This is bonkers. An Australian tabloid claims it has “proof at last” that Olivia Newton-John‘s ex-boyfriend Patrick McDermott is alive and has been secretly living in Mexico since his disappearance more than 10 years ago.
Australia’s Woman’s Day alleges in its new cover story (excerpted by the Daily Mail) that it knows of McDermott’s whereabouts. An investigator named John Nazarian reportedly told the mag: “It’s rumored he was with a German national. I spoke to people there [in Mexico]. The girl he was traveling with was described as having a German accent. … To come up with the conclusion that he fell off the boat, and allegedly no one saw him fall off the boat, is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
In June 2005, McDermott vanished during an overnight fishing trip near San Pedro, California. At the time, the cameraman, then 48, had been dating the Grease actress for nine years. Three years later, the Coast Guard was still unable to locate McDermott’s body and said he had “likely drowned.”
Out of the 22 passengers on the boat, none saw him go overboard. Newton-John — who was in the middle of a busy press tour in Australia at the time — didn’t report McDermott as missing until a week after the excursion, when he didn’t show up for a pre-planned family event.
At the time of his disappearance, McDermott owed $8,000 in child support to his ex-wife, Yvette Nipar, for the care of their son, Chance, among other debts. His life insurance policy would leave $100,000 to be left for Chance after McDermott’s supposed death.
The holes in the story left private investigators wondering whether McDermott was really dead. In 2010, a group of investigators hired by Dateline NBC reportedly found McDermott under his birth name of Patrick Kim. The group claimed that the handsome technician of Korean-American descent was supposedly alive and in Mexico.
Investigators traced his alleged location to the Pacific coast of Mexico in an area of Puerta Vallarta, where they said he was residing as Patrick Kim. In a subsequent press conference, the lead investigator, Philip Klein, told reporters: “Mr. McDermott’s wishes, according to his counsel, is not to be ‘hounded’ any longer by investigators or the media.”
Newton-John eventually moved on too, and found love in natural remedy company founder John Easterling. The two secretly wed in Peru in 2008.
