The Who2 Blog
Wow: Natalie Wood's Death is Being Re-Investigated by Sheriffs
30 years after actress Natalie Wood died in a mysterious yachting accident off Catalina Island, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office has decided to reopen the case -- apparently after hearing that the yacht's captain has more to say.
A law enforcement source added that the department recently received a letter from an unidentified "third party" who said the captain had "new recollections" about the case. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing.
It's a stunner.
Natalie Wood's death has always been mysterious at best and at worst, suspicious. As noted in our loop Death By Yacht, the actress died while spending the night on the yacht Splendour with two other men: her husband, Robert Wagner, and their friend, the actor Christopher Walken. It was November 28, 1981. Walken and Wood were filming the movie Brainstorm together at the time.
Some drinking was being done, Wagner and Walken got into an argument, and at some point Wood left the two men to go to the bedroom -- all those facts have been generally accepted. Wagner reported that when he got to the bedroom himself later that night, his wife wasn't there.
Eventually a search began. The next morning Wood's body was found floating face-down in the ocean a mile away, dressed in a nightgown, socks, and a down jacket. The yacht's dinghy was found drifting even farther away.
Wood was a big star and her death was a huge news story. Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi -- known by then as "The Coroner to the Stars" for his many high-profile autopsies -- examined Wood's body and the evidence and returned a ruling of accidental death.
Noguchi covers the case in detail in his 1983 book Coroner. He admits that the case was confounding, but his explanation was that Wood had likely slipped and fallen overboard after untying the dinghy and trying to get in. Her cheek was bruised and she had a blood-alcohol content of 0.14, and her down jacket could quickly have become waterlogged. Noguchi decided Wood had fallen, hit her face, and her body and the dinghy then both floated away from the yacht.
That was the official determination, but it didn't stop speculation. For one thing, nobody knew why Wood would be trying to untie a dinghy late at night. (Others said she was actually trying to tie up a dinghy that had got loose.) And if she fell into the water, why did no one hear her? Hollywood gossips hinted that Walken and Wagner had been fighting over Wood, although Wagner has since said that they were really fighting about Walken's opinion that Wood should put her work ahead of her family.
CBS News has the yacht captain, Dennis Davern, now saying "I believe that Robert Wagner was with her up until the moment she went in the water." Which is a pretty aggressive statement. Davern also has this to say about the coroner's determination that Wood was getting into the dinghy:
"That story is 100 percent false... Natalie would never, in a million years, take that dingy out by herself. She would have gotten me."
More to come, undoubtedly.
Read more about the case in our feature Death By Yacht ยป
(Photo supplied by WENN)
3 comments
At the time of her death they made a big deal about how Natalie Wood was afraid of the water -- that bit added spice to the mystery of why she was by herself.
I always thought they made a little too much of her fear of water. It must not have been THAT bad, she was spending the night on a yacht, right?
It has a lot of weird angles, for sure. I dunno, some of those yachts can be pretty big. If you're out in your bathrobe and a down coat in the middle of the night, you'd think emotion (like fear of water, if you had it) would be overriding everything.
Wagner and family released a comment on the investigation saying "Yes, we support the sheriff's office, please investigate." But they also dropped in a barb about unnamed people seeking publicity. The cap'n, presumably.
I remember reading all about the case in Thomas Noguchi's book "Coroner." His take was yes, weird, confounding, but in the end there weren't many possible explanations that fit the facts. I think they did some tests showing that a body dropped at that spot in the marina would float to just about the spot where she was found.
If you really think Wagner killed her, then you've got to decide either a) murder or b) accident. If murder, then what -- he killed her *with two other guys on board* and then threw her body overboard? By, uh, knocking her out and then laying her face-down in the water? And then releasing the dinghy also?
If accidental, same thing. He takes a swing at her, say, in their bedroom, and kills her. He panics, carries/drags her body topside, and tosses her over the side. Or they're arguing and they take it upstairs onto the deck, and she falls off and hits her head. He's too drunk to do anything and she dies. Either way, nobody hears a thing.
I can totally believe that Wagner and she were arguing (nothing new there) and she stormed off and later, oops, he can't find her. It's his "fault," sorta, sure, and not anything you'd want publicized. But it's not his FAULT in the sense that he directly caused her death.
Oh, and, the LA County Sheriff's Department says specifically that Wagner isn't a suspect.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57327810/l.a-police-wagner-not-suspe...
They haven't even contacted him. Although reading down that story, the Sheriff's Dept. spokesman then tosses in, "Her death was ruled an accident, an accidental drowning. That's what it is. If our investigation at the end of it points to something else, then we will address that."
Because nobody in this case can seem to make a flat-out statement without qualifiers.