It remains one of the biggest mysteries to rock the entertainment world: The still unsolved disappearance of Olivia Newton-John’s former partner Patrick McDermott.
Now, a new book about the singer and actress claims she had no doubts he died during an overnight fishing trip off the US west coast and did not fake his disappearance and flee to Mexico as was reported at the time.
A Little More Love: The Life and Legacy of Olivia Newton-John, will be released today. Excerpts from the book published overnight by People touch on the 2005 disappearance of McDermott, who was the Grease star’s on-off boyfriend for nine years.
The public was unaware the two had broken up prior to his disappearance. The singer only revealed the news herself in her 2019 memoir, Don’t Stop Believin’.
The star was in Melbourne when the LA-based cameraman and lighting technician, who had a son from a previous marriage, went missing.
She reportedly contacted a security expert, Gavin de Becker, who sent a couple of his private investigators to Mexico with a list of places Olivia recalled he had talked about.
Her friend, Liona Boyd, told the book’s author, Matthew Hild, “She thought he’d been killed. She thought he drowned.
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“She didn’t believe all the rumours about the sightings in Mexico. She said, ‘No, I don’t believe that’.”
Newton-John had touched on his disappearance during a 2009 interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“I don’t think I will ever really be at peace with it,” she said. “I think there will always be a question mark.”
McDermott disappeared from an overnight fishing charter boat he was a passenger on.
The Freedom set off from the San Pedro marina on June 30.
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McDermott was a frequent client of overnight fishing trips and he did not know any of the other 22 passengers or crew, who did not realise he was missing when the boat returned the next day.
Family members noticed he was missing when he failed to attend on July 6 and he was finally reported missing on July 11.
Some of his personal belongings, including his car keys, passport and wallet, were later found on the boat, and his car was found still parked near the marina where he had left it.
An investigation by the US Coast Guard concluded in 2006 that he was most likely lost at sea.
A further investigation in 2008 made the same conclusion.
A statement released by the Coast Guard in 2009 said there was no active investigation into his disappearance or whereabouts, and the previous probes found no evidence of “criminal action, suicide, accident or hoax in the disappearance of McDermott”.
Newton-John and McDermott started dating soon after her divorce from Matt Lattanzi in 1995.
During an appearance on Australian 60 Minutes, Newton-John told interviewer Karl Stefanovic, “It was very hard. He was lost at sea, and nobody really knows what happened”. She admitted it was “human to wonder” what happened to him, but she had learned to “let go”.
She went on to marry John Easterling, the founder and president of Amazon Herb Company.
They married in Peru in 2008, and he was by her side when she died at her California ranch in 2022 after a long battle with breast cancer, which had spread to her bones.
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