Danica Weeks, whose husband Paul was killed in the MH370 disaster, finds new love with second husband John Crinion

Danica Weeks has found love, again. Six years ago, her husband, Paul, father of their two boys, was cruelly snatched from the Perth family when on March 8, 2014, he boarded a flight to China — the doomed MH370. For the best part of six years, Danica readily admits she was in a dark place, distraught that he was somewhere, lost in the southern Indian Ocean and her boys, Lincoln and Jack, then aged four and 11 months, would grow up without a father. She had always felt she was the luckiest woman alive when she met and married Paul, then it was suddenly over. But a beaming Danica now says she got lucky again as she remarried today in a private ceremony on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, with the boys, now aged nine and six years, by her side. There was not a dry eye at the ceremony for this new love story. The wedding was in a private home with family and friends from New Zealand and Hawaii as well as across Australia. Lincoln played Wagner’s Bridal Chorus (Here Comes the Bride) on the piano while Jack was the ring bearer. “I say I’m like the luckiest and the unluckiest and the luckiest woman again,” she told Sky News on the eve of her wedding, in their two-part documentary unravelling the mystery behind the MH370 tragedy, due to air on Wednesday. “To find love, you know, some people don’t find it the first time around, and I’ve been lucky to find it a second.” That second love is John Crinion, 44, a Sunshine Coast builder. The pair met on dating site eharmony about three years ago. Danica had told her mum she was comfortable in the fact she was likely to be single forever. Danica and Paul had moved to Perth from Christchurch in 2011, settling in a new home in the Swan Valley. They had followed Paul’s mother Prudence and brother Peter, who had already moved to WA from New Zealand earlier that year. A couple of years after MH370 disappeared, Danica moved back to Queensland and was trying to connect with old friends. She found John, who was local. The pair had mutual friends and could not believe they had never crossed paths at a Coolum party. But she admits she came with baggage and it all came out on the first date. To John, it did not put him off as he wondered how such a beautiful person could have been through such tragedy and still be smiling. “And that brought a lot of admiration for me towards that end and a real big need to meet the boys and figure out who they were and see what’s happening in this world of Ms Weeks,” he said. Danica had been engulfed in grief and a desire for answers since the March 2014 air disaster. She said she did not believe she would ever find someone. She had “built a wall” and almost pulled out of the idea of dating as she campaigned governments to find her husband and the other 238 people on board the lost flight. Then she saw John playing with the boys on the beach and realised she had changed. She now calls him “her wall”. “I’m a different person, very, very different person. Sometimes I pinch myself and think ‘Gee, who was that girl beforehand? But no, life’s good and see now, I can see a future. And that’s been something I haven’t had for six years,” she said. For his part, John knows he has a duty for the family. “It is difficult to know that there’s always going to be that factor that, for the boys, not just Dan, but for the boys as well, that their father’s always been ... they’ve never known him as much as they needed to. And that’s going to be my job to take the baton and bring these boys up in a very difficult world with a hundred per cent support. “And they just need everything that they’re going to get from me to walk out into that big world and go ‘all right, I’m going to be a man’ and that’s my job.” John and Danica were on Mast Head Island, off Gladstone, when he spontaneously got on one knee and proposed with a shell. And the boys love their stepfather. “Oh, they’re ecstatic. They are. They’re really happy,” Danica said. The Malaysian Government formally declared all on board the aircraft dead in 2015. Paul had been booked on a Cathay Pacific flight but changed to Malaysia Airlines MH370 a day and a half earlier, leading to some confusion. Paul, who was 38, was flying to Mongolia, where he was starting a job as a project engineer at a goldmine. He was to begin a fly-in, fly-out job that he hoped would provide a better future for his young family.

Danica Weeks, whose husband Paul was killed in the MH370 disaster, finds new love with second husband John Crinion

The No. 1 source of news for every West Australian

Everyday Digital

Everyday Digital + Weekend Papers