Olivia Newton-John’s Missing Boyfriend

Patrick McDermott and Olivia Newton-John

Did Olivia Newton-John’s ex-boyfriend stage his own death?

(This report aired on Dateline NBC on Sunday, Jan. 25.)

By Keith Morrison

Correspondent

Dateline NBC

There are some stories that simply won’t go away.  This is one of them.  It’s a potent mix of celebrity as bright as the stars and mystery as deep as the ocean. A mystery that started three years ago and has only deepened with time.

It was June 30, 2005 – night time – Los Angeles, Calif. A charter fishing boat called the Freedom left for an overnight trip on the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.  There were 23 sport fishermen aboard.  And one of them was this Patrick Kim McDermott.

The Freedom returned the following day, July 1.  Everyone took the fish they’d caught and went their separate ways. Or so it seemed.

But ten days later, the phone rang at the 22nd Street Landing– the Freedom’s base of operations.  Patrick McDermott’s ex-wife was on the phone – he had not picked up their 13-year-old son as scheduled. In fact he hadn’t been seen since the fishing trip. Frank Liversedge managed the marina at the time.

Frank Liversedge: I went to my manifest and my sheets. And I looked, and I found out his name was on there.  And then I had found out that there had been a tackle box that had his license in it. And that was in my office.

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A member of the Freedom’s crew had turned in the tackle box. And now McDermott’s ex-wife asked about another item.

Frank Liversedge: I didn’t recognize the fanny pack for what it was until his wife described to me a fanny pack. And I said, “Yeah I have one. Do I have your permission to open this thing up?” She said, “Yeah.” I opened it up. There was a wallet on top, some car keys, and a bunch of other stuff. And I said, “There’s a wallet here, can I open it up?” She said, “Yeah.”  Looked at the driver’s license number– or name. And it was his driver’s license.

She then described McDermott’s car, and Frank Liversedge soon found it in the parking lot. Now they had Patrick McDermott’s fishing tackle, his wallet, his car… But not him.

Frank Liversedge: I called the police, called the Coast Guard.  I said, “I got what looks like a potential problem.”

Patrick McDermott was missing, lost at sea. Or was he?

Soon a lot of people, all over the world, would be asking those same questions.  Because, at the time of his disappearance, Patrick McDermott had been dating — for nine years — a very famous woman: Olivia Newton-John.

Newton-John, of course, is known to millions for her role in the movie “Grease,” and for her many hit records. Newton-John’s high profile made the mystery of Patrick McDermott a big, big story in the summer of 2005, especially in her native Australia.

Nick Papps is an Australian reporter, who at the time of McDermott’s disappearance was based in Los Angeles.  Almost immediately, he noticed some things that didn’t seem to add up.

Nick Papps: We got some very, very strong suspicions about what happened.

Starting with this– why hadn’t Olivia Newton-John reported Patrick McDermott missing?

Nick Papps: I would have thought that if I went missing, my partner would notice I was gone; especially my partner of nine years. But Olivia Newton John didn’t report him missing.

In fact, it was a full seven weeks before Newton-John issued a statement on the case, expressing concern for her “treasured friend.”  Papps began to wonder if all was well between McDermott and his world-famous girlfriend.

Nick Papps:  There were reports that came to surface that maybe, maybe they’d broken up in the weeks before he disappears.

A suspicion that Newton-John later confirmed.  And McDermott also had trouble with his ex-wife.  Her name is Yvette Nipar, an actress who has appeared in TV shows like CSI.

Nipar had sued McDermott for back child support– he owed her 8,000 dollars.  And McDermott, a freelance lighting technician, was frequently out of work.

Nick Papps: You gotta understand, his life was going very, very badly. This is a man who’s making no money.

There was also an odd detail from the trip itself:  the freedom’s galley tab.  It indicates that McDermott ordered two hot dogs and a soda… And paid five dollars.  Why does that matter?  Because the galley tab gets paid in the last hour of the trip.

Frank Liversedge: And from that point back to this dock, it’s almost a million to one odds that a guy could fall overboard, jump overboard, be pushed overboard, without half of the boat seeing it.

So the marina manager and the reporter both came to the very same conclusion: that  Patrick McDermott staged his own death. That he walked off the back of this boat alive, and disappeared.

Keith Morrison:  How could he have done it?

Nick Papps: There’s a mad scramble when they get off the boat. No one’s paying much attention to who’s getting off and where Patrick’s gone.

And where did Patrick go?  Papps had an answer for that too.

Nick Papps: I got a tip off  that McDermott had been seen in Mexico on the Baja peninsula.

We went to Baja ourselves in the summer of 2006, he area near Cabo san Lucas, a resort town popular with American tourists.  And, sure enough, we found several people who claimed to have seen Patrick McDermott.

Bartender: Patrick McDermott came here and sat at the sandbar and drank one mango margarita.

Manager: i am absolutely positive. Truthfully there aren’t many people who could look like this man.

But the trail soon went cold.  The U.S. coast guard started a lengthy  investigation into McDermott’s disappearance, trying, as we did, to answer the most basic questions:  Was Patrick McDermott dead? Did he fall overboard? Did he kill himself?  Or was he alive? Did he stage his disappearance?

The coast guard did not release its conclusions, and we decided to try a different course.  We had a missing person, so we hired a missing persons investigator.  Somebody we thought might shake things up.

Philip Klein: Quite frankly, i can’t get an answer out of anybody.  Including you!

Boy, did he.

Philip Klein:  i don’t give a f***.  What are they gonna do, arrest me?

To read the rest of this story click here:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28844965/page/2/

Have a tip? E-mail Dateline and the private investigator : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28796683/

Go to FindPatrickMcDermott.com

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