I'm Not Saying He's Dead, But This Is Flimsy

Yesterday and today I kept seeing these headlines saying Olivia Newton John's ex is alive and well, or at least alive. The first article I clicked was probably the best one I read, and is the one I am linking to here. It is an Australian site and they did some good summarizing on the story although they went for the alive and on the run portion of the report as well. Everyone since this article has just kind of turned it up more and more until it almost sounds like Olivia's ex is in a bar down the street singing Physical and dancing around in a leotard.

Let's go back in time for a little bit and get everyone caught up. Olivia's ex boyfriend had some financial problems and was last seen on a boat down in Mexico. The Coast Guard thinks he drowned. Everyone else has never been so sure because upon his death, his debts went away and his son could get a $100,000 life insurance policy. He and Olivia were in the middle of a nine year relationship when this happened.

OK, so fast forward a few years and Dateline NBC decides to hire a private investigator to look into the disappearance. The investigators set up a website called findpatrickmcdermott.com and they figure that anyone who looks at the site must be a suspect or have some relationship to the case and that the investigators would track them down by looking at the IP address from the people who logged on.

The investigator, named Phillip Klein said that there have been a number of hits from coastal villages along the Mexican and South American coast. Uh huh. So, some guy is in a boat of the coast of Ecuador and fires up the satellite so he can look at the website about himself, and he does this everyday for months up and down the Pacific Ocean? What about the guy who was logged in from London? He isn't a possibility? Just because a guy vanished along the Mexican coast doesn't mean he is still there.

The only conclusive proof to anything that this guy offered was that "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." That is fair enough.

So, read the article and I guess watch the report from Dateline on television or YouTube or whatever, but I am not convinced. I'm not saying the guy is dead, I'm just saying that they seem to have put together some pieces that fit what they were looking for and made for good television rather than anything solid.