Wagner back in spotlight over wife’s 1981 drowning
Nearly four decades after Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning, Los Angeles County investigators now say Robert Wagner, Wood’s husband at the time, is a “person of interest” in the case.
The i nvestigation i nto what had initially been ruled an accident reopened in 2011. L.A. County Sheriff ’s Department Lt. John Corina told CBS News’ 48 Hours that he believes the 87- year- old actor knows more about what happened to Wood than he originally let on “because he was the last one to see her.”
“As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s more of a person of interest now,” Corina says in the 48 Hours episode, which premières Saturday.
“I haven’t seen him tell the details that match all the other witnesses in this case. I think he’s constantly changed his story a little bit. And his version of events just don’t add up.”
In November of 1981, Wood, 43, disappeared from her family’s yacht off Catalina Island in California and was found floating in the water the next morning.
In 2012, her death certificate was amended from an accidental drowning as cause of death to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
Wood had been aboard the boat with Wagner, Christopher Walken (a friend and costar of Wagner’s at the time) and boat captain Dennis Davern. In 2013, a 10-page addendum to the original coroner’s report detailed bruises found on Wood’s arms and her face, suggesting she had been assaulted before she got in the water.
The rumours about what actually happened that night and who was complicit have shifted over the years. In a book co-authored by Davern in 2009, via Jezebel, the captain blames Wagner for not calling for a search sooner. Davern also later issued a statement that conflicted with his original, the new one claiming he had actually heard Wagner and Wood in an argument that ended with Wagner shouting “get off my f-- king boat.” Davern claims that, 15 minutes later, Wagner told him Wood was “missing.”
Marilyn Wayne, a witness whose boat was nearby, claimed she heard a woman screaming t hat she was drowning and then a man’s “slurred” voice saying help was on the way.
And in his own 2008 memoir Pieces of My Heart, Wagner wrote that he had been drinking throughout the night of Wood’s death, and had gotten into an argument — but with Walken.
Wagner wrote, “There are only two possibilities: either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy. But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened.”