logo
Netflix's Amy Bradley is Missing and the heartbreaking reason the FBI couldn't act on sex worker photo

Netflix's Amy Bradley is Missing and the heartbreaking reason the FBI couldn't act on sex worker photo

Daily Record2 days ago
The FBI were unable to investigate the 'photo of Amy Bradley' found on a sex worker website despite its striking resemblance to her and her family's desperate plea for action
Netflix's latest true-crime documentary Amy Bradley is Missing has been a massive hit with viewers since its release on July 16, quickly rising to second place in the UK's top TV show charts on the streaming platform. The three-part docu-series explores the chilling and unresolved disappearance of 23-year-old Amy Bradley, who vanished while on a Caribbean cruise with her family in 1998.

Amy was traveling on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship with her parents, Ron and Iva and her brother, Brad, when she went missing en route to Curaçao. She was last seen in the early hours of March 23 1998, resting on the balcony of the family's cabin. When her dad checked on her shortly after sunrise, she was gone - and has never been found.


Now, 27 years later, Netflix revisits the mysterious circumstances surrounding her disappearance and the persistent efforts by her family to uncover the truth.
The documentary summarises all the major theories that have emerged over the decades, including the most haunting one: that Amy was abducted and trafficked.
One of the most significant revelations in the docuseries centres around a photograph discovered in 2005 on a sex worker's website thought to be based out of the Caribbean.

The image bears a striking resemblance to Amy, so much so that her family took the discovery public and appeared on the Dr. Phil show in a desperate bid to find their daughter.
"All I could keep thinking is, 'Is that my daughter?'" Amy's mother Iva says in the documentary. "We all looked at it - the nose, the chin, and the hair - it took my breath away."

The FBI took then took the lead on analysing the image. An agent close to the case was interviewed in the series, and confirmed that forensic analysts had determined that it could very well be Amy.
Investigators examined everything from the woman's pose, which was a specific stance that would have hidden all of Amy's identifiable tattoos - like a Gecko lizard on her navel, or sun on her lower back - to the bed frame in the image in an effort to track its origin.

Speaking about the photo found on the sex worker site, co-director of the docuseries, Ari Mark told The Hollywood Reporter: "That part really made us scratch our heads, too."
He went on to add that it is 'hard to ignore is how seriously the FBI took that photo.'
Mark adds: "They really did chase that down. 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."

However, despite the extensive investigation, authorities were unable to trace the photo's origins or determine where it was taken, as the website's IP address could not be located.
The director went on to claim that "from the FBI standpoint, they've exhausted everything."
In 2010, Amy was declared legally dead in absentia. Yet, her case remains open, and the FBI continues to maintain a missing persons page with age-progressed images of what Amy might look like today.
The page also states that a $25,000 reward is offered for information leading to her discovery, with the FBI still looking for tips from the public.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Exclusive: Pam Bondi says she doesn't want new jet after The Independent exposes FBI plan for new airplane to shuttle her around
Exclusive: Pam Bondi says she doesn't want new jet after The Independent exposes FBI plan for new airplane to shuttle her around

The Independent

timean hour ago

  • The Independent

Exclusive: Pam Bondi says she doesn't want new jet after The Independent exposes FBI plan for new airplane to shuttle her around

The FBI is seeking a new private jet, which will be used not only by the bureau's elite Critical Incident Response Group, but also for 'executive transportation' by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. However, following a report on Wednesday by The Independent about the intended acquisition, a spokesman for Bondi now claims the AG is against the purchase and wants nothing to do with it. 'The FBI has an independent procurement process for the director and their agents,' Department of Justice spokesman Gates McGavick told The Independent. 'Neither the attorney general nor other DOJ leadership knew about this and see no need for its use in Main Justice.' 'Main Justice' is the colloquial name for DOJ headquarters. A DOJ source said Bondi would like to see the FBI's request for proposals rescinded, and that he is happy with her present travel arrangements. At the same time, an FBI spokesman told The Independent that obtaining a new jet will actually be a money-saver for taxpayers. 'The plane in question is for critical functions such as hostage rescue team deployments, international operations, SWAT ops, and other national security related purposes – but the current lease structure is unnecessarily wasteful,' the spokesman said. 'As we've done with other assets, like moving the headquarters building, the FBI is evaluating available options to better serve the American people at a much lower and more efficient cost to the taxpayer.' The ultra-long-range business jet is meant to fly agents and other bureau personnel to far-flung global locations for counterterrorism response, 'high-risk operations,' and other 'sensitive missions,' according to procurement documents reviewed by The Independent. Alongside the government's request for proposals, a related statement of objectives says the aircraft 'will also support executive transportation requirements for the FBI Director and the U.S. Attorney General,' namely, Patel and Bondi. The feds want a plane that flies at speeds of Mach 0.83 or higher, with Mach 0.85 listed in the RFP as 'preferred.' It must have a minimum range of 7,000 nautical miles, be able to seat at least 12 passengers, three crew, and 1,000 lbs. of cargo, the RFP states. That means the feds need something along the lines of a Gulfstream G800, which seats 19 and can travel 7,000 nautical miles at Mach 0.90, or a Bombardier Global 8000, which seats 19 and can travel 8,000 nautical miles at Mach 0.94. No prices are included in the solicitation paperwork, but the G800 starts at about $72.5 million, while the base model Global 8000 lists for roughly $78 million. The FBI paid $2.4 million to lease a Gulfstream V for six months in 2016, after a procurement process marked by numerous deficiencies, according to an audit the following year by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General. In May, Patel told legislators that the FBI was spending far beyond its means and was $1 billion in the red. The 45-year-old Las Vegas resident has been pilloried in recent months for his apparently robust use of the FBI's private jet fleet to make personal trips. Government officials are required to reimburse the cost of any flights – at commercial coach fares – that are not for official business. Patel has reportedly used government aircraft to visit Nashville, Tennessee, where his country-singer girlfriend lives, to go to hockey games in New York City, to go to Las Vegas and to attend at least one UFC fight in Miami, where he sat ringside with President Trump. In May, Senate Democrats requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office look into Patel's travel on government planes, which he is required to do, while at the same time making them unavailable for FBI emergencies. 'Those aircraft have been procured or leased specifically to support operational needs,' former FBI counterterrorism official Christopher O'Leary told CBS News in April. 'The concern is that the routine use of them by the director and deputy director for personal travel could take a critical resource offline when they are sometimes needed at a moment's notice.' Craig Holman, a governmental ethics and campaign finance expert at Washington, D.C. watchdog nonprofit Public Citizen, says the expenditure shows the Trump team going against its relentless claims of 'cost-efficiency.' 'For an administration that wants to put on a veneer of cutting waste, fraud and abuse in government spending, it sure doesn't have any qualms when it comes to lavish spending on expensive new jets and other luxuries for itself,' Holman told The Independent. '... Meanwhile, the administration is slashing spending on health care, education and worker safety for the rest of us.' Since Trump retook the White House in January, the administration has decimated school lunch programs, thrown millions off of Medicaid and enacted tax cuts that will boost incomes for the wealthy while raising taxes on working Americans, experts say. Before he took over as head of the FBI, Patel slammed then-FBI Director Christopher Wray for using bureau aircraft for personal trips, telling his podcast audience that Wray's flights should be 'ground[ed]. (Wray said he reimbursed the government for all personal use.) Bondi and Patel clashed earlier this year over the so-called Epstein files, the FBI documents related to its investigation of the notorious sex offender whose ties to the rich and famous, including Donald Trump, are now well-known. 'Dear Director Patel, Before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein,' Bondi wrote in a February 27 letter. '... Late yesterday; I learned from a source that the FBI Field Office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files.' The files have still not been released, with Bondi recently announcing that Epstein's hotly anticipated 'client list,' which she once said was 'on her desk' and ready for public dissemination, did not in fact exist.

The BBC's Unforgivable asks if we can ever forgive a child sex offender
The BBC's Unforgivable asks if we can ever forgive a child sex offender

Telegraph

timean hour ago

  • Telegraph

The BBC's Unforgivable asks if we can ever forgive a child sex offender

Warning: contains spoilers It must be galling for the BBC to be reminded that it didn't make Adolescence. Four months post-release and it's still creating news: as Netflix's most watched show of the year with 145 million views, or picking up 13 Emmy nominations. The closest thing the BBC can offer is Unforgivable (BBC Two), a new one-off drama from Jimmy McGovern that mines a similar seam of social realism, and is also about a family coming to terms with one of them committing a terrible crime. As with all of McGovern's work, it is well written and impeccably acted. Those are the two elements on which Unforgivable needs to sell itself, because nobody thinks, 'A drama about a man who sexually abused his nephew? Must sit down to watch that.' Maybe that's why it's buried on BBC2 on a Thursday night. Also, there isn't much of a plot. It's more a study of a family torn apart. They are related both to the abuser and the victim, and how do they navigate that? For Anna (Anna Friel), it's straightforward. Her brother abused her son. She will never forgive him. She has been left to pick up the pieces: her boy, Tom (Austin Haynes) has stopped speaking since the abuse, save for 'yes' and 'no'. Anna, a single mum, has to homeschool him while also trying to hold down a job on the supermarket tills. Her mum has just died, so she is grieving and also supporting her newly-widowed dad (David Threlfall). It's a lot. Friel gives the best performance of her career, managing to make her lines sound improvised even though they're not. 'I'm a lousy mother who's doing the best I can,' she tells her kids. The real focus, though, is on the perpetrator. Joe (Bobby Schofield) is released from prison near the start of the drama. He moves to a hostel run by an ex-nun, played with unnerving stillness by Anna Maxwell Martin. He hates himself, but feels more guilty about the pain he caused his mother than the damage he did to Tom. It emerges, via therapy, that Joe was abused himself by a predatory football coach. This complicates things. Joe is both the abuser and the abused. That is true in many real-life cases, although a fellow victim of the coach points out that he was abused too but didn't turn out to be a 'nonce'. It's not a given. It's an unpalatable truth that the vast majority of children who are abused have been preyed upon by someone they know, many of them family members. McGovern isn't afraid to go there, but he also goes further by asking us if we can feel compassion for Joe. At times, this seems too big an ask, even if Schofield is impressive in scenes where the tears flow. Tom, by contrast, is a mute presence; we understand that this is a response to trauma – even if his mum, oddly, asks if he's doing it for attention or a bet – but rendering him voiceless feels unfair. Perhaps that's deliberate. Anna complains bitterly that she has been unable to get child mental health support for Tom, because the system is overloaded, yet Joe has therapy on tap. The ending is too neat, as if McGovern was told he needed to wrap it up on a positive note. Until that point, though, it's a thought-provoking piece on a subject that most writers would avoid.

Stranger Things re-review: my verdict on episode 1 and 2
Stranger Things re-review: my verdict on episode 1 and 2

Scotsman

time2 hours ago

  • Scotsman

Stranger Things re-review: my verdict on episode 1 and 2

Join me in taking a trip back to Hawkins, Indiana as we rewatch Stranger Things from the start 📺 Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Stranger Things will conclude later in 2025. Before the final trips to Hawkins, let's go back to the beginning. Join me on a full week-by-week rewatch of Stranger Things. It is hard to believe but in a little over five months time, Stranger Things will be finishing up for good. Netflix's signature show and calling card has recently celebrated nine years since its debut - if you can believe it. In the near decade since it first burst onto our screens, The Duffer Brothers' 80s-themed sci-fi/horror adventure has ballooned into the kind of blockbuster you only see once, or maybe twice, a decade. The fifth and final season is bound to be an event unlike any in the history of Netflix. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But since more than three years have passed since the monster-length fourth season finale was released, you might (like me) be considering rewatching the show ahead of its conclusion. After all, you may want to jog your memory and relive the biggest moments once more. So I decided to put together a Stranger Things re-watch schedule, covering the months between now and the first part of season five on November 26 (in the UK). I will be watching and re-reviewing two episodes every Thursday starting today (July 24), and you can join me. For the first week of our Stranger Things rewatch club, we are going all the way back to the beginning. Let's take a look at the first two episodes of series one - que the theme music. Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Stranger Things | Curtis Baker/Netflix Synopsis: On his way home from a friend's house, young Will sees something terrifying. Nearby, a sinister secret lurks in the depths of a government lab. It might be hard to imagine, given what Stranger Things has become, but the show initially arrived as just another 80s-inspired show back in the summer of 2016. Yet going back to the first episode, it is no surprise that it quickly became an absolute word-of-mouth juggernaut. Right from the opening sequence, it has an air of extreme confidence and trust in its audience. Perhaps it is a lack of budget, but the restraint (something that can't be said for future seasons) is really impressive. The opening sequence sets the tone so completely in just a few moments - an unnamed scientist running for his life, scared of something the audience can't see, before being grabbed by whatever was hunting him. As a scene, it is tense and spooky, but most importantly it leaves you desperate to know more. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Truth be told, the whole opening episode is like that. It quickly gets its hooks into you in a way that not all pilots do. I remember back when most American shows had 22 episodes a season, the rule of thumb would be to give a show at least three episodes before deciding whether to continue or stop. Stranger Things does not need that. We get a real feel for the core characters in just this 50-minute episode - the dynamic of Will, Mike, Dustin and Lucas is beautifully set up through the opening D&D game. It drops enough breadcrumbs about the adult characters like Joyce, Hopper and the teens, to leave you wanting to find out more. And we start to get a sense of geography and place about Hawkins. The restraint shown in the opening sequence at the lab is maintained during the scene in which Will disappears. Like the chase with the scientist, we do not see whatever it is that is hunting him - just ominous sounds and flickering lights. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It really does capture the vibe of reading a Stephen King novel on a chilly autumn night. I found myself wishing I had a blanket I could pull up to my chin during this scene. The elements that would go on to define Stranger Things are already present in this first episode. Shady government agents, unnatural goings on, references to Dungeons and Dragons and of course that pumping synth score. I am very glad that I could instantly hit play on the next episode. Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street Barb and Nancy in Stranger Things ep 2 | Curtis Baker/Netflix Synopsis: Lucas, Mike and Dustin try to talk to the girl they found in the woods. Hopper questions an anxious Jouce about an unsettling phone call. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Oh Barb, we hardly knew ye! If you weren't around in the early days of Stranger Things, you will not believe me when I say that the fandom around this extremely minor character was enormous. People started hashtags about Barb and there was a campaign called 'Justice for Barb' - which ended up influencing a part of season two. Think pieces were penned about the character, and what better time to bring that up than in her big moment. After the confident opening episode, chapter two is dealt the task of actually making Stranger Things into a proper television series. Will has disappeared, the plot has begun, the vibe of the show has been established, but how will it look episode by episode? Fortunately, The Weirdo on Maple Street picks up the baton and really runs with it. The trio of Mike, Dustin and Lucas (as well as Will) were so well introduced in the first episode - it was time for the rest of the cast to be expanded upon. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is the episode where Eleven starts to become a character and not just some piece in the mystery. Sure, there are lots of questions about her powers and who she is - but we get the feel of her as someone who is looking for a place to belong and a flashback to what she is running from. Eleven's blossoming friendship with Mike (in particular) and the slapstick-esque moments when the boys are trying to keep her hidden are a highlight. The injection of levity really does help the show to maintain that 80s Spielberg adventure vibe - to counter the horror. This plotline also starts to introduce some of the wider 'mythology' of the show. It is the first time we get a reference to the Upside Down - as El recognises Will in a photo and uses D&D figures to explain where he is and what took him: the demogorgon. David Harbour continues to add deeper shades to Hopper, who could be simply a clichéd tortured detective figure. You can feel his grief and his feeling of being lost. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But it is really Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Joyce (Winona Ryder) who get the most to do in this episode. A lot is asked of both characters - and if the actors didn't absolutely nail the assignment, it could sink the whole show. Winona Ryder manages to keep Joyce from slipping into being a one-note hysterical caricature. Charlie Heaton also imbues Jonathan with a deep sense of melancholy that counters the more 'creepy' stalker vibes that the character can give off - the whole sneakily taking pictures thing is not it, chief. Steve and Nancy are yet to really step up and become the fan favourites they inevitably will - and they feel like the weakest part at this point. Although Nancy's friendship with the soon-to-be-doomed Barb does work well in this episode, the actors manage to imbue it with a sense of history. You can feel Barb's sadness as she worries about losing Nancy now that she is entering the 'cool' circle. It is a human moment that perhaps goes a long way to explain why people latched onto it so quickly back in 2016. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This earlier moment foreshadows the end of the episode, when Barb is left alone outside by the pool after being dragged to a 'party' at Steve's by Nancy. Alone and dejected, she drips blood from a wound into the pool and is snatched away. It is another tantalising cliff-hanger and concludes an episode that is just as strong as the premiere. Stranger Things really does come out swinging and makes one seriously good first impression on viewers. Now I have to resist the urge to hit play next. See you all next week. If you love TV, check out our Screen Babble podcast to get the latest in TV and film.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store