Four years ago, singer Olivia Newton-John’s boyfriend, Patrick McDermott, mysteriously went missing after reportedly falling off his boat off the California coast. Today, new developments emerged that McDermott is not only alive, but faked his own death to avoid mounting financial obligations. Now, the question is: how much did Olivia Newton-John know about this?

OLIVIA Newton-John’s former partner is alive and on the run after staging his own disappearance almost four years ago, according to US investigators.

A team of private investigators from Texas said they believe Patrick McDermott has been travelling along the Mexican and South American coastline since disappearing from a fishing charter in June 2005.

Lead investigator Philip Klein said he believed that the former cameraman had disappeared so that he could avoid paying debts and enable his teenage son Chance to receive a $A150,965 ($US100,000) life insurance policy.

“He’s alive – there’s no doubt in my mind, this guy’s alive,” Klein said.

“Everything was bad in this guy’s life. There was nothing good.

“Maybe in his mind if he stages his death, the insurance policy will pay off all his debts and he can leave his child a gift by pretending he’s dead.”

McDermott, who had been in a relationship with Newton-John for nine years, was 48 when he disappeared after boarding a boat called The Freedom in California.

An official report from the US Coast Guard released in November (2008) concluded that McDermott, who had previously filed for bankruptcy and owed thousands of dollars in child support payments to his ex-wife, most likely drowned.

Klein, whose agency specialises in tracking down kidnap victims and missing people who do not want to be found, was hired by US current affairs program Dateline in March 2007 to investigator McDermott’s disappearance.

In an episode devoted to the mystery this week, Klein revealed that his agency had set up a hi-tech trap to help locate McDermott by making a website called findpatrickmcdermott.com, which secretly showed investigators the locations of people accessing the site.

Klein said he suspected McDermott has regularly been logging on to the “spider site”, with the team tracking hits from what he believed was a boat traveling along the Mexican coastline as far as South America.

“We put what we call a trap on the web site where we can tell each I-address that comes in to the web site,” Klein said.

“The rule of thumb is always this – when you’re running you always are looking over your shoulder and we’re going to catch him looking at us.

“The most interesting hits have come directly from Cabo San Lucas (in Mexico) last place anybody saw Patrick McDermott.”

Klein said he believed that Olivia Newton-John, who refused to be interviewed for the investigation, had regularly been logging on to the site to get updates on the hunt for her former partner.

“The most unusual hits we’ve gotten were Olivia Newton-John when she was on tour in Asia, every hotel she was registered at and staying at there were hits from that hotel on that night where she was staying,” Klein said.

“So it’s quite obvious to us that the Olivia Newton-John camp is following it.”

Klein, who claimed to have confirmed sightings of McDermott from at least 17 witnesses across Mexico, said he was confident that his team would track down their target.

“Patrick McDermott walked off The Freedom and Patrick McDermott’s running in Mexico – that simple,” Klein said.

[From Australian Courier Mail]

Jeez, someone should have told this guy that nobody can get away with faking their own death anymore – especially if you can’t live without the Internet! I do wonder what role, if any, Olivia Newton-John plays in all of this. When the news of McDermott’s disappearance first hit the press, Olivia remained noticeably tight-lipped on the situation. She did garner a lot of public sympathy at first, but then some speculated that she didn’t seem all that upset about it. Since then, she has married someone else. But it is interesting that the singer has been secretly checking in on the status of the manhunt. Did she know where he was?

Here’s Olivia Newton John and Patrick McDermott taking their labrador puppy out for a walk in Malibu in June 2000. Images thanks to Fame.