The American television show Dateline has decided to dig into three-and-a-half year old missing persons case involving singer Olivia Newton-John. Newton-John’s boyfriend of nine years, Patrick McDermott, vanished from a fishing boat in June 2005, and was presumed dead, though his body was never found. Now the producers of Dateline have hired a team of private detectives in an attempt to prove McDermott staged his own death.

McDermott had filed for bankruptcy in 2000 and was reportedly five figures in debt when he disappeared. He had a $100,000 life insurance policy of which his son was the listed beneficiary. Philip Klein, who is the lead investigator on the case, said during a Dateline interview, “[McDermott is] alive, there’s no doubt in my mind, he’s alive. Maybe in his mind if he stages his death, the insurance policy will pay off all his debts and he can leave his child a gift by pretending he’s dead.”

Klein went so far as to launch the website findpatrickmcdermott.com, which has yielded two important pieces of information. First, because the website was designed to track visitors, he says Olivia Newton-John or her “camp” logged on from every hotel in which the singer stayed during a recent tour of Asia. But more importantly, he is now sure that McDermott himself has logged on repeatedly from South America, possibly from a boat on which he lives. Klein’s team is currently scouring the region for clues.