English-Australian singer, songwriter, and actress Olivia Newton-John has laid bare some of the more private details of her life in her new tell-all book, 'Don't Stop Believin.' However, the most striking passages pertained to Patrick McDermott, an American cameraman of Korean descent whom she met a year after her divorce from Matt Lattanzi, and who mysteriously disappeared following a 2005 fishing trip off the Californian coast.
The then-48-year-old was a passenger on the fishing boat 'Freedom' which had left from the San Pedro marina for an overnight fishing trip. Twenty two passengers and three crew members gave contradicting reports of his whereabouts both during and at the conclusion of the trip, and his disappearance would only be noticed after he failed to attend a family event a few days later.
A United States Coast Guard investigation released in November 2008, more than three years after his disappearance, concluded that McDermott had "most likely" drowned, though it was an answer that Olivia refused to accept. Before he vanished, he and Olivia had been dating on and off for nine years, and the singer wrote about how she hired a private investigator, Gavin de Becker, to help find more conclusive answers than those provided by the coast guard.
In a section obtained by Radar Online, she has written, "We decided to send a couple of his private investigators to Mexico to certain places Patrick had talked about. I asked Gavin if I should get on TV and do a public plea, but he advised against it."
The investigators apparently placed missing person posters all over Mexico, but "nobody had seen him," she wrote. The singer says she believes that McDermott may have escaped to his native Korea, though they did not find any leads or evidence to support the theory.
There were several outlandish theories that attempted to explain McDermott's disappearance ranging from his death by accident or foul play to the 48-year-old staging the whole ordeal to avoid child support payments to his ex-wife, actress Yvette Nipar; advocates of the theory point out how McDermott had filed for bankruptcy and had received a court order to pay overdue child support to Nipar as proof.
Investigators from NBC's 'Dateline' stated that McDermott was living off a boat off the west coast of Mexico, with other private detectives claiming that he had been found living in Mexico under his birth name, Pat Kim. Then, in 2016, after more than a decade after his mysterious disappearance, there were claims that he was found healthy and alive in the town of Sayulita, Mexico — where he's apparently living with his new girlfriend. All in all, there were more than 20 sightings of him in Mexico and Central America.
Olivia said that the reports of her former boyfriend being alive were "strange," but that "the truth is, I'll never really know what happened." She also writes that the one positive to come out of the disappearance was that she grew close to his ex-wife, as well as his son, Chance. "Yvette believes that Patrick would never have left his boy. I agree," she explained in the novel. "I lived in pain for so long over this, but I had to teach myself to live in the now, which is an important life lesson."
