The only thing that I could think of that would have "triggered" her would be some large difference of opinion with her family about the future she was planning. I have a lot of experience with suicidal people, both from working with them and also from having friends who have attempted suicide. The amount of future orientation that Amy expressed to everyone is inconsistent with someone who has longterm suicidal feelings, in my experience. It would be more typical for her to not be making plans or being vague about the future than it would be to do really specific things like get new job, get puppy, reconnect with girlfriend, etc. She very much gave the appearance of a young woman building a life, not a young woman who had resolved to end her life. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it seems a lot more realistic to me that through some combination of intoxication, exhaustion, and physics, she fell over the side of the ship by accident. I do not buy the trafficking theory or the idea that she was addicted to "drugs." Way too many improbable things would have to be true for either of those things to fit. I would frankly believe that she was secretly and suddenly suicidal before I'd believe that she was trafficked. |
IMO in order of likelihood:
1) Fell or jumped overboard 2) Assaulted/killed on ship by Yellow ...Distant 3) Left ship voluntarily to buy drugs, fell into the wrong hands and killed shortly after 4) Kidnapped and trafficked |
100% agree with this |
This. People don’t get it. To someone who has been there, it makes sense. She had made peace with the woman she loved and who she had wronged. She had spent a final day having fun with her family on a Caribbean island. She was dosed with liquid courage. She didn’t leave a note (that we know of, but I don’t trust the father or brother) but the note to her girlfriend had an awful lot of foreshadowing. |
She didn’t need to be addicted to drugs to go off ship to buy them. In the 90s casual drug use was very common among college age and recent graduates. Don’t forget pot wasn’t legal, ecstasy was in the club/party scene etc. Bartenders and waitstaff or band members usually knew where to go to find a dealer. Remember there wasn’t Snapchat or the Internet for white UMC/MC to score. It was through a friend of a friend or one of those staff types especially on vacation.
I think it’s very likely she walked off the ship to buy drugs. The staff got a finders fee for sending buyers or potential trafficking targets. |
NP but here's a theory I've been building while reading all of these comments (I did watch the Netflix special, but I don't think I watched it as closely as some - it was on in the background while teleworking). I think that Yellow was kind of a generic hustler - maybe sold a little drugs, definitely slept with a bunch of women on the boat, and may have had unsavory connections but I don't think he actively trafficked women off of cruise ships. Like, the suitcase of pictures of white women is strange, but there's no corresponding trail of missing white women from all the cruises he's been on. I think he was keeping mementos of conquests, or possibly conquests + hot women he would show to his friends and pretend that he'd slept with. I think Amy got drunk at the bar and he gave her some drugs, not slipped it to her but she wanted to take them. Then he said she would have to pay him - this is why she comes back out with him at 6am. She brought money, he says "that's not enough, it's $200 more". She doesn't have that, but he says that she can go to an ATM right on the dock and pay so-and-so who is the guy she really owes, and she drunkenly/stupidly decides to do this quickly rather than wake anyone up, alert her family to the predicament, or try to sneak away from her family while they're on Curacao together (they spent the entire day on Aruba doing pre-planned excursions; likely the same was planned for the next day). But when she gets there either the price keeps going up or she tries to buy more or the ATM isn't where it was supposed to be so he has to drive her to one: I don't know what but something happens that ties her up with the drug dealer on shore, and at this point she's just a thin young white woman who is drunk/high/disoriented/shoeless, so the whole "it's too risky to take an American citizen off a cruise!" angle doesn't really apply. She gets swept into a seedy underworld, hooked on much harder drugs (they could have kept her near catatonic for the first few days until the boat leaves and the furor dies down, then move her to Barbados or something), and is probably dead by 2007/2008. This lines up with 1) her being seen with Yellow again in the elevator after she went to the room, 2) her being seen by witnesses after the fact at the brothel/on the beach, 3) her being shoeless when she left the room, 4) the railing being too high for an accidental fall for someone her height, and 5) the tie-in to the Caribbean trafficker that has been mentioned. Yellow's polygraph was inconclusive because he didn't want to say he even talked to her later that night, let alone that he was trying to run a scam on her to get money. He could also have been afraid of the people who ended up taking her, if he knew who they were. I think he thought of the whole thing as a light-work shakedown and when it devolved into something worse his reaction both out loud and internally was "this has NOTHING to do with me!" Okay, going back to keep reading from the point of this comment I'm replying to. Just wanted to write this down before it got away from me (or one of you debunks it before I can say it out loud!). |
I completely agree with paragraph 1, your take on Yellow. I did initially think you she left the ship voluntarily to get recreational drugs then got into trouble. It makes sense Yellow wouldn't be willing to disclose this due to fear of losing his job. However, I now think she fell and that they were farther out in the ocean based in the inconsistencies in the father's timelines. I'm not certain of this because of the semi-credible eyewitness sightings, but it is more likely than not they were all mistaken. A fall is the most credible theory, and she did seem quite wasted when she was waiting for the elevator. |
This is the most probable thing that happened. Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence. People spotted Natalie Halloway for years after she was killed. Same with so many missing people who were later found dead. Prostitution was legal at that time in Curaçao which isn’t surprising considering it is a protectorate of the Netherlands. It makes no sense she was sex trafficked to an island of 150,000 people where visa were given to legal prostitutes. Then add there was a very sizeable award for her so people would have been very motivated for her to talk, and other images of the person in the photo the fbi analyzed involved in sex work are missing tattoos. Yellow wasn’t from that island he is from a British colony where English is spoken not the language that is spoken in curaçao. And a female Caucasian jawbone was found on the beach in Aruba which the cruise ship had just left and is nearby. People thought it was Natalee Haloways so it was tested for her dna but not Amy’s. |
True Crime Garage podcast just dropped a 2 part deep dive…it’s really good.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-garage/id1062418176?i=1000721726377 |
It's a lot more complicated than you're stating. Trafficking is in fact common but Amy did not fit the profile. https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/curacao/ That said, I think she fell. Intoxicated accident not suicide. |
In Curacao only foreign women are prostitutes and trafficking for the sex trade involved women from Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic. Curacao is a small country of 150k. An American woman speaking English and not Spanish being trafficked would be an extreme anomaly. There is zero chance she was somehow kidnapped and trafficked. It is pretty awful that Yellow had his livelihood ruined. So many are so quick to jump on the foreign black guy must have been involved. But no one seems to point out how weird it is that the maga brother is sharing a bed with his sister and the maga dad wrote a 3 page letter to the girlfriend and is sharing a tiny room with her. They were both the last to see her alive. Not hard to imagine them telling Amy she was going to burn in hell for being gay and was going to give the family AIDS. |
Honestly you think her family are that stupid? ![]() |
There's a lot of animus and projecting on this thread. |
There's not, but there's definitely a lot of idiocy. Gay women are literally the LEAST likely to contract AIDs than any other social group. You should know this, it has been around since the 1980s FFS |
I listened. Thanks for the recommendation. I didn’t think it was the best, but they did fill in a lot of the gaps from the Netflix documentary. Any other podcasts on the topic people like? |