A month before she disappeared from a Caribbean cruise ship, Amy Bradley penned a heartfelt letter to her girlfriend, asking her to “save” her, as seen in the Netflix documentary
Before her vanishing on a family holiday, Amy Lynn Bradley made a tearful confession to her girlfriend: she had kissed another woman.
The news devastated her lover Mollie McClure, prompting her to cut off communication to process the betrayal.
Desperate to reconnect, Amy, from Virginia, penned a heartfelt letter and sent it to Mollie in a “message in a bottle.” The handwritten note, now shared in episode three of Netflix’s Amy Bradley Is Missing, would gain haunting significance just weeks later when the 23-year-old vanished without a trace during a Caribbean cruise with her family. It comes after a dad died in scalding hot bath as family slam hotel management for ‘ignoring warnings’.
“Mollie, I hurt you deeper than you can ever forget,” Amy wrote. “I’m not asking you to forget… I just wanted to ask you if you could find it in your heart to forgive me.
“I feel like there is an ocean between us, like I’m on a desert island waiting for you to rescue me… Save me, please. Stranded, Amy.”
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Exactly one month after writing those words, on March 24, 1998, Amy disappeared from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship while docked in Curaçao. She was last seen by her father, asleep on the cabin balcony between 5:15 and 5:30am. By 6am, she was gone, leaving behind everything but her lighter and cigarettes.
Since then, theories have ranged from accidental drowning or suicide to kidnapping and human trafficking. While some point to the letter as a possible clue to suicide, McClure disagrees.
“It could suggest suicide,” Mollie says in the series. “But I don’t connect with it in that way.”
“It is a love letter. The metaphor — ‘stranded,’ ‘ocean between us’ — is convenient to misread, but I don’t interpret it that way.”
Amy’s disappearance has sparked a decades-long investigation and her family has occasionally received tips that have seemed promising.
In August 1998, Canadian tourist David Carmichael claimed he saw Amy on a Curaçao beach flanked by two individuals. He said the woman pointed to her tattoos, which matched Amy’s. Authorities searched the area, but found nothing.
Then in January 1999, a U.S. Navy petty officer reported that a woman at a brothel in Curaçao told him, “My name is Amy Bradley,” and begged for help.
She reportedly panicked when he mentioned a nearby naval ship, responding, “No, you don’t understand.”
The officer didn’t take action, her father, Ron Bradley, told NBC News — in in part because the officer wasn’t allowed to be in the brothel and because he didn’t know anyone by that name was missing until he saw a magazine cover with Amy’s face and name on it.
In 2005, the Bradley family received anonymous online photos of a woman named “Jas,” who closely resembled Amy. A forensic analysis reportedly suggested a match, but investigators were unable to trace the source of the images, and the FBI found no actionable evidence.
Despite public interest and numerous leads, Amy remains missing. The FBI has classified her case as a suspected abduction, but no suspects have been charged, and her fate remains unknown.
Now, thanks to the latest Netflix documentary her story is drawing fresh interest, and with it, renewed hope that the mystery might one day be solved.
Amy Bradley Is Missing is available to stream on Netflix
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