Joe Kelly reveals family secret: half-sister drowned

It wasn’t until he was 13 that Joey Kelly found out that his four older siblings came from a different mother. That’s not all the former Kelly Family member said during a home visit from Pierre M. Krause. In an emotional conversation with the moderator, he also reveals a dark family secret.

“What nobody knows: My mother was basically the nanny from my father’s first marriage. The family fell apart because my older half-sister died at the age of two. She drowned. Nobody knows that,” he reports Kelly Family’s previously secret family drama. After the death of their little daughter, his father Dan Kelly’s (1930 – 2002) first wife left.

“After that, my mother was basically the new mom. My father had eight more children with her and none of us knew that our older siblings were our half-siblings,” the musician continues. His cousin pointed out to him that Danny, Caroline, Kathy and Paul had black hair. The extreme athlete had never thought about it.

Joe Kelly: “We never talked about it”

His sister Patricia only found out about it when she was 25. “It was a topic that was never discussed. We were all a family and our mother gave birth to all the children, but that’s not true at all,” remembers the survival expert.

However, during the TV team’s visit to his farm in the Bergisches Land, Joey Kelly emphasized that he and his siblings were “always happy, despite the limited opportunities”: “Our mother ran the store and there was nothing missing. She has never complained and she was always smiling.” He also talks about the reason for their much-discussed nomadic life: They were in Europe illegally at the time because they didn’t have an Irish passport, “but a US passport.”

His mother Barbara-Ann died of cancer at the age of 36. Joey Kelly was nine years old at the time.