Finding Olivia Newton-John’s Ex-Boyfriend
Phil Klein, the private investigator hired by Dateline NBC to find Olivia Newtown-John’s ex-boyfriend Patrick McDermott, apparently solved the case using a clever, techie ruse.
It’s a classic Dateline story: McDermott’s family reported the long-time boyfriend of Newtown-John missing in 2005, when he didn’t come back from a fishing trip in California. Authorities initially thought that he had fallen overboard and died, but eyewitnesses claimed they saw him get off the boat in port. This sparked the theory that McDermott had faked his own death and disappeared to escape his mounting debt.
In 2007, Dateline NBC hired Klein to find him, and Klein recently claimed McDermott sent him irrefutable evidence that he is alive, in exchange for Klein calling off the investigation.
Having spent almost 15 years in the field of corporate IT, one tool that Klein used to find McDermott caught my eye: Klein built a website, www.findpatrickmcdermott.com, and tracked the locations of its visitors from their internet protocol (IP) addresses. Klein believed McDermott would learn of the website, visit it frequently, and that by tracing his IP address they’d know where he was living. When I first heard about the website, I thought of two possible kinks that might prevent his trap from working:
- McDermott could be using a proxy server, indirectly connecting him to the www.findpatrickmcdermott.com website. The result could be McDermott appearing as a visitor from China, when he’s actually surfing the web halfway around the world. There are many free applications and web proxies for people who want to surf the web anonymously.
- McDermott might be using an internet service provider (ISP) like AOL, which has its web and email servers in Virginia. The result: McDermott visits Klein’s website using AOL from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, but appears to Klein as an IP address in Virginia. The same issue can come up tracing emails by IP address, and can result in a Gmail user in New York appearing to be emailing from Northern California (where Google’s email servers are).
Klein claimed his trap worked, since frequent website visits from someone moving along the Mexican Pacific coast led him and his team south of the border. They found a number of eyewitnesses there who swore they’d seen McDermott in that area. But we may never know if the IP trap worked, since Klein won’t say where McDermott is living, only that he is alive. While IP tracing may produce misleading results, it can be an effective tool for a tech savvy private investigator. The reality is most people are unaware of the “digital trail” they leave everyday, when they surf the web, send email, or make calls on their cell phone. And that trail can provide law enforcement and investigators with important leads, particularly in missing persons cases.
