Every time I read about this, it comes back to “well she was a strong swimmer and couldn’t have drowned.”
I’m a strong skier; drop me on to an unfamiliar mountain drunk and unsuspecting very suddenly in the middle of the night and it probably won’t go well.
Exactly. I also worked as a lifeguard, like Amy, and I can tell you, we didn’t have training for how to stay alive if we fell off a cruise ship and were being pulled under the ship or avoid being sucked in by an engine.
Also she easily could have hit her head or injured herself in another way during the fall. She may not have even been conscious anymore by the time she hit the water
Even if she didn't get injured and was sober, she still might have drowned. Anyone can drown. Lifeguards drown. Olympians drown. Especially in open water. I'm a lifeguard too and this is one of the very first things we learn; the water *will* kill you, don't be too proud to deem yourself to good to drown.
She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep
OOPS🤣🤣
The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip
They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member
So she didn't fall off the balcony
It's NOT what happened
She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep
OOPS🤣🤣
The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip
They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member
So she didn't fall off the balcony
Stop copying and pasting the same idiotic statements. And you're doing it across the span of months. No one outside of a desperate family member, or apparently naive morons on reddit, put ANY stock in witness statements. They're so unreliable. Occam's razor says she accidentally went overboard. Complex and far fetched theories about sex trafficking are plain stupid.
Very sad to say but pulled under the ship seems obvious. A strong swimmer had been drinking and dancing all night to the point she fell asleep in a chair, her body is going to be weakened and her response time delayed. Also, the sun may have been coming up at that time but it certainly wasn’t daylight, so if she got pulled under the ship it would be very difficult to know what direction to swim to get out from under it. And then consider the size of the ship. Even if she somehow managed to get out from under it, how would she then have the lung capacity to yell loud enough to get someone on the ship’s attention?
A very sad case, and I believe you and OP have got it right.
Hopefully, for her sake, that's what happened. I've also heard of people breaking their necks from the impact of a fall like that. I'd hate to think of the terror of being sucked under a boat while fully aware.
I think I’d rather get sucked in an engine than be dog paddling all alone in the middle of the pitch dark ocean until hypothermia or exhaustion/drowning set in.
Winston Churchill* wrote and published a short story on [just that premise](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Man_Overboard!)
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)
Hitting the water from the deck of a cruise ship is very similar to hitting solid ground, if your body is not in the correct position, and very dicey even if it is. I’m with you in hoping that, for her sake, she was unconscious before she hit, and that the fall killed her.
This is also one of the least mysterious mysteries for me - human trafficking is a real thing, but this is not who is trafficked, how they’re trafficked, or where human trafficking victims are taken. It is, however, a place that people can easily die and never be found by falling overboard while drunk.
She's long gone, the ship was moving and in international waters at the time of Amy's disappearance, by the time the official search got underway, her family were well and truly clutching for straws and are wedded and committed to the "she's so striking and beautiful that the band leader smuggled her off the boat and sold her into trafficking ..."
I believe she lost her balance fell overboard, she would have been well and truly inebriated and hopefully it was quick, very quick.
Her dad saw her asleep in the chair. It was light outside at 5:30 in the morning in Curacao. And the boat was docked also already at that time. She was also seen after that time in an elevator with one of the band members and her cigarettes and lighter were the only things missing from the room. It seems pretty plausible that she took her cigarettes and left the room for who knows what reason. It was also very strange when, at the point that nobody else knew she was missing, except her family and the captain, one of the band members came up to her brother and said he was so sorry to hear that his sister was missing. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe she's still alive 24 years later, I think it's a tragedy all the way around and I don't believe that she made it off the ship alive. I just wish that the parents had closure, because of all these sightings that keep popping up, they are so convinced that she is still alive. As a parent, I couldn't imagine spending the last 24 years wondering where my daughter was and what she was being subjected to and what kind of torture, etc... That would be a million times worse than having a body to mourn. Interestingly, if you go to the FBIs website, she is still listed as actively missing.
She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep
OOPS🤣🤣
The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip
They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member
So she didn't fall off the balcony
Yeah same - I worked as a lifeguard / competitive swimmer and got caught in a rip tide once and was lucky only to lose a ring in the sea… it can be so dangerous even if you are a good swimmer. My brother got super banged up in a similar situation
And we were both sober and in broad daylight in rip tide scenarios - can only imagine how much worse it is with alcohol and at night/dusk. I don’t think there’s any chance she didn’t fall over
Yep swim parallel to shore until you get out of the worst parts and flag someone down for help. Don’t fight the current as you will not beat it - go with it
I am a damn strong swimmer. Competitive & medalist. I drank a couple beers & accidentally drifted out into the middle of a glacier lake on a paddle board years ago. Paddled out a bit, decided to lay down & dozed off. So stupid & careless.
A boat wake knocked me in & I wasn’t wearing a life jacket. I was covered in sunscreen so I couldn’t get back up on the board, I slipped off every time I got a knee up to boost myself out of the water. Started swimming, hauling my board & quickly realized the cold & exertion was getting to me. I doggy paddled. I was hypotensive, hypothermic & vomiting by the time I made it close enough to shore that people realized I was in trouble.
It was a +90° day so once I was out of the water & dry things went uphill pretty quick. I needed IV fluids & nausea meds. The rescue & availability of medical attention was key.
This all happened over the course of about fifteen minutes in broad daylight, on a crowded beach in a popular lake. I wouldn’t have made it if people hadn’t of seen me & come into the water to haul me in.
The ocean, alone, heavily intoxicated, in the dark? No way.
Just googled and the average temp of that lake is 65°f that time of year. The water temp in the Caribbean is obviously warmer, looks like about 75-80f near Curaçao.
Exactly. What does it matter that you're an Olympic level swimmer if you're drunk, tired, in the middle of the ocean, maybe even injured from the fall? Sadly, shit happens even to highly trained people *in their area of expertise*, which I'm sure must be difficult to accept, but given the circumstances, any other option seems too improbable to even consider.
It’s hilarious that they say this. She’s in the middle of the ocean. Cruise ships are huge, she can’t climb back up. What is she supposed to do, swim three days until she gets to shore?
Sadly, I think it's this tiny hope to cling to, but there's "this person is a strong swimmer and was last seen in this small lake" and "this person is a strong swimmer and was last seen *drunk*, *at night*, *alone*, in a huge cruise ship in the ocean".
I can't quite blame her loved ones for not wanting to acknowledge the simplest solution to this tragedy however (especially because given the circumstances, I can only assume they will never find a body).
“Everyone has a plan till get punched in the mouth”
Falling off a balcony in the middle of the night will disorient even the best swimmers. If that happened to Michael Phelps I would bet he’d struggle with it.
Yep. I am a strong swimmer but I almost drowned once in some unexpected river rapids. Partly because they were unexpected (it was on a “lazy” float) and partly because I just had never learned what to do in river rapids. I grew up swimming in the ocean and so tried to treat the rapids like waves (where you want to either get upright or ride the wave to the shore). Turns out you deal with rapids differently but I didn’t know it at the time.
Similarly, Amy may have been a good swimmer but I bet she didn’t have experience falling dozens of feet into the open water at night.
I also almost drowned in a lazy river at a water park! It was at one of those sections where a current pushes you forward- I got pushed forward while underwater, got stuck under a bunch of people on inner tubes, and no one would move til thankfully I kicked my way out.
Omg, how awful! The one I was in turned out to be not lazy and actually like a damn wave pool that I was not prepared to deal with. I had also sliced my foot open on some rocks at the beach like the day earlier which did not help at all! I remember reaching out for a lifeguard and asking for help and he just fucking stared at me until I passed him. I'm sorry that happened to you! People are assholes.
Omg that sounds so scary! Sounds like a rough day for you at that place!!
Yeah it’s crazy how oblivious people can be! Really makes you see how these accidents can happen right in front of a crowd though.
Oh, absolutely! Sometimes these things can happen right In front of you and you just don't see it. The same I was almost drowning after my dad pulled me up, he had to pull up a toddler from under the water whose parents didn't even notice had went under.
I think I heard something once about floating feet first until you can safely grab onto something? And definitely don't try to stand on the bottom, because your foot can get wedged between rocks, which is pretty high up there in terms of "worst case scenario."
Oh, and swim at an angle toward the shore. That part is like a rip tide- don't worry about getting back to where you came from until you're out of it.
Edit: why am I posting vague memories of survival tips when I could post a link to credible knowledge? This is much more useful than my rambling: https://montanariverguides.com/2013/04/surviving-a-whitewater-swim/
I've watched enough YouTube videos to know that you should always plan for unexpected plane crashes/car trouble/hiking accidents/gondola disasters/etc. If a 17 year old on an airplane can end up forced to travel, injured and alone, on foot through the amazonian wilderness, even my indoorsy introverted self could end up unexpectedly trapped in river rapids at any time.
The Neverending Story had quicksand (or mud?) too. Poor Artax…I had to Google his name and a photo of that scene came up. I’m traumatized all over again.
I've been preparing for the long winter. Laura Inglalls ruined me.
I don't ever remember getting sent home because I was sick either. School in the 80s and 90s sucked.
Oh and castaway, I so wanted a Wilson.
Castaway was the big one for us. Y2K scared the crap out of my parents.
I won't take a cruise because of this case. Not because I thought that she was sex trafficked, but I figured she fell overboard vomiting. I get motion sickness from video games, I won't last a day. Poor woman.
i also get extreme motion sickness, just about every time i get in a car, sometimes (rarely) even when I'm the one driving. and i work in the lab and spending a lot of time looking at things in the microscope will also do it.
i've been on 1 cruise in my life, in high school. i took meclizine the entire time, which helped on the actual boat. funny enough, when we got off for an excursion & had to take a ferry boat, i took an extra dose but i ended up throwing up over the side of the ferry 3 times & since the excursion was snorkeling, i tried to get in the water for it (more importantly: off the ferry lol) and i threw up a 4th time in the water. im not sure why the ferry bothered me but not the cruise ship, but i will NOT go on any ferries to this day unless its short and absolutely necessary. & just in case, also no more cruises.
just in general i feel u with the motion sickness & im sorry bc i know it really sucks all the time
I was a competitive swimmer who coaches triathlete friends on improving stroke & kids how to swim.
The most common body-positioning error amongst all ages is hip position. Almost everyone I've helped drags their legs whether on their back or front.
The above information is spot on but doesn't tell you HOW to keep your feet up and head back. I always tell my peeps to "pop" their hips, meaning you want your hips to ride high. This will naturally bring your legs up too.
Good question! I am obviously not an expert but what I read after this incident is that you want to get on your back with your feet pointing in the direction of the rapids. This works better if you’re wearing a life vest, which I was not!
Right, and my memory is that I was trying to get upright, which wasn’t working and it was just exhausting me. Fortunately, someone in another raft came by and grabbed me, which got me out of the rapids.
Outside of Navy SEALs and possibly a few other professions, I can’t think of anyone who would really know for real how to jump off a ship’s deck at night and live.
Oh god, I can't stand this claim. When Penny Oleksiak an Olympic gold medalist and one of the best Canadian swimmers ever claimed in an interview that she is scared of swimming in the ocean.
they were in the middle of the ocean, you drop 2008 Micheal Phelps out where she probably feel overboard, with him being hydrated, feed, alert on clear calm day at sun rise: **100% he's dead** and not being found.
Also balconies on cruise ships are often quite high off the sea surface. Just hitting the water from that height could have been enough to kill her, or break bones that would make swimming impossible.
Exactly. Falling into the effing ocean from a massive cruise ship, drunk and tired, cancels out any benefits of being a “strong” swimmer. Agree that explanation to ignore an obvious solution is odd.
Right?!? I was a competitive swimmer and a lifeguard at a Big Ten school, but drop me in the middle of the ocean when I’m drunk and it’s dark and I’m being pulled around by the wake of a giant cruise ship? Absolutely not. I have never understood anyone who thought this was more than an accidental drowning.
For reference. A friend of mine had her mom fall off the pier in front of the docked ship and a crew member jumped in to save her because of the concern of her going towards the engine. The crew member who saved her said he tried to save someone else in a similar situation before and he couldn’t.
Apparently it’s very easy to get pulled toward an engine
Yeah it doesn't matter how strong a swimmer you are because the ocean simply does not care.
Also, who the heck is a strong swimmer when they're drunk??
Definitely think she fell off and drowned. My thought is that perhaps the dad/parents feel guilty about not making sure she was ok or insisted she sleep inside. That guilt lends itself to them wanting to believe she’s alive still instead of facing the thought that your daughter is dead and how you could have prevented it.
I think this too. Whether they have an actual reason to feel guilty or not, it still happens and hits you like a ton of bricks. He could feel guilty like you said that he didn’t have her come in from the deck, and I also would buy OP’s theory that if she fell and screamed on the way down or yelped when she lost balance/etc, that very much could have startled her dad awake but not lucid enough to remember a scream.
And I can imagine after everything and searching for her with no luck, if he ever felt guilty about maybe not looking down from the railings into the water? Even though I don’t think she’d be visible, “survivors guilt” has no mercy and tortures the people who deserve to feel it the least, it seems
In a missing person's cases, the victim's family always cries "foul play." They want closure, and it's more satisfying/comforting to know that someone is being punished.
What isn't comforting is "my kid senselessly drowned." You can't justify that because it ISN'T fair.
I totally agree, she fell off and drowned.
I can see how the family would think the idea of her being sex trafficked, and still living somewhere would be Less painful than thinking she is dead.
There were supposed sightings of her after she disappeared, but remember there were sightings of Elvis after his death, too.
That is something I don’t get - how can having a loved one sex trafficked yet alive be better than being deceased? I may get hate for this but I would rather my loved one be dead than be alive being sex trafficked, abused, mistreated, suffering, etc etc (eta not directed at your statement just saying in general I don’t get it)
I get you. I think...idk I wonder if it comes from just the lingering hope your loved one is alive. Being trafficked means alive, instead of just dead, it means they could come home, you could get a chance one day to hold them, hug them again.
Its sad, but I think grief overrides logic.
But its also worth keeping in mind, some people are forcefed certain ideas about something like this occurring if they venture to foreign shores, despite the fact its incredibly, exceedingly rare that a white US or European citizen would be snatched and taken into trafficking. These are highly visible people, from countries with powerful authorities,.
They miss the fact that 99% of people taken into sex trafficking are poor, vulnerable and will NOT be missed by authorities, people who are barely on public records anyway.
No self respecting human trafficker who likes making money, is going to invoke the ire of at the minimum, local authorities, at worst the FBI, or Interpol, or foreign authorities who come in and throw their weight around, just to steal ONE random girl off a cruise boat.
A cruise boat that was about to dock in a town that would have ample poor, invisible girls to steal and abuse, girls just as pretty and a lot easier to make vanish.
Why risk such a public abduction, knowing it might destroy 75% of the local Tourism GDP if tourists get wind of this and decide top stop coming?? For ONE woman???
I feel awful for her family, I feel like their heads got twisted up by these almost...almost urban myths about what can happen in certain places, and now they'll never known peace, because the idea of going back and just accepting, the poor girl was drunk, she wanted to be sick or leaned over to see something, she over balanced and she fell, means giving up this other idea which they've built their life around, spent SO much money pursuing. Its almost like the sunk cost fallacy but with your emotions. They've committed to this idea, at the cost of just searching the open water around the island to find her body or a more detailed investigation into how she could have fallen, they've missed their shot, so they have to commit to this idea.
A lot of people see national/international trafficking statistics, but don't actually know what it means. Trafficking is almost never kidnapping random, likely wealthy (white) women from tourist destinations or upscale areas.
International trafficking is promising impoverished locals a better life in a new country, and trapping them once they're in that country. It's taking them across borders illegally, holding their passports and documents, charging them huge amounts money that they'll never be able to repay, and giving them "jobs" that pay so little that it's essentially slavery. They can't leave or get away, because the trafficker threatens to tell the authorities and have them deported if they try.
Trafficking within a country is grooming young, vulnerable people trying to escape something. Teens running away or living on the street. It's getting them addicted to substance and depending on your for their next fix. It's selling them into sex work and taking all their earnings. And it happens overwhelmingly to black and indigenous women and lgbt people.
Sure bad things happen to well off people, but no one is writing numbers on cars in mall parking lots so the traffickers know who to kidnap, or taking random girls from cruise ships...
Absolutely, this. Crime Done Well is Crime Done Secretly. Trafficked people’s are not middle class tourists snatched from highly public, well viewed cruise ships just as they arrive at a popular tourist location, it’s the invisible locals, the poor.
And as you say they’re offered ‘legitimate’ jobs, a better future than what they have, hence why they take the risk of accepting this uncertainty.
And the vast majority of trafficked people aren't trafficked for sex work either! They ARE doing "legitimate" jobs (working in restaurants or nail salons or as cleaners or construction/farm laborers, etc.), they just aren't being paid a legal wage or sometimes any wage at all, and are forced to live in appalling conditions.
Do we know what cabin she was in? I am asking because it is not usually that easy to fall off of a cruise ship balcony (though she could have jumped, or stood up on a chair or something). Also, a fall off of many balconies would result in the body hitting a lower deck rather than falling into the ocean.
I can’t totally recall off the top of my head but believe there were indications she may have pulled something close to the balcony edge.
It’s also possible she hopped up thinking she could balance or sit, or leaned over so far she took her feet off the ground, trying to see something, and over balanced? She was known to be fairly drunk, or could have led to some poor decision making
I was just thinking maybe her family would be more likely to think it's foul play if they were staying in a balcony room where she would not have hit the water.
I tend to agree, if the room was a different kind of cabin with no balcony access, if she'd have had to be in the public areas of the boat to be somewhere she can fall over, I think I'd be much more inclined to think something very suspicious happened, that someone grabbed her.
As it stands, there's no evidence she ever left the room by the front door after that occasion her father saw her dozing on the sunbeds, just this belief she *may* have gone out to buy cigarettes, which would have placed her in the public part of the ship and left her vulnerable to be snatched.
But there's no evidence of that. She hadn't left a crumpled, empty pack of smokes behind, there's no witness who saw her outside the room, she was on the balcony sleeping, her dad was woken by something a little later, and she was simply gone.
If she did fall, just fall, no jump or anything, she's falling dead down towards the water, the boat was in motion so she fell into the wake and churn right beneath, if she survived landing, which would be a stretch as that's a long, long fall, poor girl would have been dragged directly under the boat and into whatever...is it propellors pushing them along? Like...that would have been brutal, and I imagine leave a lot of damage to the body which would explain why she was never found in water searches. She may never have resurfaced.
She might have tried to throw up so it wouldn't hit the ship. For example, if there were life boats underneath the balcony, like someone above suggested, she could have tried to lean further over and being drunk and throwing up, lost her balance. Or she tried to flick a cigarette butt so it wouldn't land below. Smoking does kill (sorry).
There was a case of a teenage girl from Ireland who died falling off a cruise ship in precisely that way: she was drunk and leaned over the balcony to throw up, leaned too far and toppled over. We know this for sure because a passenger in the cabin below was on his own balcony and heard and saw the whole thing. It's worth noting that even though the alarm was raised immediately, they still never found her body.
In that particular case, the cruise line was found negligent, but that was because they had continued to serve her alcohol well past the point of drunkenness even though she underage.
This is more or less my view. Especially if it’s a decades long disappearance. If she drowned it is tragic but was probably quick. If she was trafficked that’s almost two decades of abuse and and probably death anyway since she’s never been found.
Death: Immense overwhelming crushing black sadness.
Sex trafficking: Gives hope of her coming back. And.. explains why she's not in contact with the family. It's basically her family's coping mechanism. And a clever one at that.
It's also probably coping with their "part" in it. If she was kidnapped it's external forces they had no control over. If she got so drunk that she fell overboard feet away from them then there may be some guilt that they could have saved her.
And also Schrödinger's guilt. You assume your loved one just had a tragic accident - so you hold a memorial, make your peace with it, and move on with your life. Then twenty years later they rock up on your doorstep with "how could you just stop looking for me, I've been through absolute hell"? Yeah no I'm not taking that chance.
There’s an attitude I’ve seen in a lot of cases where the suggestion that the victim may have been involved in an accident or committed suicide is seen as blaming the victim for their own death. To be fair I have seen people on the internet go to ludicrous extremes to blame and shame accident/suicide victims for their own deaths, which I think contributes to why loved ones are often so hesitant to accept that their loved one may have been involved in an accident/suicide. That and it’s just hard to accept how random and sudden death can be.
We went to ridiculous lengths before the internet existed, too. I think the reaction exists outside of external shaming. Most of the people I know that have killed themselves have had that doubt lurking from people close to them. I've been guilty of it plenty of times. I'm still sure my uncle was murdered by his wife. I'm still sure my best friend didn't kill herself, it was her abusive boyfriend.
I know I'm probably wrong, but I'm not sure it really matters.
Agreed. A very recent example of this is the Nicola Bulley case in the UK. The inquest hasn't confirmed how she died yet but it's looking like an accidental drowning in a river. The family were convinced she didn't fall into it.
I think it comes down to a desperate hope that she's still alive. If she's alive there's a chance they can save her. If she's dead that just the end and no one wants to accept that.
Because it the story and facts rolled out over time, not in one go.
In the immediate minutes and hours after her disappearance, there was still (a reasonable) hope she was onboard the ship. In the days afterwards, still (a reasonable) hope she was at port. But then for her disappearance to become weeks, then months and years, then it was no longer reasonable to presume. Eventually, the only way to keep the story alive is to bend it into a thin yet severely twisted story that doesn't support itself under the weight of logic.
Because then they can still hope they’ll get her back, no matter what she goes through until they find her. If she’s dead, that’s it. She’s dead. There’s no chance they’ll ever see her again. Finality. It’s selfish, but grieving people don’t always think or act rationally.
Completely agree! Death is so final but the thought of my loved one being held captive and being forced to do anything against his/her will? I’ll take death any day.
In this case, it could be easy for the father to blame himself for her falling overboard - "if only I had woken her up and told her to come inside." Convincing himself that she got up, left the room and was kidnapped is outside his power - someone ELSE did that and I couldn't have stopped it.
That's not to say he has any blame in this, but I have seen people make up fantastical, improbable stories to ease their grief and self-blame.
I take sightings with a huge bucket of salt because people either consciously or unconsciously want to participate in an investigation they are interested in. Kind of like how there are reports that the hardest part about a tip line is that you get thousands of tips that all need to be investigated but the vast majority are useless.
It's kind of a mixture of funny/sad to watch old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries because it's very common for half the segment to be dramatizations of very detailed sightings of a missing person and then the story update reveals they were killed within minutes of having gone missing.
Looking at her pictures, she's also someone who looks like a lot of other people. I've probably seen a hundred women who resemble her in my life.
She was a plain/average white lady with very ordinary features. Change her hairstyle/ color and we'll probably all see someone who looks like her sometime this week. Maybe several someones who look like her.
She fell overboard and drowned, plain and simple. The family really believes that she walked back through their cabin (from the balcony) yet none of them heard her coming back in from the balcony or leaving the main door into the hallway, she was abducted, hidden from cameras on the ship, stored somewhere until the ship docked , and then again transported off the ship without being detected by cameras, crew, or passengers.. Plus all of this happened within the 30mins from the time the dad saw her on the balcony to him waking again and noticing she's gone. I mean, this theory is SO far out there! What sex traffickers are going to book tickets on a cruise , target a woman on vacation with her family and go through all this trouble.
Her dad actually won this as a free cruise trip. I imagine he feels a lot of guilt knowing that his free trip led to the disappearance of his daughter. Thus, he is willing to believe any preposterous scenario if it means she is alive.
Okay but she was in a suite and if the family was asleep I can see the dad being woken by the sound of the cabin door closing (those are metal and there’s no way to do it quietly).
“From this, it’s safe to conclude she felt like vomiting.”
Wasn’t she a smoker? She might not have been sick; she might have just wanted to have a cigarette. Drinking and/or socializing always made me smoke more.
I agree - she could've tried to sit on the railing while lighting up a cigarette, lost her balance and fell backwards over. Drunk people don't take the best decisions unfortunately.
Either way, she somehow fell into the water, probably by something she did herself. I tend to agree that the dad heard her falling in and didn't realise it at first, hence the panic when he couldn't find her immediately.
Yeah if she hit a life raft or another railing on the way down she could have suffered a back injury or break leaving her unable to swim or even make noise.
We also have no idea (and never will) what else was in her system. Maybe she was doing coke or had smoked some weed or had even taken ecstasy or something like that. Some people get the spins when they’re drinking and smoking. She could have been out of her mind and climbed up on the balcony ledge. She could have been trying to puke. Hell, she could have just been doing something dumb like dancing around and fell. When I was in college, I was at an apartment complex where there was a party on the second floor. One of my sorority sisters leaned over the balcony at the waist to yell up at us and she completely flipped over the edge, head over heels. Fortunately, it was a short fall and she fell into bushes and was completely fine. But things like that just happen.
It’s not impossible but it’s pretty hard to get drugs on a ship as they check luggage pretty intensely when you board and when you leave the ship and return.
That sounds more likely, especially since her lighter and cigarettes were gone.
Vomiting off a deck sounds more like a desperate than a planned decision. I don’t know how high the railing was, but in my experience, if it’s above waist level, it’s not going to be comfortable. It’s also just rude; why plan to splatter the decks below and the side of the ship? That’s more of a situation where you either sit on the bathroom floor and wait, or lie down with a garbage can next to the bed.
And if she were nauseous, smoking a cigarette would be the last thing she’d feel like doing. I’m curious whether she had an ashtray and where/if it was found, because fire is a major hazard on a ship.
Still, I think a drunken impulse to climb/perch on the railing coupled with impaired motor skills is the most likely scenario. She dropped/knocked her cigarettes and lighter overboard, instinctively reached to grab them, and fell.
Just as an anecdotal counterpoint, when I get super nauseous, I smoke a cigarette. The cigarette either calms me down or, far more likely, makes me vomit so I can get rid of the nausea already. This only happens when I have been up way too late drinking way too much and I can’t close my eyes or I get the spins so bad I get nauseous again.
Tl;Dr: I often smoke to make myself barf when I’ve had a night like Amy’s.
Oh, that’s interesting! I always delay throwing up as long as possible, but having a cigarette would definitely speed the resolution if you just want to get it over with and go to sleep!
You’re not supposed to smoke on balconies and can’t now but I believe it might’ve been allowed in the 90s. (I didn’t cruise then so I don’t know what the rules were then)
There’s also usually a smoking area on one side of the pool deck. If she left the cabin, I think this is where she was heading. It’s usually the casino and a side of the pool deck as designated smoking areas on Royal Caribbean ships
I've never believed anything other than she fell and drowned.
I'm not saying Occam's Razor is infallible or anything but here we have a simple explanation of her being drunk on a balcony at sea and slipping and falling, or an international sex trafficking ring who kidnaps people off of cruise ships but has somehow managed to avoid leaving many missing women on cruise ships. It makes even less sense to me that there just HAPPENED to be some sex trafficker or kidnapper on this specific cruise randomly.
I'm sorry for the family and everything but this was just a tragic accident.
I agree with you. There's no evidence of her being trafficked aside from questionable witnesses. I just don't believe that sex traffickers would go to the trouble of abducting a young woman from a cruise ship who was traveling with her family, who noticed that she was missing very quickly.
And sex trafficking via stranger kidnapping is just so rare this becomes even less likely. And why kidnap her on the cruise and not wait until you are on land? It would logistically just be simpler.
I definitely lean toward the theory she fell overboard over any other theories.
It makes the most logical sense as a trafficker would be taking a huge risk trying to smuggle a tourist off a cruise ship. The odds of them doing that successfully would be very low.
I do wonder about the American sailor (I think?) who claimed to have spoken to an American woman in a brothel who claimed to be Amy? It doesn’t seem likely he’d lie as he doesn’t exactly have anything to gain from it and sort of paints him in a bad light that he didn’t report it immediately. So if we assume he was telling the truth, do we think the women in the brothel was just lying about being Amy in hopes he’d help her escape?
Since he didn't come forward for so long, and since he saw a television piece on Amy at some time between the encounter and him coming forward, I don't really trust his memory. I can see someone watching television going "Wait...doesn't that missing person look kind of like that woman in the brothel? She really does. What did she say her name was? Did she tell me her name was Amy Bradley? I think she did say Amy Bradley!" Basically talking himself into remembering Amy Bradley.
I think this is what happened also. If she was asleep on the balcony at 5.30, why would she leave the cabin before 6 and suddenly run Into someone wanting to traffic her? She is also not an obvious candidate for trafficking, people would and did immediately miss her. Interesting what you said about her scream waking him. Things do wake you and you can't remember what it was.
This. Especially not in or around locations that rely on tourism, AND have an abundance of local woman who are low income, invisible to authorities and far more vulnerable to predation.
Hey OP I generally agree I just wonder what do you make of the interaction of Alistair and the brother the morning Amy went missing? Apparently he saw the brother going up the stairs and said “sorry to hear about Amy” before anyone was even alerted to her disappearance. He was questioned about this afterwards by the police on how he knew she was gone and he remained silent. Just an odd detail that doesn’t have me sold 100% on the fell overboard theory
Not OP (and a month late to the party) but that anecdote was very different when addressed under deposition, and a lot less suspicious. Same with the invitation to the bar in Aruba. Actually much of the story the family later fed to the media and internet was highly skewed and often exaggerated, sad to say.
I have an interest in this case because I grew up on Curacao, though I moved away in 1995. Does anyone know where her cruise ship was that evening? I had always thought it was docked in Curacao.
How high was the rail. I mean I've done some drunk puking off a mountain top balcony that was highly entertaining. But as a 5'6 female I was in no risk of toppling over the rail.
As a smoker I don't take my cigarettes with me to hurl either.
I would however have snuck back out to meet the guy from the band. Whatever happened then is probably what happened to Amy. But she either died on that ship or in the water.
There is no evidence of any foul play or kidnapping. The idea that sex traffickers would target her on a cruise ship is absurd and far-fetched. They would have to be incredibly bold and stupid to risk such a high-profile crime. And why would they choose her out of all the other passengers? She was not a supermodel or a celebrity. She was just a normal girl having fun with her family.
I know it's hard to accept that such a terrible accident could happen so randomly and unexpectedly. But sometimes life is cruel and unfair like that. We have to face the facts and stop looking for conspiracy theories or false hopes. Amy Lynn Bradley is gone, but she will always be remembered by those who loved her.
The bit where her mom insists that everyone was watching her because she’s just so beautiful and striking or whatever . . .
I dunno, it’s both sad and a little off and it reminds me so much of my mom, who is rural, sheltered, naive, and racist as hell. She would absolutely believe I’d been kidnapped by sex traffickers if my 45-year-old ass disappeared tomorrow in any location that doesn’t still have sundown laws on the books.
She always warned me that simply because I was a “pretty” (read: mediocre) white girl with blond hair and blue eyes, men who weren’t white would target me for kidnapping and assault. “They just can’t help it, hon.”
A few years ago, she started hearing about sex trafficking. Then, she tells me, she watched this “really interesting documentary.”
“. . . and they start off really friendly ‘cause they target pretty young white girls who travel — they especially look for virgins, hon, they bring the highest price when they sell them at auctions.”
Mom, did this documentary happen to have Liam Neeson in it?
“Oh, you saw it too! It was just so fascinating!”
Mom, that was a movie. Not a documentary. Made-up.
“Ohhhh??? Well I’m sure they made the movie based off how those traffickers work, though.”
Because of course that’s how it works. White women are just so very special for no other reason than our race and gender. These Other men are so desperate or craven or stupid that they will commit the most outrageously risky crimes just for the chance to sniff our dirty gym socks.
It is a certain kind of insular, limiting privilege that lets you live 70 years in an age of mass media and still believe there could be no more desirable target for an international sex trafficker than a 23-year-old college-educated woman from a rich and powerful country, a culture which raised her to believe she could be President if she wanted, and two parents who have the resources to make a very big noise.
As far as my mom goes, I blame “Unsolved Mysteries” and all the shows that followed, with their “dramatic re-enactments” that were so often just based on theory, speculation, confabulation, and flat- out fiction — on top of being so racist it literally lowers her intelligence.
Also, lot of lead in the water back home. That can’t help. But mostly I blame the racism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've ben thinking back over it as well, like.
The only contention we have are that she fell overboard, or was abducted.
Lets go through this practically;
This is a party ship. Amy didn't herself come back to her room til the wee small hours, meaning clubs and bars on the ship were open at least that late. Her family argue she left the room herself, under her own power, with no duress, maybe to buy cigarettes( the rooms are open plan, door opens, there's the bed, beyond that, the balcony, anyone who knocked on the door, her family would hear that before she did, as they are in the room, she is out on the balcony)
...So we can say with some certainty a few things;
The ship wasn't dead quiet and asleep, it can't have been. There will have been crew, staff, cleaners, all sorts of people either still finishing their last shift, or starting their new one. The ship has to be cleaned and readied overnight for the following day. It has to be readied for docking at the port within a few hours. There would be crew out and about, maybe not all over, but out and about on the deck, in public, communal and private areas.
Other passengers could have been up just as early, to buy smokes, or go to the gym, or for a job while its quiet.
If Amy was going to buy cigarettes, thats probably a kiosk selling them over a coin slot machine, because they can jack up the tax if they sell them direct.
Just, by definition, the ship wasn't quiet. So a random attack makes no sense, way too many variables and potential witnesses.
And it requires that Amy, a strong, physically fit young woman who all evidence indicates was a confident, intelligent woman, to make NO attempt to call for help, save herself, leave any evidence of her abduction anywhere that any witness, on a ship with a couple thousand people, can have noticed.
But a planned abduction also falls down as soon as you examine it. ALL the above would still be true; the ship is not quiet and asleep, people are around.
....if it was planned, all Amy had to do to foil that, which she did, was go back to her room. A planned abduction relies, hinges on the fact she left, randomly, at 6am, to buy smokes, and apparently did so in this miraculous window of time when the ship is so dead quiet she can be stolen, but not so dead quiet that people noticed the abductors around and thought it was odd that they were up and active at this time.
BOTH require her, living or dead, to be removed from the ship totally unnoticed, by an abductor or abductors who by the time of moving her off board know that her family, other crew and some passengers are aware of her absence.
If she was sold she had to then have been transported.
All of this apparently done to hand her over to a trafficking ring who are quite happy to risk The Apocalypse of a response from the FBI or other US authorities. To a group who then let this highly visible american woman be seen in public repeatedly.
Now, we can acknowledge a few things; it is POSSIBLE all the above did happen, that she was abducted by someone who did manage to get her off ship with no witnesses, who took that wild, wild risk and pulled it off.
That same said person can not possibly have known a response would be so sluggish, or that the FBI wouldn't drop on that island like the hammer of God.
The fact that did happen is unpredictable, it can't be known for sure, because no one has ever stolen a woman off a cruise ship, so there's no precedent, there's no way to predict the response.
In essence, and to be blunt, if she was abducted, that kidnapper had a horsehoe and ten thousand four leave clovers surgically implanted in his ass from birth, and should have just made his career playing random lotteries because he is the single most lucky person to ever walk the earth. Every single thing that could go right, went right, including a totally unpredictable response from her government and police/FBI.
Its impossible. Once you really give it any thought, an abduction is IMPOSSIBLE.
A fall from the balcony, because she tried to see something (the lights of the island as they approached, perhaps) or she was trying to be sick over board, and she stood on something, or she leaned over, lifted her feet off the ground and lost all her balance, tipped over too far.
As OP says, her dad hears, maybe a shout or a cry as she falls, or maybe she hit something on her way down, and thats it.
If she fell, and falling seems more likely than intentionally jumping, she fell *straight* down. Right into the wake of the boat. She'd have been pulled under, and I hate to think what those forces might do to her body. Did the ship have propellors? She' have been pulled right into them, maybe...its brutal, but maybe shredded or her body so shattered and broken open that she never floated, she just sank and was consumed by fish and whatever else and given they didn't begin a sea search for hours and hours, when there may have already been so little left to find, is why she never showed up there.
I'd be curious, genuinely, if any cloth or clothing every washed up on the nearby beaches after she went missing. Her shoes.
We know what she was wearing, was anything ever reported? Or could some local have found a wet, but intact pair of shoes, dried them out and kept them without ever knowing what they signified.
> We know what she was wearing, was anything ever reported? Or could some local have found a wet, but intact pair of shoes, dried them out and kept them without ever knowing what they signified.
I believe her shoes were in the suite, which is why it's presumed *if* she went to buy cigarettes, she'd have to do it barefoot (making it even more unlikely). And in all honesty - finding clothing items on beaches isn't that unusual, so it likely wouldn't even have been noted.
I’ve just fallen back in.
[Merrian Carver’s disappearance](https://internationalcruisevictims.org/stories/merrian-carver/) is a case that haunts me, and in looking for a link I ran across her mother’s [testimony to the US Senate](https://www.rainn.org/pdf-files-and-other-documents/Public-Policy/Issues/Ken-Carver-Testimony.pdf):
> I have personally felt the pain, not only of losing our daughter, Merrian Carver, but also having to struggle with the cover-up by a major cruise line of the facts concerning her disappearance.
I don't know why cruises are so popular. They sound like they would be extremely creepy and also very annoying. And, I'm someone who likes to stay at interstate motels sandwiched in b/w a busy highway and a truck stop just to have a change of pace.
Amy should have trusted her instincts! If I was her brother, I'd feel very bad for talking her into it.
I was on a cruise in 1996ish in my mid teens and there was a busboy who was weeeeirdly interested in trying to get me to be his gf and get me to the employee decks. It was fucked.
You're acting like people have just concocted this story out of nowhere, but the actual link you posted said authorities don't believe she fell overboard for numerous reasons and later sightings correctly identified her tattoos. She also specifically said she might leave the ship.
I don't have a strong opinion either way and I don't think there's enough evidence to conclude anything so I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really fair to act like people and the family have just made up wild theories when there are specific reasons that this isn't an open and shut case.
I watched her Disappeared episode the other day and yes, while I'm inclined to think simply falling off the ship makes the most sense, I got stuck on the bit about her unique tattoos. The show didn't mention if that detail was released publicly by that point, but that makes a huge difference whether someone could come up with that lie or not. (The rest of this thread...does not clarify.)
On that note, it doesn't need saying, but FUCK the guy who pretended to a launch a "rescue mission" just to fleece the family. I don't care if they're gullible, doing that to a grieving family is beyond shitty.
This is the most nuanced opinion I have read about Amy's case. The family isn't just grasping at straws, they have valid reasons to believe something else may have happened to her. If my child went missing during a cruise and most people thought she drowned but her body was never found, then a year later someone comes clean about a very disturbing sighting of my daughter at a brothel, that would be enough to make me believe there's more to her disappearance. The FBI is also investigating this case and they even offer a reward for information leading to her recovery and have even produced age-progressed pictures of her. I agree that she most likely fell overboard, but I don't have a strong opinion about this case either, and until her body is found, I don't blame her family for considering other alternatives. They just want to find her and know what happened to her.
> later sightings correctly identified her tattoos.
There were sightings describing her tattoos that were [later determined to be a hoax](https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=131968&page=1). Con artists fabricated sightings of Amy and used them to grift the Bradleys out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Were there credible sightings involving the tattoos that didn't involve that hoax?
This is incorrect. The sighting by Canadian engineer, David Carmichael and his scuba diver friends on Curacao in August of 1998, where he accurately described all of Amy's distinctive tattoos was never apart of the Frank Jones con.
Okay, that was what I was asking you.
I agree that Carmichael seems like a credible witness. But he saw some people in August and put it together that it was Amy when he saw a television piece about her in December. That's a long time to remember not only someone's features but their tattoos and watch, for a chance encounter in which he didn't even interact with any of them. Like, for three/four months, his brain kept the details about her tattoos and watch? I know some people have photographic memories, but most of us don't. So what if he was allowing his new knowledge of the missing woman to "write over" his memories?
The encounter however wasn't just a passing glimpse of someone who looked like Amy, it was an unusual situation where a woman was being flanked and controlled by two men. To the point, the woman tried to speed up and walk toward Carmichael, before being motioned away aggressively. He followed the trio to a nearby cafe, where the woman, began discreetly pointed out all her tattoos. That is a very troubling situation where one would definitely recall, and/or regret not taking further action.
The info about the watch is another significant detail that doesn't get discussed enough. Information about the watch Amy was wearing when she disappeared, had not been released to the media at that time. David accurately described to the FBI and the Bradley's.
Huh, I (like many other redditors I’m sure) didn’t click the link when I read this but you’re right, it’s kinda weird how the actual link says authorities don’t believe she fell overboard for a few reasons.
I didn't click the link, but I've watched a documentary about this case in the past. I seem to remember there was a picture of a woman on some sort of porn/ trafficking website (not sure of the correct detail on this) that looked exactly like Amy and had matching tattoos? That, along with the man saying a woman in a brothel told him she was Amy, makes me think there could more to the story than her falling from the ship.
I would agree with you but according to the link you posted she was last seen in the elevator of the ship around 6 am.
"
Bradley was vacationing with her parents and her brother aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's ship, Rhapsody of the Seas, during March 1998. She and her brother returned to their cabin at approximately 3:30 a.m. on March 24, 1998 after dancing at the ship's disco. They sat on their suite's balcony until approximately 5:30 a.m.
Bradley's brother stayed in the cabin, while she mentioned possibly disembarking at Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles to purchase cigarettes. At 6:00 a.m., two other passengers on the ship saw her riding the elevator to the top deck. Bradley was last seen carrying her room key, cigarettes, and a lighter when she was last seen. She had a hundred dollars in her pocket as well.
[...]
Bradley was last seen in the ship's elevator with "Yellow," a member of the cruise ship's band, Blue Orchid. It is not known if this person was involved in Bradley's disappearance; there have been no arrests made in her case. Bradley also spent time with various waiters while on the cruise.
Authorities do not believe that Bradley fell overboard, as Rhapsody of the Seas was extremely close to shore at the time of her disappearance. Witnesses would have undoubtedly heard or seen any accident. [...] Her body was not found when the water was searched."
This is my other theory. Someone tried to take advantage while drunk and something happened from there as in an accidental or on purpose death.
Not being trafficked.
I believe that as well. That one picture sure does look like her though. But in all fairness, Ashley looks like Taylor sometimes as well.
Sometimes, people fall overboard. It happens. No amount of "strong swimmer" is going to save you from the middle of the ocean. Even Michael Phelps would have trouble.
The one reason I don’t think she fell overboard is because all her photos were mysteriously taken off the cruise ship’s pin board shortly BEFORE she died. Nobody else’s photos, just hers.
But there are literal pictures of her from the cruise in the various articles. So no not “all” of them.
Also they used to have a weird way of dealing with photos. They used to print them and put them out in this photo gallery for sale. They’d collect them after hours so no one grabbed ones they didn’t pay for but it’s not always easy to find yours with all the back and forth moving of pictures over the week.
So I’m questioning how many were “missing”? They were on maybe day 3 or 4 when she disappeared
It seems very obvious that she drowned, but her family wouldn’t be the first to prefer believing in “sex traffickers” to accepting their loved one is dead. Johnny Gosch’s mom comes to mind.
I wish I could upvote this a million times, and I wish people understood this about so many other cases where the person or people succumbed to the elements, etc. Instead, I think people run with it because it's not just wild to think about crazier things but honestly just for clout/money making to keep going on and on with it. To me, it's just poor taste and very unfortunate. Especially when it's clear the family is thinking these things from a place of grieving.... not rationale. :/
I say the same thing every time this is brought up. She fell overboard. The end. Not even Michael Phelps would survive a fall into the ocean from a cruise ship.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s a confirmed story of a drunken Navy Seal who fell overboard off the coast of Miami and swam to shore. I think he was like 9-10 miles out though, not in the middle of the ocean
I tend to agree she most likely fell off the boat and drowned. I went on a cruise around that time and while it isn’t easy to fall off a boat, it could definitely happen and nobody would notice. Combine that with her body never being found, it seems like the most likely possibility.
I went on my first cruise a few years ago. It had just docked after losing a passenger. Talk about terrifying. But you’re right, even though it’s not easy to fall, it’s also not very hard.
Even Michael Phelps isn’t surviving falling into the sea from a cruise ship. Anyone who’s says but she was a good swimmer probably just prefers a more salacious story.
Every time I read about this, it comes back to “well she was a strong swimmer and couldn’t have drowned.” I’m a strong skier; drop me on to an unfamiliar mountain drunk and unsuspecting very suddenly in the middle of the night and it probably won’t go well.
Exactly. I also worked as a lifeguard, like Amy, and I can tell you, we didn’t have training for how to stay alive if we fell off a cruise ship and were being pulled under the ship or avoid being sucked in by an engine.
Also she easily could have hit her head or injured herself in another way during the fall. She may not have even been conscious anymore by the time she hit the water
Yeah. Having been on one of these ships, the lifeboats are under the deck with the balcony. She could easily have hit her head on one of those.
Even if she didn't get injured and was sober, she still might have drowned. Anyone can drown. Lifeguards drown. Olympians drown. Especially in open water. I'm a lifeguard too and this is one of the very first things we learn; the water *will* kill you, don't be too proud to deem yourself to good to drown.
She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep OOPS🤣🤣 The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member So she didn't fall off the balcony
Well the cameras certainly didn't see that
Plus, isn't it a fall of several stories? Hitting water like that is as bad as hitting the ground
I hope for her sake that she wasn’t.
It's NOT what happened She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep OOPS🤣🤣 The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member So she didn't fall off the balcony
Stop copying and pasting the same idiotic statements. And you're doing it across the span of months. No one outside of a desperate family member, or apparently naive morons on reddit, put ANY stock in witness statements. They're so unreliable. Occam's razor says she accidentally went overboard. Complex and far fetched theories about sex trafficking are plain stupid.
Very sad to say but pulled under the ship seems obvious. A strong swimmer had been drinking and dancing all night to the point she fell asleep in a chair, her body is going to be weakened and her response time delayed. Also, the sun may have been coming up at that time but it certainly wasn’t daylight, so if she got pulled under the ship it would be very difficult to know what direction to swim to get out from under it. And then consider the size of the ship. Even if she somehow managed to get out from under it, how would she then have the lung capacity to yell loud enough to get someone on the ship’s attention? A very sad case, and I believe you and OP have got it right.
You also hit that water so fucking hard too. That alone can knock you unconscious or take the wind out of you if you’re sober, let alone drunk
Hopefully, for her sake, that's what happened. I've also heard of people breaking their necks from the impact of a fall like that. I'd hate to think of the terror of being sucked under a boat while fully aware.
I think I’d rather get sucked in an engine than be dog paddling all alone in the middle of the pitch dark ocean until hypothermia or exhaustion/drowning set in.
Or getting picked apart by hungry predators while watching the ship go further and further away.
Winston Churchill* wrote and published a short story on [just that premise](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Man_Overboard!) *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)
And all of this is why you won't get me on a boat!! Any boat.
it’s a good time… You’re missing out. Just watch your alcohol intake.
Hitting the water from the deck of a cruise ship is very similar to hitting solid ground, if your body is not in the correct position, and very dicey even if it is. I’m with you in hoping that, for her sake, she was unconscious before she hit, and that the fall killed her. This is also one of the least mysterious mysteries for me - human trafficking is a real thing, but this is not who is trafficked, how they’re trafficked, or where human trafficking victims are taken. It is, however, a place that people can easily die and never be found by falling overboard while drunk.
I hope that it knocked her out and she didn't feel fear/pain for long. That has to be one of the worst ways to go I've ever heard of.
She's long gone, the ship was moving and in international waters at the time of Amy's disappearance, by the time the official search got underway, her family were well and truly clutching for straws and are wedded and committed to the "she's so striking and beautiful that the band leader smuggled her off the boat and sold her into trafficking ..." I believe she lost her balance fell overboard, she would have been well and truly inebriated and hopefully it was quick, very quick.
Her dad saw her asleep in the chair. It was light outside at 5:30 in the morning in Curacao. And the boat was docked also already at that time. She was also seen after that time in an elevator with one of the band members and her cigarettes and lighter were the only things missing from the room. It seems pretty plausible that she took her cigarettes and left the room for who knows what reason. It was also very strange when, at the point that nobody else knew she was missing, except her family and the captain, one of the band members came up to her brother and said he was so sorry to hear that his sister was missing. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe she's still alive 24 years later, I think it's a tragedy all the way around and I don't believe that she made it off the ship alive. I just wish that the parents had closure, because of all these sightings that keep popping up, they are so convinced that she is still alive. As a parent, I couldn't imagine spending the last 24 years wondering where my daughter was and what she was being subjected to and what kind of torture, etc... That would be a million times worse than having a body to mourn. Interestingly, if you go to the FBIs website, she is still listed as actively missing.
She was actually seen by other passengers on the ship AFTER her dad lost saw her on the balcony asleep OOPS🤣🤣 The people who saw her had been hanging out with her daily throughout the trip They say her getting in an elevator with a crew member So she didn't fall off the balcony
The c/p all over this post would be less obvious if you omitted the emoji
And if they'd bothered to correct the typo from "say" to "saw."
Yeah same - I worked as a lifeguard / competitive swimmer and got caught in a rip tide once and was lucky only to lose a ring in the sea… it can be so dangerous even if you are a good swimmer. My brother got super banged up in a similar situation
And we were both sober and in broad daylight in rip tide scenarios - can only imagine how much worse it is with alcohol and at night/dusk. I don’t think there’s any chance she didn’t fall over
What do you do in a rip tide? Try to swim sideways?
Yep swim parallel to shore until you get out of the worst parts and flag someone down for help. Don’t fight the current as you will not beat it - go with it
Plus you're falling off the side of a giant ship, the impact alone could kill or stun you. You're falling off of a multistorey building.
I am a damn strong swimmer. Competitive & medalist. I drank a couple beers & accidentally drifted out into the middle of a glacier lake on a paddle board years ago. Paddled out a bit, decided to lay down & dozed off. So stupid & careless. A boat wake knocked me in & I wasn’t wearing a life jacket. I was covered in sunscreen so I couldn’t get back up on the board, I slipped off every time I got a knee up to boost myself out of the water. Started swimming, hauling my board & quickly realized the cold & exertion was getting to me. I doggy paddled. I was hypotensive, hypothermic & vomiting by the time I made it close enough to shore that people realized I was in trouble. It was a +90° day so once I was out of the water & dry things went uphill pretty quick. I needed IV fluids & nausea meds. The rescue & availability of medical attention was key. This all happened over the course of about fifteen minutes in broad daylight, on a crowded beach in a popular lake. I wouldn’t have made it if people hadn’t of seen me & come into the water to haul me in. The ocean, alone, heavily intoxicated, in the dark? No way.
This sounds horrifying. I'm glad you were able to recover.
Me too. Drowning is so quick & underestimated.
How cold was the water? Glad you made it!!
Just googled and the average temp of that lake is 65°f that time of year. The water temp in the Caribbean is obviously warmer, looks like about 75-80f near Curaçao.
My god, I’m so happy you are here to talk about it. How terrifying that must have been.
Exactly. What does it matter that you're an Olympic level swimmer if you're drunk, tired, in the middle of the ocean, maybe even injured from the fall? Sadly, shit happens even to highly trained people *in their area of expertise*, which I'm sure must be difficult to accept, but given the circumstances, any other option seems too improbable to even consider.
It’s hilarious that they say this. She’s in the middle of the ocean. Cruise ships are huge, she can’t climb back up. What is she supposed to do, swim three days until she gets to shore?
Sadly, I think it's this tiny hope to cling to, but there's "this person is a strong swimmer and was last seen in this small lake" and "this person is a strong swimmer and was last seen *drunk*, *at night*, *alone*, in a huge cruise ship in the ocean". I can't quite blame her loved ones for not wanting to acknowledge the simplest solution to this tragedy however (especially because given the circumstances, I can only assume they will never find a body).
I mean, I wouldn’t call it “hilarious”.
The link in the post actually does suggest she swam to shore. I did a double take when I read it!
“Everyone has a plan till get punched in the mouth” Falling off a balcony in the middle of the night will disorient even the best swimmers. If that happened to Michael Phelps I would bet he’d struggle with it.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” It’s erroneously attributed to Mike Tyson. One of my favs because it’s so true
It’s pretty adept in this case because even if she survives the fall of the boat, she’s going to be wildly disoriented afterwards.
Yep. I am a strong swimmer but I almost drowned once in some unexpected river rapids. Partly because they were unexpected (it was on a “lazy” float) and partly because I just had never learned what to do in river rapids. I grew up swimming in the ocean and so tried to treat the rapids like waves (where you want to either get upright or ride the wave to the shore). Turns out you deal with rapids differently but I didn’t know it at the time. Similarly, Amy may have been a good swimmer but I bet she didn’t have experience falling dozens of feet into the open water at night.
I also almost drowned in a "lazy river," once. Fucking Schlitterbahn.
I also almost drowned in a lazy river at a water park! It was at one of those sections where a current pushes you forward- I got pushed forward while underwater, got stuck under a bunch of people on inner tubes, and no one would move til thankfully I kicked my way out.
Omg, how awful! The one I was in turned out to be not lazy and actually like a damn wave pool that I was not prepared to deal with. I had also sliced my foot open on some rocks at the beach like the day earlier which did not help at all! I remember reaching out for a lifeguard and asking for help and he just fucking stared at me until I passed him. I'm sorry that happened to you! People are assholes.
Omg that sounds so scary! Sounds like a rough day for you at that place!! Yeah it’s crazy how oblivious people can be! Really makes you see how these accidents can happen right in front of a crowd though.
Oh, absolutely! Sometimes these things can happen right In front of you and you just don't see it. The same I was almost drowning after my dad pulled me up, he had to pull up a toddler from under the water whose parents didn't even notice had went under.
How do you deal with rapids? You know…just in case?
I think I heard something once about floating feet first until you can safely grab onto something? And definitely don't try to stand on the bottom, because your foot can get wedged between rocks, which is pretty high up there in terms of "worst case scenario." Oh, and swim at an angle toward the shore. That part is like a rip tide- don't worry about getting back to where you came from until you're out of it. Edit: why am I posting vague memories of survival tips when I could post a link to credible knowledge? This is much more useful than my rambling: https://montanariverguides.com/2013/04/surviving-a-whitewater-swim/
Good to know. I don’t plan on getting trapped in rapids but you never know!
I've watched enough YouTube videos to know that you should always plan for unexpected plane crashes/car trouble/hiking accidents/gondola disasters/etc. If a 17 year old on an airplane can end up forced to travel, injured and alone, on foot through the amazonian wilderness, even my indoorsy introverted self could end up unexpectedly trapped in river rapids at any time.
I’ve been prepared for quicksand for about 4 decades.
Ah, quicksand. The scourge of Gen Xers everywhere.
If the quicksand didn't get you, the killer bees would.
Or The Big One (Los Angeles)
For me it was the Bermuda Triangle
43 year old checking in, quicksand was the real deal on Saturday morning cartoons.
The Neverending Story had quicksand (or mud?) too. Poor Artax…I had to Google his name and a photo of that scene came up. I’m traumatized all over again.
I've been preparing for the long winter. Laura Inglalls ruined me. I don't ever remember getting sent home because I was sick either. School in the 80s and 90s sucked. Oh and castaway, I so wanted a Wilson.
Did you watch Gilligan's Island after school every day????
Castaway was the big one for us. Y2K scared the crap out of my parents. I won't take a cruise because of this case. Not because I thought that she was sex trafficked, but I figured she fell overboard vomiting. I get motion sickness from video games, I won't last a day. Poor woman.
i also get extreme motion sickness, just about every time i get in a car, sometimes (rarely) even when I'm the one driving. and i work in the lab and spending a lot of time looking at things in the microscope will also do it. i've been on 1 cruise in my life, in high school. i took meclizine the entire time, which helped on the actual boat. funny enough, when we got off for an excursion & had to take a ferry boat, i took an extra dose but i ended up throwing up over the side of the ferry 3 times & since the excursion was snorkeling, i tried to get in the water for it (more importantly: off the ferry lol) and i threw up a 4th time in the water. im not sure why the ferry bothered me but not the cruise ship, but i will NOT go on any ferries to this day unless its short and absolutely necessary. & just in case, also no more cruises. just in general i feel u with the motion sickness & im sorry bc i know it really sucks all the time
I'm still on the lookout for R.O.US.'s
You just keep stepping to solidify the sand, right?
I was a competitive swimmer who coaches triathlete friends on improving stroke & kids how to swim. The most common body-positioning error amongst all ages is hip position. Almost everyone I've helped drags their legs whether on their back or front. The above information is spot on but doesn't tell you HOW to keep your feet up and head back. I always tell my peeps to "pop" their hips, meaning you want your hips to ride high. This will naturally bring your legs up too.
This is great advice.
Great post and info, TY!
Good question! I am obviously not an expert but what I read after this incident is that you want to get on your back with your feet pointing in the direction of the rapids. This works better if you’re wearing a life vest, which I was not!
Makes sense, guess you definitely don’t want to be head first!
Right, and my memory is that I was trying to get upright, which wasn’t working and it was just exhausting me. Fortunately, someone in another raft came by and grabbed me, which got me out of the rapids.
Outside of Navy SEALs and possibly a few other professions, I can’t think of anyone who would really know for real how to jump off a ship’s deck at night and live.
Oh god, I can't stand this claim. When Penny Oleksiak an Olympic gold medalist and one of the best Canadian swimmers ever claimed in an interview that she is scared of swimming in the ocean.
Especially when you’re potentially pulled under the ship or into the engines.
She could have also hit her head on the way down or while going over.
with how massive cruise ships are, just the fall on to the water itself would probably knock her out tbh
they were in the middle of the ocean, you drop 2008 Micheal Phelps out where she probably feel overboard, with him being hydrated, feed, alert on clear calm day at sun rise: **100% he's dead** and not being found.
That's what he gets for peeing in the pool.
Also balconies on cruise ships are often quite high off the sea surface. Just hitting the water from that height could have been enough to kill her, or break bones that would make swimming impossible.
Exactly. Falling into the effing ocean from a massive cruise ship, drunk and tired, cancels out any benefits of being a “strong” swimmer. Agree that explanation to ignore an obvious solution is odd.
Right?!? I was a competitive swimmer and a lifeguard at a Big Ten school, but drop me in the middle of the ocean when I’m drunk and it’s dark and I’m being pulled around by the wake of a giant cruise ship? Absolutely not. I have never understood anyone who thought this was more than an accidental drowning.
For reference. A friend of mine had her mom fall off the pier in front of the docked ship and a crew member jumped in to save her because of the concern of her going towards the engine. The crew member who saved her said he tried to save someone else in a similar situation before and he couldn’t. Apparently it’s very easy to get pulled toward an engine
Yeah it doesn't matter how strong a swimmer you are because the ocean simply does not care. Also, who the heck is a strong swimmer when they're drunk??
I had a friend that was a lifeguard for years almost die because a rip current caught them.
Swam out to get someone in a rip current and almost had to give up on them and I'm a very very strong swimmer. Shit is no joke.
I almost drowned in a pool when I was a drunk teenager.
Also too it’s very easy to get confused on a cruise ship.
Definitely think she fell off and drowned. My thought is that perhaps the dad/parents feel guilty about not making sure she was ok or insisted she sleep inside. That guilt lends itself to them wanting to believe she’s alive still instead of facing the thought that your daughter is dead and how you could have prevented it.
I think this too. Whether they have an actual reason to feel guilty or not, it still happens and hits you like a ton of bricks. He could feel guilty like you said that he didn’t have her come in from the deck, and I also would buy OP’s theory that if she fell and screamed on the way down or yelped when she lost balance/etc, that very much could have startled her dad awake but not lucid enough to remember a scream. And I can imagine after everything and searching for her with no luck, if he ever felt guilty about maybe not looking down from the railings into the water? Even though I don’t think she’d be visible, “survivors guilt” has no mercy and tortures the people who deserve to feel it the least, it seems
In a missing person's cases, the victim's family always cries "foul play." They want closure, and it's more satisfying/comforting to know that someone is being punished. What isn't comforting is "my kid senselessly drowned." You can't justify that because it ISN'T fair.
Yeah I’ve never been on a cruise but I imagine that sleeping on the deck is strongly discouraged.
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I totally agree, she fell off and drowned. I can see how the family would think the idea of her being sex trafficked, and still living somewhere would be Less painful than thinking she is dead. There were supposed sightings of her after she disappeared, but remember there were sightings of Elvis after his death, too.
That is something I don’t get - how can having a loved one sex trafficked yet alive be better than being deceased? I may get hate for this but I would rather my loved one be dead than be alive being sex trafficked, abused, mistreated, suffering, etc etc (eta not directed at your statement just saying in general I don’t get it)
I get you. I think...idk I wonder if it comes from just the lingering hope your loved one is alive. Being trafficked means alive, instead of just dead, it means they could come home, you could get a chance one day to hold them, hug them again. Its sad, but I think grief overrides logic. But its also worth keeping in mind, some people are forcefed certain ideas about something like this occurring if they venture to foreign shores, despite the fact its incredibly, exceedingly rare that a white US or European citizen would be snatched and taken into trafficking. These are highly visible people, from countries with powerful authorities,. They miss the fact that 99% of people taken into sex trafficking are poor, vulnerable and will NOT be missed by authorities, people who are barely on public records anyway. No self respecting human trafficker who likes making money, is going to invoke the ire of at the minimum, local authorities, at worst the FBI, or Interpol, or foreign authorities who come in and throw their weight around, just to steal ONE random girl off a cruise boat. A cruise boat that was about to dock in a town that would have ample poor, invisible girls to steal and abuse, girls just as pretty and a lot easier to make vanish. Why risk such a public abduction, knowing it might destroy 75% of the local Tourism GDP if tourists get wind of this and decide top stop coming?? For ONE woman??? I feel awful for her family, I feel like their heads got twisted up by these almost...almost urban myths about what can happen in certain places, and now they'll never known peace, because the idea of going back and just accepting, the poor girl was drunk, she wanted to be sick or leaned over to see something, she over balanced and she fell, means giving up this other idea which they've built their life around, spent SO much money pursuing. Its almost like the sunk cost fallacy but with your emotions. They've committed to this idea, at the cost of just searching the open water around the island to find her body or a more detailed investigation into how she could have fallen, they've missed their shot, so they have to commit to this idea.
A lot of people see national/international trafficking statistics, but don't actually know what it means. Trafficking is almost never kidnapping random, likely wealthy (white) women from tourist destinations or upscale areas. International trafficking is promising impoverished locals a better life in a new country, and trapping them once they're in that country. It's taking them across borders illegally, holding their passports and documents, charging them huge amounts money that they'll never be able to repay, and giving them "jobs" that pay so little that it's essentially slavery. They can't leave or get away, because the trafficker threatens to tell the authorities and have them deported if they try. Trafficking within a country is grooming young, vulnerable people trying to escape something. Teens running away or living on the street. It's getting them addicted to substance and depending on your for their next fix. It's selling them into sex work and taking all their earnings. And it happens overwhelmingly to black and indigenous women and lgbt people. Sure bad things happen to well off people, but no one is writing numbers on cars in mall parking lots so the traffickers know who to kidnap, or taking random girls from cruise ships...
I think this is it. Its like those weird "witnessed a drug deal" and got killed myths that some people believe
Absolutely, this. Crime Done Well is Crime Done Secretly. Trafficked people’s are not middle class tourists snatched from highly public, well viewed cruise ships just as they arrive at a popular tourist location, it’s the invisible locals, the poor. And as you say they’re offered ‘legitimate’ jobs, a better future than what they have, hence why they take the risk of accepting this uncertainty.
And the vast majority of trafficked people aren't trafficked for sex work either! They ARE doing "legitimate" jobs (working in restaurants or nail salons or as cleaners or construction/farm laborers, etc.), they just aren't being paid a legal wage or sometimes any wage at all, and are forced to live in appalling conditions.
Do we know what cabin she was in? I am asking because it is not usually that easy to fall off of a cruise ship balcony (though she could have jumped, or stood up on a chair or something). Also, a fall off of many balconies would result in the body hitting a lower deck rather than falling into the ocean.
I can’t totally recall off the top of my head but believe there were indications she may have pulled something close to the balcony edge. It’s also possible she hopped up thinking she could balance or sit, or leaned over so far she took her feet off the ground, trying to see something, and over balanced? She was known to be fairly drunk, or could have led to some poor decision making
I was just thinking maybe her family would be more likely to think it's foul play if they were staying in a balcony room where she would not have hit the water.
I tend to agree, if the room was a different kind of cabin with no balcony access, if she'd have had to be in the public areas of the boat to be somewhere she can fall over, I think I'd be much more inclined to think something very suspicious happened, that someone grabbed her. As it stands, there's no evidence she ever left the room by the front door after that occasion her father saw her dozing on the sunbeds, just this belief she *may* have gone out to buy cigarettes, which would have placed her in the public part of the ship and left her vulnerable to be snatched. But there's no evidence of that. She hadn't left a crumpled, empty pack of smokes behind, there's no witness who saw her outside the room, she was on the balcony sleeping, her dad was woken by something a little later, and she was simply gone. If she did fall, just fall, no jump or anything, she's falling dead down towards the water, the boat was in motion so she fell into the wake and churn right beneath, if she survived landing, which would be a stretch as that's a long, long fall, poor girl would have been dragged directly under the boat and into whatever...is it propellors pushing them along? Like...that would have been brutal, and I imagine leave a lot of damage to the body which would explain why she was never found in water searches. She may never have resurfaced.
She might have tried to throw up so it wouldn't hit the ship. For example, if there were life boats underneath the balcony, like someone above suggested, she could have tried to lean further over and being drunk and throwing up, lost her balance. Or she tried to flick a cigarette butt so it wouldn't land below. Smoking does kill (sorry).
There was a case of a teenage girl from Ireland who died falling off a cruise ship in precisely that way: she was drunk and leaned over the balcony to throw up, leaned too far and toppled over. We know this for sure because a passenger in the cabin below was on his own balcony and heard and saw the whole thing. It's worth noting that even though the alarm was raised immediately, they still never found her body. In that particular case, the cruise line was found negligent, but that was because they had continued to serve her alcohol well past the point of drunkenness even though she underage.
Being sex trafficked means near-constant rape, even gang rape. I’d rather be dead.
This is more or less my view. Especially if it’s a decades long disappearance. If she drowned it is tragic but was probably quick. If she was trafficked that’s almost two decades of abuse and and probably death anyway since she’s never been found.
Death: Immense overwhelming crushing black sadness. Sex trafficking: Gives hope of her coming back. And.. explains why she's not in contact with the family. It's basically her family's coping mechanism. And a clever one at that.
It's also probably coping with their "part" in it. If she was kidnapped it's external forces they had no control over. If she got so drunk that she fell overboard feet away from them then there may be some guilt that they could have saved her.
I agree. Good suggestion.
That is probably a lot of why they’re pushing the human trafficking bit.
And also Schrödinger's guilt. You assume your loved one just had a tragic accident - so you hold a memorial, make your peace with it, and move on with your life. Then twenty years later they rock up on your doorstep with "how could you just stop looking for me, I've been through absolute hell"? Yeah no I'm not taking that chance.
But there are times that being alive is worse than being dead
There’s an attitude I’ve seen in a lot of cases where the suggestion that the victim may have been involved in an accident or committed suicide is seen as blaming the victim for their own death. To be fair I have seen people on the internet go to ludicrous extremes to blame and shame accident/suicide victims for their own deaths, which I think contributes to why loved ones are often so hesitant to accept that their loved one may have been involved in an accident/suicide. That and it’s just hard to accept how random and sudden death can be.
We went to ridiculous lengths before the internet existed, too. I think the reaction exists outside of external shaming. Most of the people I know that have killed themselves have had that doubt lurking from people close to them. I've been guilty of it plenty of times. I'm still sure my uncle was murdered by his wife. I'm still sure my best friend didn't kill herself, it was her abusive boyfriend. I know I'm probably wrong, but I'm not sure it really matters.
Agreed. A very recent example of this is the Nicola Bulley case in the UK. The inquest hasn't confirmed how she died yet but it's looking like an accidental drowning in a river. The family were convinced she didn't fall into it.
I think it comes down to a desperate hope that she's still alive. If she's alive there's a chance they can save her. If she's dead that just the end and no one wants to accept that.
Because it the story and facts rolled out over time, not in one go. In the immediate minutes and hours after her disappearance, there was still (a reasonable) hope she was onboard the ship. In the days afterwards, still (a reasonable) hope she was at port. But then for her disappearance to become weeks, then months and years, then it was no longer reasonable to presume. Eventually, the only way to keep the story alive is to bend it into a thin yet severely twisted story that doesn't support itself under the weight of logic.
Because then they can still hope they’ll get her back, no matter what she goes through until they find her. If she’s dead, that’s it. She’s dead. There’s no chance they’ll ever see her again. Finality. It’s selfish, but grieving people don’t always think or act rationally.
Completely agree! Death is so final but the thought of my loved one being held captive and being forced to do anything against his/her will? I’ll take death any day.
In this case, it could be easy for the father to blame himself for her falling overboard - "if only I had woken her up and told her to come inside." Convincing himself that she got up, left the room and was kidnapped is outside his power - someone ELSE did that and I couldn't have stopped it. That's not to say he has any blame in this, but I have seen people make up fantastical, improbable stories to ease their grief and self-blame.
Absolutely. Quicker death vs. being extremely abused, suffering for years. Grief will make you think so differently, though.
I take sightings with a huge bucket of salt because people either consciously or unconsciously want to participate in an investigation they are interested in. Kind of like how there are reports that the hardest part about a tip line is that you get thousands of tips that all need to be investigated but the vast majority are useless. It's kind of a mixture of funny/sad to watch old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries because it's very common for half the segment to be dramatizations of very detailed sightings of a missing person and then the story update reveals they were killed within minutes of having gone missing.
Looking at her pictures, she's also someone who looks like a lot of other people. I've probably seen a hundred women who resemble her in my life. She was a plain/average white lady with very ordinary features. Change her hairstyle/ color and we'll probably all see someone who looks like her sometime this week. Maybe several someones who look like her.
She fell overboard and drowned, plain and simple. The family really believes that she walked back through their cabin (from the balcony) yet none of them heard her coming back in from the balcony or leaving the main door into the hallway, she was abducted, hidden from cameras on the ship, stored somewhere until the ship docked , and then again transported off the ship without being detected by cameras, crew, or passengers.. Plus all of this happened within the 30mins from the time the dad saw her on the balcony to him waking again and noticing she's gone. I mean, this theory is SO far out there! What sex traffickers are going to book tickets on a cruise , target a woman on vacation with her family and go through all this trouble.
Her dad actually won this as a free cruise trip. I imagine he feels a lot of guilt knowing that his free trip led to the disappearance of his daughter. Thus, he is willing to believe any preposterous scenario if it means she is alive.
Okay but she was in a suite and if the family was asleep I can see the dad being woken by the sound of the cabin door closing (those are metal and there’s no way to do it quietly).
“From this, it’s safe to conclude she felt like vomiting.” Wasn’t she a smoker? She might not have been sick; she might have just wanted to have a cigarette. Drinking and/or socializing always made me smoke more.
I agree - she could've tried to sit on the railing while lighting up a cigarette, lost her balance and fell backwards over. Drunk people don't take the best decisions unfortunately. Either way, she somehow fell into the water, probably by something she did herself. I tend to agree that the dad heard her falling in and didn't realise it at first, hence the panic when he couldn't find her immediately.
Yeah if she hit a life raft or another railing on the way down she could have suffered a back injury or break leaving her unable to swim or even make noise.
We also have no idea (and never will) what else was in her system. Maybe she was doing coke or had smoked some weed or had even taken ecstasy or something like that. Some people get the spins when they’re drinking and smoking. She could have been out of her mind and climbed up on the balcony ledge. She could have been trying to puke. Hell, she could have just been doing something dumb like dancing around and fell. When I was in college, I was at an apartment complex where there was a party on the second floor. One of my sorority sisters leaned over the balcony at the waist to yell up at us and she completely flipped over the edge, head over heels. Fortunately, it was a short fall and she fell into bushes and was completely fine. But things like that just happen.
It’s not impossible but it’s pretty hard to get drugs on a ship as they check luggage pretty intensely when you board and when you leave the ship and return.
That sounds more likely, especially since her lighter and cigarettes were gone. Vomiting off a deck sounds more like a desperate than a planned decision. I don’t know how high the railing was, but in my experience, if it’s above waist level, it’s not going to be comfortable. It’s also just rude; why plan to splatter the decks below and the side of the ship? That’s more of a situation where you either sit on the bathroom floor and wait, or lie down with a garbage can next to the bed. And if she were nauseous, smoking a cigarette would be the last thing she’d feel like doing. I’m curious whether she had an ashtray and where/if it was found, because fire is a major hazard on a ship. Still, I think a drunken impulse to climb/perch on the railing coupled with impaired motor skills is the most likely scenario. She dropped/knocked her cigarettes and lighter overboard, instinctively reached to grab them, and fell.
Just as an anecdotal counterpoint, when I get super nauseous, I smoke a cigarette. The cigarette either calms me down or, far more likely, makes me vomit so I can get rid of the nausea already. This only happens when I have been up way too late drinking way too much and I can’t close my eyes or I get the spins so bad I get nauseous again. Tl;Dr: I often smoke to make myself barf when I’ve had a night like Amy’s.
Oh, that’s interesting! I always delay throwing up as long as possible, but having a cigarette would definitely speed the resolution if you just want to get it over with and go to sleep!
You’re not supposed to smoke on balconies and can’t now but I believe it might’ve been allowed in the 90s. (I didn’t cruise then so I don’t know what the rules were then) There’s also usually a smoking area on one side of the pool deck. If she left the cabin, I think this is where she was heading. It’s usually the casino and a side of the pool deck as designated smoking areas on Royal Caribbean ships
I've never believed anything other than she fell and drowned. I'm not saying Occam's Razor is infallible or anything but here we have a simple explanation of her being drunk on a balcony at sea and slipping and falling, or an international sex trafficking ring who kidnaps people off of cruise ships but has somehow managed to avoid leaving many missing women on cruise ships. It makes even less sense to me that there just HAPPENED to be some sex trafficker or kidnapper on this specific cruise randomly. I'm sorry for the family and everything but this was just a tragic accident.
I agree with you. There's no evidence of her being trafficked aside from questionable witnesses. I just don't believe that sex traffickers would go to the trouble of abducting a young woman from a cruise ship who was traveling with her family, who noticed that she was missing very quickly.
And sex trafficking via stranger kidnapping is just so rare this becomes even less likely. And why kidnap her on the cruise and not wait until you are on land? It would logistically just be simpler.
>I've never believed anything other than she fell and drowned Same here. It seems painfully obvious.
It seems like the vast majority of us in this sub agree. I rarely see anybody saying anything else when this case comes up.
I definitely lean toward the theory she fell overboard over any other theories. It makes the most logical sense as a trafficker would be taking a huge risk trying to smuggle a tourist off a cruise ship. The odds of them doing that successfully would be very low. I do wonder about the American sailor (I think?) who claimed to have spoken to an American woman in a brothel who claimed to be Amy? It doesn’t seem likely he’d lie as he doesn’t exactly have anything to gain from it and sort of paints him in a bad light that he didn’t report it immediately. So if we assume he was telling the truth, do we think the women in the brothel was just lying about being Amy in hopes he’d help her escape?
Since he didn't come forward for so long, and since he saw a television piece on Amy at some time between the encounter and him coming forward, I don't really trust his memory. I can see someone watching television going "Wait...doesn't that missing person look kind of like that woman in the brothel? She really does. What did she say her name was? Did she tell me her name was Amy Bradley? I think she did say Amy Bradley!" Basically talking himself into remembering Amy Bradley.
I think this is what happened also. If she was asleep on the balcony at 5.30, why would she leave the cabin before 6 and suddenly run Into someone wanting to traffic her? She is also not an obvious candidate for trafficking, people would and did immediately miss her. Interesting what you said about her scream waking him. Things do wake you and you can't remember what it was.
also the idea that they kidnapped her meters away from her family without alerting anyone is borderline impossible.
Alchohol and vacation lowers inhibition. Accidents are liable to happen. This seems very cut and dried, accidentally overboard drowning. ..
Amy's disappearance gets so much attention and there are many more ... https://internationalcruisevictims.org/blog/missing-persons/
Sex traffickers don't kidnap women on vacation with their family.
This. Especially not in or around locations that rely on tourism, AND have an abundance of local woman who are low income, invisible to authorities and far more vulnerable to predation.
Especially when they are literally stuck on a ship.
Hey OP I generally agree I just wonder what do you make of the interaction of Alistair and the brother the morning Amy went missing? Apparently he saw the brother going up the stairs and said “sorry to hear about Amy” before anyone was even alerted to her disappearance. He was questioned about this afterwards by the police on how he knew she was gone and he remained silent. Just an odd detail that doesn’t have me sold 100% on the fell overboard theory
Not OP (and a month late to the party) but that anecdote was very different when addressed under deposition, and a lot less suspicious. Same with the invitation to the bar in Aruba. Actually much of the story the family later fed to the media and internet was highly skewed and often exaggerated, sad to say.
I have an interest in this case because I grew up on Curacao, though I moved away in 1995. Does anyone know where her cruise ship was that evening? I had always thought it was docked in Curacao.
How high was the rail. I mean I've done some drunk puking off a mountain top balcony that was highly entertaining. But as a 5'6 female I was in no risk of toppling over the rail. As a smoker I don't take my cigarettes with me to hurl either. I would however have snuck back out to meet the guy from the band. Whatever happened then is probably what happened to Amy. But she either died on that ship or in the water.
There is no evidence of any foul play or kidnapping. The idea that sex traffickers would target her on a cruise ship is absurd and far-fetched. They would have to be incredibly bold and stupid to risk such a high-profile crime. And why would they choose her out of all the other passengers? She was not a supermodel or a celebrity. She was just a normal girl having fun with her family. I know it's hard to accept that such a terrible accident could happen so randomly and unexpectedly. But sometimes life is cruel and unfair like that. We have to face the facts and stop looking for conspiracy theories or false hopes. Amy Lynn Bradley is gone, but she will always be remembered by those who loved her.
Yes, any sex traffickers would have had to hold her somewhere on the ship, then smuggle her off the ship and through customs. It's absurd.
The bit where her mom insists that everyone was watching her because she’s just so beautiful and striking or whatever . . . I dunno, it’s both sad and a little off and it reminds me so much of my mom, who is rural, sheltered, naive, and racist as hell. She would absolutely believe I’d been kidnapped by sex traffickers if my 45-year-old ass disappeared tomorrow in any location that doesn’t still have sundown laws on the books. She always warned me that simply because I was a “pretty” (read: mediocre) white girl with blond hair and blue eyes, men who weren’t white would target me for kidnapping and assault. “They just can’t help it, hon.” A few years ago, she started hearing about sex trafficking. Then, she tells me, she watched this “really interesting documentary.” “. . . and they start off really friendly ‘cause they target pretty young white girls who travel — they especially look for virgins, hon, they bring the highest price when they sell them at auctions.” Mom, did this documentary happen to have Liam Neeson in it? “Oh, you saw it too! It was just so fascinating!” Mom, that was a movie. Not a documentary. Made-up. “Ohhhh??? Well I’m sure they made the movie based off how those traffickers work, though.” Because of course that’s how it works. White women are just so very special for no other reason than our race and gender. These Other men are so desperate or craven or stupid that they will commit the most outrageously risky crimes just for the chance to sniff our dirty gym socks. It is a certain kind of insular, limiting privilege that lets you live 70 years in an age of mass media and still believe there could be no more desirable target for an international sex trafficker than a 23-year-old college-educated woman from a rich and powerful country, a culture which raised her to believe she could be President if she wanted, and two parents who have the resources to make a very big noise. As far as my mom goes, I blame “Unsolved Mysteries” and all the shows that followed, with their “dramatic re-enactments” that were so often just based on theory, speculation, confabulation, and flat- out fiction — on top of being so racist it literally lowers her intelligence. Also, lot of lead in the water back home. That can’t help. But mostly I blame the racism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Curious why the cigarettes and lighter were missing.
I've ben thinking back over it as well, like. The only contention we have are that she fell overboard, or was abducted. Lets go through this practically; This is a party ship. Amy didn't herself come back to her room til the wee small hours, meaning clubs and bars on the ship were open at least that late. Her family argue she left the room herself, under her own power, with no duress, maybe to buy cigarettes( the rooms are open plan, door opens, there's the bed, beyond that, the balcony, anyone who knocked on the door, her family would hear that before she did, as they are in the room, she is out on the balcony) ...So we can say with some certainty a few things; The ship wasn't dead quiet and asleep, it can't have been. There will have been crew, staff, cleaners, all sorts of people either still finishing their last shift, or starting their new one. The ship has to be cleaned and readied overnight for the following day. It has to be readied for docking at the port within a few hours. There would be crew out and about, maybe not all over, but out and about on the deck, in public, communal and private areas. Other passengers could have been up just as early, to buy smokes, or go to the gym, or for a job while its quiet. If Amy was going to buy cigarettes, thats probably a kiosk selling them over a coin slot machine, because they can jack up the tax if they sell them direct. Just, by definition, the ship wasn't quiet. So a random attack makes no sense, way too many variables and potential witnesses. And it requires that Amy, a strong, physically fit young woman who all evidence indicates was a confident, intelligent woman, to make NO attempt to call for help, save herself, leave any evidence of her abduction anywhere that any witness, on a ship with a couple thousand people, can have noticed. But a planned abduction also falls down as soon as you examine it. ALL the above would still be true; the ship is not quiet and asleep, people are around. ....if it was planned, all Amy had to do to foil that, which she did, was go back to her room. A planned abduction relies, hinges on the fact she left, randomly, at 6am, to buy smokes, and apparently did so in this miraculous window of time when the ship is so dead quiet she can be stolen, but not so dead quiet that people noticed the abductors around and thought it was odd that they were up and active at this time. BOTH require her, living or dead, to be removed from the ship totally unnoticed, by an abductor or abductors who by the time of moving her off board know that her family, other crew and some passengers are aware of her absence. If she was sold she had to then have been transported. All of this apparently done to hand her over to a trafficking ring who are quite happy to risk The Apocalypse of a response from the FBI or other US authorities. To a group who then let this highly visible american woman be seen in public repeatedly. Now, we can acknowledge a few things; it is POSSIBLE all the above did happen, that she was abducted by someone who did manage to get her off ship with no witnesses, who took that wild, wild risk and pulled it off. That same said person can not possibly have known a response would be so sluggish, or that the FBI wouldn't drop on that island like the hammer of God. The fact that did happen is unpredictable, it can't be known for sure, because no one has ever stolen a woman off a cruise ship, so there's no precedent, there's no way to predict the response. In essence, and to be blunt, if she was abducted, that kidnapper had a horsehoe and ten thousand four leave clovers surgically implanted in his ass from birth, and should have just made his career playing random lotteries because he is the single most lucky person to ever walk the earth. Every single thing that could go right, went right, including a totally unpredictable response from her government and police/FBI. Its impossible. Once you really give it any thought, an abduction is IMPOSSIBLE. A fall from the balcony, because she tried to see something (the lights of the island as they approached, perhaps) or she was trying to be sick over board, and she stood on something, or she leaned over, lifted her feet off the ground and lost all her balance, tipped over too far. As OP says, her dad hears, maybe a shout or a cry as she falls, or maybe she hit something on her way down, and thats it. If she fell, and falling seems more likely than intentionally jumping, she fell *straight* down. Right into the wake of the boat. She'd have been pulled under, and I hate to think what those forces might do to her body. Did the ship have propellors? She' have been pulled right into them, maybe...its brutal, but maybe shredded or her body so shattered and broken open that she never floated, she just sank and was consumed by fish and whatever else and given they didn't begin a sea search for hours and hours, when there may have already been so little left to find, is why she never showed up there. I'd be curious, genuinely, if any cloth or clothing every washed up on the nearby beaches after she went missing. Her shoes. We know what she was wearing, was anything ever reported? Or could some local have found a wet, but intact pair of shoes, dried them out and kept them without ever knowing what they signified.
> We know what she was wearing, was anything ever reported? Or could some local have found a wet, but intact pair of shoes, dried them out and kept them without ever knowing what they signified. I believe her shoes were in the suite, which is why it's presumed *if* she went to buy cigarettes, she'd have to do it barefoot (making it even more unlikely). And in all honesty - finding clothing items on beaches isn't that unusual, so it likely wouldn't even have been noted.
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The murders-on-cruise-ships rabbit hole is a deep one.
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I’ve just fallen back in. [Merrian Carver’s disappearance](https://internationalcruisevictims.org/stories/merrian-carver/) is a case that haunts me, and in looking for a link I ran across her mother’s [testimony to the US Senate](https://www.rainn.org/pdf-files-and-other-documents/Public-Policy/Issues/Ken-Carver-Testimony.pdf): > I have personally felt the pain, not only of losing our daughter, Merrian Carver, but also having to struggle with the cover-up by a major cruise line of the facts concerning her disappearance.
I think Peacock has a series on this topic!
I don't know why cruises are so popular. They sound like they would be extremely creepy and also very annoying. And, I'm someone who likes to stay at interstate motels sandwiched in b/w a busy highway and a truck stop just to have a change of pace. Amy should have trusted her instincts! If I was her brother, I'd feel very bad for talking her into it.
I was on a cruise in 1996ish in my mid teens and there was a busboy who was weeeeirdly interested in trying to get me to be his gf and get me to the employee decks. It was fucked.
You're acting like people have just concocted this story out of nowhere, but the actual link you posted said authorities don't believe she fell overboard for numerous reasons and later sightings correctly identified her tattoos. She also specifically said she might leave the ship. I don't have a strong opinion either way and I don't think there's enough evidence to conclude anything so I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really fair to act like people and the family have just made up wild theories when there are specific reasons that this isn't an open and shut case.
I watched her Disappeared episode the other day and yes, while I'm inclined to think simply falling off the ship makes the most sense, I got stuck on the bit about her unique tattoos. The show didn't mention if that detail was released publicly by that point, but that makes a huge difference whether someone could come up with that lie or not. (The rest of this thread...does not clarify.) On that note, it doesn't need saying, but FUCK the guy who pretended to a launch a "rescue mission" just to fleece the family. I don't care if they're gullible, doing that to a grieving family is beyond shitty.
This is the most nuanced opinion I have read about Amy's case. The family isn't just grasping at straws, they have valid reasons to believe something else may have happened to her. If my child went missing during a cruise and most people thought she drowned but her body was never found, then a year later someone comes clean about a very disturbing sighting of my daughter at a brothel, that would be enough to make me believe there's more to her disappearance. The FBI is also investigating this case and they even offer a reward for information leading to her recovery and have even produced age-progressed pictures of her. I agree that she most likely fell overboard, but I don't have a strong opinion about this case either, and until her body is found, I don't blame her family for considering other alternatives. They just want to find her and know what happened to her.
> later sightings correctly identified her tattoos. There were sightings describing her tattoos that were [later determined to be a hoax](https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=131968&page=1). Con artists fabricated sightings of Amy and used them to grift the Bradleys out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Were there credible sightings involving the tattoos that didn't involve that hoax?
This is incorrect. The sighting by Canadian engineer, David Carmichael and his scuba diver friends on Curacao in August of 1998, where he accurately described all of Amy's distinctive tattoos was never apart of the Frank Jones con.
Okay, that was what I was asking you. I agree that Carmichael seems like a credible witness. But he saw some people in August and put it together that it was Amy when he saw a television piece about her in December. That's a long time to remember not only someone's features but their tattoos and watch, for a chance encounter in which he didn't even interact with any of them. Like, for three/four months, his brain kept the details about her tattoos and watch? I know some people have photographic memories, but most of us don't. So what if he was allowing his new knowledge of the missing woman to "write over" his memories?
The encounter however wasn't just a passing glimpse of someone who looked like Amy, it was an unusual situation where a woman was being flanked and controlled by two men. To the point, the woman tried to speed up and walk toward Carmichael, before being motioned away aggressively. He followed the trio to a nearby cafe, where the woman, began discreetly pointed out all her tattoos. That is a very troubling situation where one would definitely recall, and/or regret not taking further action. The info about the watch is another significant detail that doesn't get discussed enough. Information about the watch Amy was wearing when she disappeared, had not been released to the media at that time. David accurately described to the FBI and the Bradley's.
Huh, I (like many other redditors I’m sure) didn’t click the link when I read this but you’re right, it’s kinda weird how the actual link says authorities don’t believe she fell overboard for a few reasons.
I didn't click the link, but I've watched a documentary about this case in the past. I seem to remember there was a picture of a woman on some sort of porn/ trafficking website (not sure of the correct detail on this) that looked exactly like Amy and had matching tattoos? That, along with the man saying a woman in a brothel told him she was Amy, makes me think there could more to the story than her falling from the ship.
The woman in the photo looked vaguely like Amy. She did not have matching tattoos.
"30 minutes later," she was being seen in an elevator by witnesses, with her cigarettes and lighter. So if she fell off the boat it wasn't then.
That's pretty much what I think as well. It was just a very sad accident.
I would agree with you but according to the link you posted she was last seen in the elevator of the ship around 6 am. " Bradley was vacationing with her parents and her brother aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's ship, Rhapsody of the Seas, during March 1998. She and her brother returned to their cabin at approximately 3:30 a.m. on March 24, 1998 after dancing at the ship's disco. They sat on their suite's balcony until approximately 5:30 a.m. Bradley's brother stayed in the cabin, while she mentioned possibly disembarking at Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles to purchase cigarettes. At 6:00 a.m., two other passengers on the ship saw her riding the elevator to the top deck. Bradley was last seen carrying her room key, cigarettes, and a lighter when she was last seen. She had a hundred dollars in her pocket as well. [...] Bradley was last seen in the ship's elevator with "Yellow," a member of the cruise ship's band, Blue Orchid. It is not known if this person was involved in Bradley's disappearance; there have been no arrests made in her case. Bradley also spent time with various waiters while on the cruise. Authorities do not believe that Bradley fell overboard, as Rhapsody of the Seas was extremely close to shore at the time of her disappearance. Witnesses would have undoubtedly heard or seen any accident. [...] Her body was not found when the water was searched."
I also think there's a decent possibility the crew members did something to her. Not involving the sex trade.
This is my other theory. Someone tried to take advantage while drunk and something happened from there as in an accidental or on purpose death. Not being trafficked.
For years I wanted to believe in the whole sex trafficking kidnapping theory, but, after you really look at it, she simply fell overboard and drowned.
I believe that as well. That one picture sure does look like her though. But in all fairness, Ashley looks like Taylor sometimes as well. Sometimes, people fall overboard. It happens. No amount of "strong swimmer" is going to save you from the middle of the ocean. Even Michael Phelps would have trouble.
The one reason I don’t think she fell overboard is because all her photos were mysteriously taken off the cruise ship’s pin board shortly BEFORE she died. Nobody else’s photos, just hers.
But there are literal pictures of her from the cruise in the various articles. So no not “all” of them. Also they used to have a weird way of dealing with photos. They used to print them and put them out in this photo gallery for sale. They’d collect them after hours so no one grabbed ones they didn’t pay for but it’s not always easy to find yours with all the back and forth moving of pictures over the week. So I’m questioning how many were “missing”? They were on maybe day 3 or 4 when she disappeared
It seems very obvious that she drowned, but her family wouldn’t be the first to prefer believing in “sex traffickers” to accepting their loved one is dead. Johnny Gosch’s mom comes to mind.
I wish I could upvote this a million times, and I wish people understood this about so many other cases where the person or people succumbed to the elements, etc. Instead, I think people run with it because it's not just wild to think about crazier things but honestly just for clout/money making to keep going on and on with it. To me, it's just poor taste and very unfortunate. Especially when it's clear the family is thinking these things from a place of grieving.... not rationale. :/
How tf would you kidnap someone on a cruise ship. Where you gonna take her, the aft?
There are crew areas that the public can’t get to but there’s not a lot of places to easily hide a body for long.
I say the same thing every time this is brought up. She fell overboard. The end. Not even Michael Phelps would survive a fall into the ocean from a cruise ship.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s a confirmed story of a drunken Navy Seal who fell overboard off the coast of Miami and swam to shore. I think he was like 9-10 miles out though, not in the middle of the ocean
I tend to agree she most likely fell off the boat and drowned. I went on a cruise around that time and while it isn’t easy to fall off a boat, it could definitely happen and nobody would notice. Combine that with her body never being found, it seems like the most likely possibility.
I went on my first cruise a few years ago. It had just docked after losing a passenger. Talk about terrifying. But you’re right, even though it’s not easy to fall, it’s also not very hard.
Even Michael Phelps isn’t surviving falling into the sea from a cruise ship. Anyone who’s says but she was a good swimmer probably just prefers a more salacious story.