The Disappearance of Amy Lyn Bradley & Other True Crimes

By Jessi Dowers

AN ANTHOLOGY OF WOMEN GONE MISSING

AMY LYNN BRADLEY

For most people, a cruise to the Caribbean is an exhilarating, fascinating experience - but for others, the holiday can be memorable for the entirely wrong reasons. The Caribbean is one of the top cruise destination for many major cruise operators, and millions of people travel there each year. It's the perfect place to enjoy exotic sights, sounds, and flavors while taking advantage of the Caribbean's calm, blue seas.The ships themselves are constructed with safety and comfort in mind. The multiple decks feature railings of approximately 3.5 feet, which prevents vacationers from tripping and falling overboard. And with hundreds of luxurious rooms and plenty of recreational facilities, passengers can keep themselves busy even during long stretches out on the ocean.Cruises are such a popular travel option that people continue flocking to book trips on cruise ships throughout the Caribbean - even when hundreds of people have reportedly vanished without a trace while cruising through this corner of the world. People like Amy Lynn Bradley.

SUZIE & STACY

Graduated from high school, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall went to Suzie's house to spend the night after a really long day of celebration and parties. They were looking forward to moving to the next stage of their life. Suzie's mother, Sherrill Levitt was at the house as well. All three of them mysteriously vanished in the middle of the night and they have never been seen again. BRIANNA MAITLANDOn March 19th, 2004, Brianna Maitland disappeared. The 17-year-old girl had just left the Black Lantern Inn in Montgomery, Vermont, where she washed dishes and occasionally served tables, when her car was found abandoned only twenty minutes later. Despite a brief visit from a local police officer, and curious passersby photographing the abandoned Oldsmobile, she was not reported missing for several days. Her parents, Bruce and Kelli Maitland, assumed she was at home, and Brianna's roommate was out of town at the time. Brianna left a trail of clues behind her, but over 12 years later there is still no official story for what happened that night. As the years pass without any major leads, the investigation has petered out and will soon be coming to a close. BRITANEE DREXEL Brittanee Drexel disappeared from Myrtle Beach, SC while on spring break on April 25, 2009. She was 17 at the time and traveled without receiving parental consent. She told her mother that she was staying at a friend's house near their home in Rochester, New York. Brittanee's mother, Dawn, then learned where she really was when her boyfriend, John, called her after he suspected something had happened to Brittanee. Her parents immediately grew angry, scared, and devastated when they received word that their daughter was missing. MISTY COPSEY Misty Copsey was fourteen years old when she disappeared on September 17th, 1992 after a trip to the Puyallup Fair. Her case remains a showcase of administrative screw-ups and dropped balls. She was initially thought of as a runaway before foul play was finally suspected a month after the fact. Subsequently, there have been at least five people suspected of committing her abduction. But the Puyallup police did not get within sniffing distance of Misty or charging anyone with her disappearance. Three different police chiefs and numerous detectives all took a swing at the case and whiffed. No one in law enforcement has been able to answer the question on everyone's lips. What happened to Misty Copsey?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201480929

Book preview

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AMY LYNN BRADLEY & OTHER TRUE CRIMES

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JESSI DOWERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AMY LYNN BRADLEY

SUZIE & STACY

BRIANNA MAITLAND

BRITTANEE DREXEL

MISTY COPSEY

CAROL TAGGART

DOMINIQUE DUNNE

FAITH HEDGEPETH

AMY LYNN BRADLEY

For most people, a cruise to the Caribbean is an exhilarating, fascinating experience – but for others, the holiday can be memorable for the entirely wrong reasons.

The Caribbean is one of the top cruise destination for many major cruise operators, and millions of people travel there each year. It’s the perfect place to enjoy exotic sights, sounds, and flavors while taking advantage of the Caribbean’s calm, blue seas.

The ships themselves are constructed with safety and comfort in mind. The multiple decks feature railings of approximately 3.5 feet, which prevents vacationers from tripping and falling overboard. And with hundreds of luxurious rooms and plenty of recreational facilities, passengers can keep themselves busy even during long stretches out on the ocean.

Cruises are such a popular travel option that people continue flocking to book trips on cruise ships throughout the Caribbean – even when hundreds of people have reportedly vanished without a trace while cruising through this corner of the world. People like Amy Lynn Bradley.

On May 12, 1974, Amy Lynn was born in the town of Petersburg, Virginia, to parents Ron and Iva Bradley. Her younger brother, Brad, completed the family a few years later – but until then, Amy lived the undisturbed life of a much-loved only child.

Amy was born first and ran the show, said her mother, Iva. Amy lettered in five sports in high school, and Brad did the same thing.

The siblings were especially close, according to their parents. Iva described her daughter as focused and a fireball – a lot like her mom, added Amy’s father, Ron. In her senior year of high school, Amy received a number of scholarship offers, but ended up choosing the school that would allow her to remain close to home.

By the time she was 23, in 1998, Amy had already built herself the life she’d always imagined – a new apartment, plans to study for her master’s degree in sports psychology.

She seemed to just be as happy as she could, and was very excited about everything at home and how things were going with her life at that point, said Brad.

In early March of that year, Amy got a call from her parents with some exciting news – the company her father worked for had offered to send the entire family on a seven-day cruise through the Caribbean. But Amy was a bit reluctant to accompany her parents on the trip.

She was a little apprehensive about the big boat thing, and about the ocean, even though she’s a swim-team coach and swam all her life, Iva said.

While she was an excellent swimmer – and had even received her certification as a lifeguard – she was terrified at the thought of being on the open sea. Still, Amy couldn’t resist the opportunity to spend the extra time with her family, and she was excited to explore the Caribbean with them. They boarded the cruise ship – a Royal Caribbean ship called Rhapsody of the Seas – in Puerto Rico on March 21, 1998

I looked at them and thought, ‘Wow, how special,’ said Iva. How great everybody looks, and everybody’s having a great time.

But just three days after Amy and her family left the United States, heading to Curacao, Antilles, Amy Lynn Bradley was reported missing.

Investigations and witnesses reported that on March 23, 1998, Amy had gone with her family to a dinner party aboard the cruise ship while the vessel was docked in Curacao. During the party, Amy had danced with a man named Douglas Alister, a bass player who’d performed earlier that evening with the band Blue Orchid and went by the nickname ‘Yellow.’ With her brother, Brad, Amy partied all night, reportedly returning to her cabin at around 3:40 am.

There was music, and we did the limbo contest – which I won, that night, Brad said. You know, just having drinks, having a good time.

Together, Amy Lynn and her brother sat on the balcony of their suite until around 5:30 am, at which point her brother retired to bed. Brad said Amy had told him she was going to stay out on the balcony and get some fresh air, so he told her he loved her and went inside the cabin.

According to some reports, she apparently took her cigarettes and lighter outside of the cabin, barefoot, for a smoke, but it was also reported that she’d told her family that some of the waiters at the party had been flirting with her – they’d supposedly invited her to go ashore with them to keep the fun going, but she’d declined the invitation and said she thought it was creepy. Brad had also claimed that while the siblings were in the nightclub, some of the crew there were giving Amy special attention.

She had also mentioned to her brother that she was thinking about getting off the ship in Curacao to buy more cigarettes. At around 6 am, she was spotted taking the elevator to the top deck of the ship by two other passengers, who said she’d been holding her cigarettes, lighter, and a room key. She was also thought to have been carrying around one hundred dollars in her pocket.

At that time, the ship was just preparing to dock in Curacao – and, between 6 and 6:30 am, Amy’s family realized she hadn’t come back to the room. The sliding glass door that separated the suite from the balcony was left slightly ajar, and a pair of Amy’s sandals had been left inside of the suite. That was the only sign she’d even been there – everything else was gone, and Amy had brought nine other pairs of shoes with her on the cruise.

Her father, Ron, remembers waking up and looking outside at around 5 am. He’d spotted his daughter on the balcony, he said, but that she was sleeping.

Knowing that she was comfortable, I just decided to lay my head back down, he said, because I knew that in about twenty minutes, we would want to get up and go off on the island to get some breakfast.

When he woke up just a half-hour later, he said, she was gone.

I knew right away something was up, he said. It was unlike Amy. It’s very unlike her to just leave and not let us know where she’s going.

He reasoned that she’d likely just gone up to the deck to take some pictures and have some coffee, and said he still fully anticipated seeing his daughter on the ship before the family disembarked at Curacao. But Amy was not on the deck – her belongings were all still in her room, but Amy herself is nowhere to be found.

After looking all over the ship for his daughter, Ron returned to his room to wake Iva and get her to come help.

I’m immediately very, very, very upset and concerned – I took one look at him, and it didn’t even look like him, Iva said. He was completely frantic.

When Amy Lynn’s family discovered that she was missing, they immediately went to the crew, including the cruise director, to request an announcement be made over the loudspeaker to try and attract her attention. The officials refused, claiming it was too early in the morning for that and it would rouse the other passengers. The announcement was made, eventually, but most of the passengers had already disembarked.

According to Amy’s parents, they also made a request that the staff not let anyone on or off the ship until their daughter had been located, but the gangplank was dropped at Curacao as planned. The crew told the Bradleys that they’d looked at every nook and cranny of the ship in an effort to locate the missing woman, but to no avail. The family got off the ship and tried looking for Amy on land, which also turned up no leads.

Some crew members suggested that Amy may have jumped into the water on purpose, in an attempt to commit suicide, but her family was quick to discount that theory. According to Brad, Amy wasn’t likely to do something like that.

Knowing the type of person that she is, and the fact that she had just graduated from college and had just gotten a new English bulldog, which she’d always wanted, as far as jumping from the ship, it’s just never been a possibility, in my mind, he said.

That evening, the family made the decision to disembark in Curacao and stay behind while the ship continued its itinerary – banking on the fact that, with no sign of Amy on the ship, she had to have gotten off during that brief stop on the island.

The Netherland coast guards and Royal Caribbean formed a search party, which spent three to five days searching the area for any sign of Amy – of course, they returned with no answers. It remains uncertain to authorities whether Amy disembarked the ship of her own will and disappeared while in Curacao, or if other factors were at work.

A cab driver claimed she’d approached his car the morning she vanished – just minutes after the cruise ship had docked in Curacao – saying she desperately needed to use a phone, but this sighting has never been confirmed. And, according to some eyewitness reports, strange people had boarded the ship while it was in Curacao that night, and blended in with the passengers of the cruise. The eyewitnesses said it was weird and suspicious.

A woman named Crystal Robert was the last person to see Amy, who was headed to another part of the ship with Alister Douglas, the bass player, at approximately 5:45 am. According to Roberts, he returned after a few minutes, but Amy Lynn was no longer with him. CNN reported that Alister claimed he and Amy had parted ways at around 1 am, and that she’d gone off in another direction and he hadn’t seen where she went.

He was then awakened at around 6 am, in his room, by a manager of the cruise line demanding to know if Amy Lynn was there with him. Though investigators conducted a thorough search of his room, and even searched the rooms of Alister’s bandmates, no evidence or clues were discovered.

Brad, who had seen his sister dancing with the bass player during the party, bumped into him the morning Amy went missing.

He comes up to me, and the first thing he said was, ‘Hey man, I’m sorry to hear about your sister,’ Brad recalled.

But at that time, Brad said, the only ones who knew that Amy was missing – other than the family – were the captain and his security team. The incident was reported to the FBI, but when Alister was brought in for questioning, he claimed to know nothing about Amy’s disappearance. The bass player is even given a polygraph test, but there was not enough evidence to detain him any further and he was released.

He came out with a thumbs-up, just kind of smiling like everything’s cool, and it was all I could do to keep my composure at that time, said Ron.

Things get even stranger when the family learns that the cruise ship’s photo service, which regularly snaps and sells pictures of the passengers at various locations throughout the vessel, has somehow lost all of the photos that were taken of Amy.

Her pictures were missing about nine to ten hours before she disappeared, Iva said.

While the family made attempts to find out how the photos had been removed, and by who, they come up empty-handed once again.