Patrick McDermott

Patrick Kim McDermott (born September 18, 1956 – disappeared June 30, 2005) was a Korean-American cameraman who disappeared on June 30, 2005, while on an overnight fishing trip off the coast of Los Angeles, California. He was the on-and-off boyfriend of singer-actress Olivia Newton-John. The United States Coast Guard concluded that he was likely lost at sea. Since his disappearance, unsubstantiated claims have been made, particularly in the Australian media, that McDermott faked his own death and is still alive in Mexico.

Personal life McDermott was born in Seoul, South Korea, on September 18, 1956. According to McDermott, he believed he was born to a Korean mother and an American father. He was placed for adoption by his mother and subsequently adopted by an American family when he was two years old. According to his adoption card, his birth name was Kim Chong-nam. McDermott married the actress Yvette Nipar in 1992 and divorced around 1994. They have a son, Chance McDermott. McDermott had filed for bankruptcy in 2000 and had received a court order to pay overdue child support to his former wife. At the time that Olivia met him, McDermott was working as a lighting designer. There was no headcount on the boat when the passengers disembarked. Some of his personal belongings, including his car keys, passport, and wallet, were found on the boat, and his car was found parked near the marina where he had left it. He was reported missing on July 11, but the story did not gain widespread press coverage until a month later. A separate United States Coast Guard marine safety investigation, looking into the conduct of the fishing vessel, closed on October 30, 2008. Both investigations concluded that McDermott was likely lost at sea. In a 2009 feature on Dateline NBC, investigators went undercover to look for him in Mexico, where they believed he might be hiding. The investigators claimed McDermott disappeared to avoid debts, including US$8,000 owed to his ex-wife for child support. Those same investigators created the website FindPatrickMcDermott.com for the sole purpose of trapping McDermott. As the Dateline special showed, all visitors' web addresses were logged and mapped. The Dateline investigators believed in 2009 that McDermott was living in a boat off the west coast of Mexico. They continued to track hits to their website. The Dateline investigators said there were over 20 sightings of McDermott in Mexico and Central America.

In January 2009, investigators alleged he is alive and well in Mexico, and asking to be left alone.

In April 2009, a man Dateline hired to find McDermott, Philip Klein, released the following statement:

After years of searching for the missing man, a group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC were alleged to have located McDermott alive and living in Mexico in April 2010. The private investigators, led by Texas-based Philip Klein, claimed to have tracked McDermott down after noticing that a collection of centralized IP addresses were logging onto the website that followed his presumed whereabouts.

The addresses led the investigators to the Mexican-Pacific coast near Puerto Vallarta, where they claimed McDermott had been living under his birth name, Pat Kim.

In 2016, more than a decade after his mysterious disappearance, the Australian weekly magazine Woman's Day claimed investigators found McDermott healthy and alive in the town of Sayulita, Mexico—where they purported that he lived with his new girlfriend. None of the claims were ever substantiated. that New Idea, a long-running Australian weekly magazine, claimed it had evidence McDermott is alive after receiving photos by US media agency Coleman-Rayner which show a man who matched his description alongside a woman. On January 2, 2018, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published a story of a man from Manitoba, Canada, who identified himself and his wife as the subject of the photo from the 2017 Australian tabloid, as a case of mistaken identification.