into the ocean? Or did someone target her and spirit her away for their own purposes? The series looks at those aboard who could have targeted her and presents the stories of those who've claimed to have encountered a sex-trafficked woman they say is Amy. It seeks to answer the question, if she didn't die at sea, where is Amy Bradley today?

1:24Rebecca Lavoie:We were told by an FBI agent, keep your lights on. Nobody can keep a secret their entire life.

1:43Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by directors Phil Lott and Ari Mark. Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much. Amy Bradley went missing in 1998. The story has been in and out of the news over the decades. I'm curious, what made you want to come around and cover this one? Phil? This is an urgent story. I mean, 1998, Amy Lynn Bradley goes on what's meant to be a dream vacation with her family to the Caribbean on a cruise ship. And if you can put yourself in that position, your family goes to bed one night and the next morning you wake up and one of you is completely vanished.

2:18That is a story that happens in 1998 for this family. But I think what really attracted us to it is when you meet this family, this is a story that continues every single time they wake up and open their eyes. This is not just a past tense story. It is happening every single day for that poor family.

2:37Rebecca Lavoie:Ari, can you talk a little bit about Amy Lynn Bradley and what her life was like before this cruise on Rhapsody of the Seas? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, Amy was, for all intents and purposes, a happy person. She was extremely close or is extremely close with her family. Amy had lots of friends. She had a really great relationship with her brother. She was extremely athletic, outgoing, you know, had a scholarship to Longwood University for sports. she was looking to be a PE teacher. She had just gotten a new apartment, just gotten a dog. That stuff becomes really relevant as you start looking into her mindset at that time and what could have or could have not happened.

3:22Rebecca Lavoie:It's also telling to me, Ari, that how the Bradley family ended up on this cruise is that the parents won the trip, right, through work, and they wanted to take their adult kids with them. Actually, yeah, they insisted and kind of begged, actually, the cruise insurance company that was offering up the prize as an incentive for their insurance work. When they won and hit that milestone, they insisted, can we really want to bring our kids? And they actually made an exception for them, which is why they were all staying in one room, because that was what they want. So for a decade before everyone had cameras in the phones in their pockets, you had a surprising amount of video footage from this cruise.

4:06Rebecca Lavoie:Where did all these visuals come from? Yeah, I mean, so a couple of weeks after the family got back from their vacation, some of the family members went out to repeat this journey. They took exactly the same cabins, they took the exactly same cruise, and they did the itinerary. And at the exact moment when they believed, or that little period of time when they believed that whatever happened to Amy happened, they got the camera out and they walked the possible routes that she had been on. They were in the cabin. They walked down the corridors. So you have this amazing volume of footage of not just being on board that ship, but being on board that ship at the exact time when she disappeared.

4:44That was one piece of it. But also, this is the vacation. So this is the happiest time in most people's lives. So a lot of people have been on that ship. A lot of people had cameras. A lot of people uploaded footage. I mean, I think that's one thing about vacations is that there's this dual trove, one of capturing experience of this journey and this wonderful time everyone had. And then you meet Amy, really, for the first time through the gaze of this camera, that this guy who's meant to be photographing the happiest time of everyone's lives actually captures Amy potentially with a very important piece of the puzzle dancing with her.

5:20Rebecca Lavoie:So, Ari, let's walk through some highlights of the case. What was Amy and her brother Brad's night like before they returned to the cabin? And then what happened in the early morning hours? They were hanging out. Brad and Amy were having a great time. They're pretty close in age. They're really close with each other. And they were out partying, as you do on a cruise ship. It was sort of the kind of celebratory night after they were disembarking from Aruba on their way to Curacao. So as they arrange on these types of cruise ships, they arranged for this disco nightclub event. And they were excited, you know, and they got dressed up.

6:00They were hanging out with some of the other people their age that night. They were hanging out with crew people who were also close in age with them. And there was a DJ. There was all kinds of drinks. And they kind of just went for it and kind of cut loose and basically stayed there until the nightclub closed. And then after the nightclub closed, what we do know is that Amy was hanging out with some people. Brad motioned to Amy that he was going to go back to the room, went back in with his key card, entered the room, hung out there by himself for a few minutes, waited for Amy to come. She did.

6:39She entered her room, which we know because we have the data that was collected from entering the room, but it didn't actually collect data when you left the room. Amy joined Brad out on the balcony. They had a smoke. They hung out a little bit, made conversation. It was time for bed. and we were getting up pretty early the next morning, so I was going to try to get a few hours of sleep. She said, you know, I don't feel too good. I'm going to sit right here with all the fresh air and the wind.

7:11Told her I loved her and see her tomorrow and shut the glass door behind me. She stays out there. We don't know how long. What we do know is that Ron, being a protective parent, kind of glances over, sees Amy's feet, makes sure she's back from the nightclub, sees her feet on the lounge chair and says, good, I can go back to sleep now. My kids are safe. Goes back to sleep, reports hearing something, but unclear what. Wakes up again, looks out, sees she's not there, gets up, looks around the room, realizes she's gone. Starts to get a little nervous, doesn't really panic, then starts to search the ship.

7:51And like any parent can relate to, more times going by when he can't find his daughter, a little more times going by, a little more times going by. You know, this is a giant, giant, giant cruise ship. So you start panicking as a parent. And he started to kind of get really nervous, woke up Iva and said, I can't find Amy. Iva is like, what the hell are you talking about? Jumps up. They both start searching the ship. And that was when they engaged with the captain and the crew to say, hey, we need to take this to the next level. We need to find out where Amy is.

8:22Rebecca Lavoie:So the Bradleys were disappointed in the response from the ship's crew. You know, they said they didn't want to do a ship wide loudspeaker announcement because people were sleeping and they didn't want to prevent all the passengers from going ashore. And I found myself wondering, you know, seeing this is an adult, right, who wasn't spotted by her parents for about an hour before breakfast. Knowing what you know now, it's clear that they should have. But do you understand why some of the crew may have seen the parents' request as being a little bit extra? It's tough. You've got, you know, they say in the show, we interview folks who work for the cruise line.

8:56There are 2 ,400 other people on that ship who've all paid a lot of money. You've all had to work a year or whatever to kind of save up for this trip. We're not going to stop everybody's cruise because there was a missing girl. That's one family's unfortunate incident, but we still had 2 ,400 people who paid a lot of money. And as cold as that sounds, that's the reality. It's a tough call to make. You know, I think one of the fascinating things about the story for both of us was this is a crime scene like no other. You know, if you think about a missing person situation or a murder scene in most true crime stories, there's police tape, there's a room taped off, there's blood splatter, there's some sort of evidence, there's tire tracks or whatever.

9:36here the ship has already moved away from the period of time when Ron woke up and first noticed that Amy was missing. It's already moved into a docking situation so we're no longer on the site of the crime or whatever happens. This crew is faced with this sort of impossible situation. I'm sure every cruise there is, there's probably three or four people that end up sleeping it off on a bench somewhere up on the deck or maybe meeting someone and going out and hanging out in the room for a few hours. I think someone even said the number of times Granny walks off and ends up just playing craps or something down in the casino, who's to say what's actually happened in a relatively short period of time?

10:13So in retrospect, speaking for folks who've got family hurt in this situation, you can imagine why the family are so kind of at 11, because you're terrified. But for the crew, it's a huge dilemma. What do they do? I mean, I'm sure they're following protocols. But of course, you know, the number of times this sort of story happens and then it turns out to be nothing, probably far outweighs the number of times it turns out to be something as terrible as this.

10:39Rebecca Lavoie:Well, Ari, there are many scenarios about what could have happened. And one of the things I loved about your series is that as a viewer, I'm sort of thinking one thing and then my mind is opened up to other possibilities. And I'm wondering, given that a lot of people, at least initially believed and still do believe that she may have gone overboard, what is the best argument for that at this point, that she could have gone overboard either on purpose or by accident? Look, I mean, the best argument for going overboard is it's the most logical scenario when you think about a cruise ship being out in the middle of the ocean, right?

11:14I mean, we're all trained to be logical people. We are always calculating sort of odds automatically of the likelihood of this happening versus the likelihood of that happening. So automatically you're on this ship. That's what pops into your head right away, right? Because the notion of jumping off intentionally, the notion of getting abducted, the notion of getting drugged, or the notion of walking off independently are just harder to imagine and harder to believe.

11:43Rebecca Lavoie:You still have several scenarios. Many things could have occurred. Did she inadvertently fall off? Wasn't feeling well, felt sick, by mistake was on the balcony, fell off into the water. Did she commit suicide? It's very uncommon to have that many scenarios that feel possible. And what really makes this hard to not watch is I dare anybody to look at those scenarios and argue me off one of them because there's enough information to suggest that any of those scenarios could be possible. It drove us nuts. I'm not going to lie. It's really, really difficult to make a show where you really want to make sure you're being objective and balancing these different theories.

12:29You also want to avoid sensationalism. And you also want to stay within law enforcement boundaries, right? I mean, at the end of the day, the way that you determine a timeline, the way that you determine a narrative, and the way you really can have something to rely on as a filmmaker and also as a viewer is using that baseline law enforcement scenario. So really, at the very end of the day, we only really know a couple of things for fact. And those are the things that you have to stick to, because otherwise your mind will go absolutely everywhere and you've got to narrow it down somehow.

13:04Rebecca Lavoie:Phil, can you talk about Alistair Douglas? He goes by the nickname Yellow. How does he fit into this puzzle? Yeah, I mean, he's an interesting character. and it's just such a huge part of the story and an interesting character. He was the band leader for the onboard ship cruise band. He's very well liked by the crew. He's a gregarious presence for the passengers. You know, I think if you're an entertainer on board with one of these ships, I think your job is to be on, your job is to be friendly to everybody. And to the extent that, you know, he's seen dancing with Amy that night and potentially even being seen with him again later after the family see aiming for the last time.

13:46It sort of makes him suddenly a character of great interest. You know, if we had concrete evidence we're working with the local police department, Alistair Douglas would have been arrested, but we didn't have that. But, I mean, he was bothered, you know, by what was going on, you know, for whatever reason. Either he was bothered because he had something to do with it or he was bothered because he had nothing to do with it, but he was bothered. He's been named publicly for a long time and has sort of wrestled with it. you know the question we were kind of struggling with was look his job is to be personable and dancing with everybody where's that line where's it's about looking like this is something sort of beyond the normal where it is perhaps paying too much attention to her and in the video you see Amy and him dancing and but make up your own mind but it definitely feels to us like there's some kind of level of intimacy that I perhaps wouldn't have expected from from a crew member but I wasn't there that that night now well you know maybe the party atmosphere caught everybody in that moment But he's for a long time been sort of studied and searched in his movements and the hours afterwards.

14:48He's spoken to by the FBI eventually. He's spoken to by the folks afterwards. Does his story end up? I don't know. But we definitely do, I think, a good job of tracking down his daughter, who then sort of reveals a little bit more about the nature of her relationship with him.

15:05Rebecca Lavoie:Well, there is this extraordinary scene with Amika, Yellow's daughter, where she actually calls her father during her interview. We danced at the club, like I danced with many people at the club. So you don't know if she ever got off the boat. How would I know that? I left in the club at one o 'clock. As a filmmaker, how did that come about? What was that like? It was stressful. That was a very stressful moment in the show because to touch on a little bit of what Phil was getting at, you really want to approach these types of situations with empathy. And it's very easy to ambush people and put them on Netflix and pick apart everything that they say.

15:48And we wanted to be really careful about that. I had a long conversation with Amika. I had a long conversation with her mother as well. And the thing that kept coming back was just how adamant he was about being innocent. And Amika shared with me how much this has taken over her life, right? You know, we think about the Bradley family as well we should. We think about all the other characters. But this really ruptured their relationship, meaning Amika and Alistair's. And it's created a huge rift and a huge online kind of chaos. And it's very easy online for people to jump to conclusions. And she has become associated with this story.

16:40And her daughter also is starting to become associated with a story. So there's a legacy there that she doesn't want to inherit. And so she's motivated to get to the bottom of this thing. She's motivated. And like most good humans, she feels for that family. She wants to help that family. So when she agreed to do the interview, she really wanted to call her dad. And she wanted to show us just how emotional he would become upon asking about this story. So that's exactly what we did. And look, it's really easy to place judgment as a viewer on his responses. And I think it's really important that we really are careful and look at this picture as a whole.

17:21I think what I can say, and I don't know if Phil really wanted to go there, but I will. His story doesn't add up. Hmm. It doesn't it doesn't mean he's guilty of this doesn't mean he's guilty of that. We're not lawyers. We're not law enforcement. His story doesn't add up. And that's why we feel obligated to kind of put it all out there. And we feel like that's part of the responsibility of the show.

17:46well.

17:47Rebecca Lavoie:There are several alternate theories having to do with Amy being taken against her will, smuggled ashore to be trafficked. And we're going to dive deeper into the ongoing effort to find Amy in our next episode with Anthony Willis. But the two of you come at this with fresh eyes. So can you talk about the significance of David Carmichael's sighting of a woman that he believed to be Amy? Yeah, I mean, look, I think our job is to sort of put the hat on of the audience and go on that journey with the audience and ask the questions they would at that time. And I think the significant thing about David Carmichael is that he pops up in the story right around the moment when you're kind of beginning to exhaust your questions.

18:26You're kind of beginning to get to the point where, oh, maybe she just jumped up. Maybe she just fell up or maybe something happened aboard that ship that maybe she was being sick over the side of the ship. It's apparently Apparently something happens and you lose your man. You start to get to that position again, you know, that preconception again. And then David pops up. And she's just about to say something to me.

18:48Rebecca Lavoie:When the person who was on the inside comes up, I'm looking right at him. He stared at me. He doesn't say a word. And motions her away. The thing about him when you meet him, he is so adamant. This is a man who has lived with this. He didn't have to reach out. But obviously, you're trying to keep your credibility alarm set to hundreds. But he comes off as someone who is truly dedicated to finding Amy. He reached out to the family. He didn't have to do that. He spent time with the family. He didn't have to do that. He flew out to meet the family. He didn't have to do that. Here he is, 28 years later, sitting in a chair for an interview for several, I'm sure, uncomfortable hours sitting in the chair being interviewed by us.

19:32And he didn't have to do that either. Part of his credibility comes from just the longevity of his commitment to this case. You listen to his story and the details he finds on that beach, he sees specifically the tattoo that Ailey had. Once you listen to him, you feel like you have just met Ailey on that beach. I think that's what keeps you turning the page in this story, is that every time you get to a point where you've exhausted all the answers, you've exhausted all the possibilities, and then something else happens, someone else popped up. And that repeats itself with the other witnesses, too.

20:06Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. One of the other witnesses is Bill Hefner. He was in the Navy and went to what he referred to as an illegal bar. He says he has nothing to gain at all by talking about what he saw there. But what did he recall about that visit, Ari? He's a fascinating character. Bill Hefner recalled leaving his Navy ship and going to what he described as a bar. but he also described to us that there were prostitutes there as well. He went inside. He immediately got a drink and very soon after two young women walk over to him. And according to Bill, as soon as one of the women kind of waft away, leaving him alone with the Caucasian woman, as he describes her, she said to him, my name is Amy.

20:55I need help. I got off the boat to get some drugs and they won't let me back until I pay them a debt. Can you please help me? I've heard all kinds of stories from working girls. Singapore, Thailand. I've heard it before, you know. And that's when she said, with a Southern accent, my name is Amy Bradley. He looked at her and was like, look, I'm not supposed to be in this bar. I can get in big trouble with the Navy and he ended up leaving. And then it isn't until much later when he's already out of the Navy that he sees her face on the cover of People Magazine and tells the family. He's a pretty compelling character and it's a pretty compelling interview.

21:43And I think what really got me on that one is why would anyone want to share that story?

21:50Rebecca Lavoie:Right. Right. Doesn't make him look good, right? It just doesn't make him look great. That's right. So it really got us. And you know, when you interview people, there's a level of hesitation with certain people that makes you really go, Ooh, okay, this happened. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there is this stunning development in which this photo emerges of a Caribbean-based escort who looks, in my opinion, remarkably like Amy. Can you talk about how that changed things? It changed everything. We all looked at it. The nose, the chin, and the hair. It took my breath away. I thought, that could be Amy. The photo that emerges of the escort also came at a time when I think the case sort of needed a tipping point.

22:41And I think that's important to keep in mind that this series is also very much about the need to believe. And it doesn't make it any less real or true, but it is still something that I think is important emotionally to understand that this is a journey. This is not one incident or several incidents. This is a journey. It's a 26-year journey. And when something like a picture pops up like that, there are so many people devoted to finding out the truth in this case from generations of FBI, several different departments of FBI agents, experts that were brought in, photo analysis people. These are people who want to uncover something.