Amy Bradley said goodnight to her brother at 4am on a cruise. By sunrise, she had vanished.

In March 1998, 23-year-old Amy Lynn Bradley boarded a cruise ship with her parents and younger brother for a family holiday through the Caribbean.

A recent college graduate, Amy was adventurous and vibrant, having recently come out as gay to her family and friends. For the first two nights of the cruise, she enjoyed dancing at the ship's nightclub and relaxing on deck.

On the evening of March 23rd, Amy spent hours dancing. But when her father went to check on her early the next morning, she had vanished without a trace. Only a polo shirt and sandals remained — silent witnesses to a mystery that would haunt her family for decades to come.

What happened to Amy in those early morning hours? Was it an accident or something far more sinister?

More than 27 years later, her family still searches for answers, clinging to hope that Amy might still be alive.

Watch the trailer for Amy Bradley Is Missing on Netflix. Post continues below.

The search begins.

On Amy's final evening, she and her younger brother Brad went to a party at the ship's rooftop club.

Sometime after 3.30am, they returned to relax on their family cabin's balcony, Brad recently told People.

At 4am, Brad went to bed, telling Amy "I love you" — words he's grateful were his last to her.

Around 5.30am, their father Ron woke and saw Amy on a lounge chair outside. When he woke again 30 minutes later, she was gone.

After a search for Amy turned up empty, her family reported her missing to the crew.

The ship was scheduled to dock in Curaçao that morning, and despite the Bradley family's urgent requests to delay the docking to search for Amy, the ship proceeded as planned.

The family asked the crew to search the ship before passengers disembarked, but the crew refused and simply paged Amy over the intercom. They didn't search the ship until later that day.

"Nothing was found," cruise director Kirk Detweiler said in the new Netflix documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing. "Everyone, from at least the employees' side, was just assuming that she jumped or fell overboard."

As an experienced swimmer and lifeguard, this seemed unlikely to those who knew Amy. She had also just got a new dog, moved into a new apartment and was about to start a new job — hardly the actions of someone planning to disappear.

The US Coast Guard later launched search efforts, but the challenge was immense — searching thousands of square miles of ocean for Amy with no clear timeline of when she went missing.

Amy Bradley's family still believe she's alive. Image: Netflix.

Two days after Amy vanished, FBI agents boarded the ship in St Maarten — but by then, the cruise had continued.

The agents interviewed Amy's family, crew members and passengers, including Wayne Breitag, who was staying in the cabin next to the Bradleys. Breitag had spoken to Amy several times through the partition separating their balconies.

The FBI also interviewed Alister "Yellow" Douglas, the bass player from the ship's band Blue Orchid. He was seen on video dancing with Amy at the nightclub just hours before she disappeared.

According to Brad, Amy had confided in him during those final moments on the balcony that Douglas had made a pass at her.

On the morning Amy disappeared, before any official announcement had been made about her being missing, Brad told People Douglas approached him with the words: "Sorry to hear about your sister."

The Bradleys remain convinced Douglas knows more than he's letting on, though he's consistently denied any involvement and took a lie detector test with inconclusive results.

The FBI hasn't charged him with any crime. Despite interviewing passengers who claimed they saw Douglas with Amy after her family last saw her, investigators say they couldn't establish a reliable timeline.

As the investigation deepened, a darker theory began to emerge — one that would haunt the Bradley family for decades.

Amy Bradley Is Missing delves extensively into the possibility that Amy had been trafficked, examining potential evidence that she may have been taken against her will and forced into a life she never chose.

The investigation takes a dark turn.

In 1999, Amy's parents were contacted by a man named Frank Jones, who claimed to be a former Navy SEAL and US Army special forces officer with information regarding Amy's whereabouts, according to ABC News.

Jones said Amy was being held by armed Colombians in Curaçao and provided fake surveillance photos. For months, he gave the family updates about Amy before demanding money to fund a rescue operation.

He scammed the family out of more than $200,000 from their personal savings and a nonprofit missing children's fund.

In 2002, Jones was charged and pleaded guilty to mail fraud. He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay back the money he stole.

"If it was your child, what would you do?" Ron told ABC News. "So I guess we took a chance. And I guess we lost."

Over the years, the FBI chased down multiple reported sightings of Amy across the Caribbean and the US, but each lead came to nothing.

Then, in September 2005, the Bradley family received several photos from an anonymous source. The images claimed to be of Amy, under the name "Jas," on an adult website based in the Caribbean, showing sex workers for hire.

"Jas" was posed in a way that would hide Amy's distinctive tattoos — a Tasmanian Devil on her shoulder, a Chinese symbol on her right ankle, a gecko on her navel, and a sun on her lower back.

"It was a terrible thing. A level of panic. All I could keep thinking was, 'Is that my daughter?'" Amy's mother Iva recalled. "We all looked at it — the nose, the chin and the hair — it took my breath away."

People reports that FBI analysis concluded "Jas" was Amy, but they couldn't track the IP address. It wasn't for a lack of trying, documentary creator Ari Mark said.

"It wasn't like they were like, "Oh, whatever," they really did chase that down," he told the Hollywood Reporter.

"They analysed the bed frame, tried to figure out where it was made. They sent an operative down there to actually scope it out. And they did look into that website, and they brought in that trafficking expert — it's hard to ignore."

The FBI missing person poster. Image: FBI.

Where is Amy today?

In March 2010, Amy was legally declared dead, despite no body ever being found. She remains on the FBI's most wanted missing persons list — and her family never stops hoping.

"People can't understand the level of hope that we've maintained," Brad told People. "We're still waiting for that call."

"The more we got to know the Bradleys in the subsequent months, the more two things became abundantly clear: First, that the family's belief that Amy is still alive was and continues to be unbreakable, and second, that maybe they're right," the documentary's creators told People.

Since the documentary's release, new tips have been coming in, though the directors remain tight-lipped about details.

"There have been tips actually coming in that I can't publicly share," director Ari Mark told CBS Mornings.

"Obviously, when you get this sort of exposure and you're on a platform like Netflix, and it has the incredible reach that it does, you're going to get a lot of people out there who are going to want to help — and we've activated them.

"That was the point of this, but we also want to be really careful about vetting those tips carefully and making sure that law enforcement is involved. So, it's definitely a process, but hopefully something shakes loose."

The FBI is offering a reward of $25,000 USD for any information leading to Amy's recovery. Her family is offering an additional $50,000.

Feature image: amybradleyismissing.com.