splendour yacht natalie wood

The yacht tied to actress Natalie Wood’s mysterious 1981 death is out of Oahu waters

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - A boat that was once a crucial piece of evidence in a Hollywood homicide investigation has finally been removed from Honolulu waters.

The yacht “Splendour” is now a sitting scrap heap. On Tuesday, the state hauled the vessel from the Ala Wai Harbor. It’s been sitting there unused for over 20 years as it changed owners.

But it was once owned by actor Robert Wagner who was questioned in 1981 following the death of his wife, actress Natalie Wood.

Wood is said to have fallen from the boat one night, yet conflicting witness statements from Wagner, actor Christopher Walken, and the boat’s captain led to an extensive investigation.

For years, her death was classified as an accident until new witnesses emerged and the case was reopened in 2011. Authorities now consider Wagner a person of interest.

The vessel itself has racked up nearly $12,000 in illegal mooring fees, and it will cost the state almost $14,500 to get rid of the yacht.

The DLNR adds that the boat was in extremely poor condition and was in danger of sinking.

To this day, no one has ever been arrested in connection to Wood’s death.

Copyright 2020 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

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Yacht tied to Natalie Wood’s drowning removed from harbor

By Star-Advertiser staff

Jan. 30, 2020

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BRUCE ASATO / [email protected]

The derelict yacht Splendour, moored at Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor for two decades, was destroyed Tuesday. Actress Natalie Wood was vacationing aboard the yacht at the time of her death in 1981.

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Splendour, a 55-foot yacht connected with the 1981 drowning death of actress Natalie Wood, was demolished Tuesday, ending a more than 20-year run in the Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor.

The vessel has been in the harbor under different ownership for more than 20 years, said Meghan Statts, assistant administrator for the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation, part of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. The current owner had illegally moored it in the harbor since June, racking up $12,000 in mooring fees, Statts said.

DOBOR impounded the vessel on Dec. 23, Statts said.

“The owner has not taken responsibility for the vessel, and the State Boating Fund will pay the cost for the disposal,” she said. “The cost is $14,491. The vessel has numerous structural issues and large holes in the hull. The vessel is in extremely poor condition and has been in danger of sinking.”

A large hole could be seen in the boat’s hull on Tuesday. Workers from JS International Inc. salvaged what they could before dismantling and demolishing the boat. Pieces of plywood held the hull of the boat together so it could be moved across the harbor.

The yacht once belonged to Wood’s husband, actor Robert Wagner. Prior to Wood’s drowning, the couple had spent Thanksgiving weekend on the yacht floating off Catalina Island. Their friend, actor Christopher Walken, and the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, were also aboard.

Wood’s body was found floating off Catalina Island on the morning of Nov. 29, 1981. Her death was ruled accidental, but in 2011 the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation. Wood’s death certificate was amended in 2012 to list the cause of death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

In 2018, Los Angeles County homicide detectives named Wagner a “person of interest” in the case.

40 years later, the mystery over Natalie Wood’s death endures

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Forty years ago, actress Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island.

Authorities classified her death as an accident, concluding the 43-year-old star of “West Side Story,” who couldn’t swim, had been drinking the night before she was found floating face-down in the ocean waters.

Her death has been a Hollywood mystery, the topic of tabloid speculation, TV specials and books that explored whether she was the victim of a homicide.

The theory gained dramatic interest a decade ago.

In 2011, 30 years after Wood’s death, Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials reopened the investigation . Then, in 2013, county coroner’s officials changed Wood’s cause of death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.” The new coroner’s report cited fresh bruises on the actress’ arms and knee, along with a scratch on her neck and a scrape on her forehead, as evidence that she might have been assaulted before she drowned.

The new report also noted “conflicting statements” about when Wood disappeared and whether she had argued with her husband, actor Robert Wagner, who — along with Christopher Walken, her co-star in the film “Brainstorm” — were aboard the 60-foot yacht where she was last seen alive on Nov. 28, 1981.

Hours before her death, authorities said, the three actors had had dinner at Doug’s Harbor Reef restaurant in Two Harbors and then returned to the yacht, called the Splendour, where they drank and an argument ensued between Walken and Wagner. According to the new report, Wood went missing about midnight, and an analysis of her stomach contents placed her death around that time. The report said Wagner placed a radio call to report her missing at 1:30 a.m.

PHOTOS: Natalie Wood |1938-1981

Roger Smith, the L.A. County rescue boat captain who helped pull Wood’s body from the water, said he did not receive a call to look for her until after 5 a.m.

The original investigators thought Wood’s body was bruised when she fell off the yacht and struggled to pull herself from the water into a rubber dinghy, whose side bore scratch marks that seemed consistent with that theory. But in the 2013 report, coroner’s investigators noted that nail clippings were not taken from Wood’s body to determine whether she had made the scratch marks, and the dinghy was no longer available to be examined. The coroner thinks Wood died soon after entering the water.

Detectives said more than 100 people contacted authorities after the investigation was reopened. But it became clear that the new probe didn’t provide a big break in the case. Some detectives claimed Wagner knew more than he let on about Wood’s death, an allegation the actor’s attorney denied.

No charges were ever filed, and the department has said it is not sure whether a crime occurred.

40 years ago, Mystery endures >> https://t.co/CB3X5dKmQz pic.twitter.com/3flidFGwkx — Shelby Grad (@shelbygrad) November 30, 2021

“Our biggest challenge is time,” Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Homicide Bureau said in 2018. “Many witnesses have passed away, who were on boats nearby. The original investigator has passed away. We’re reaching out one more time to see if people will come forward with information.”

Corina died in 2019.

This article was compiled from The Times archives. Here is a breakdown of Times coverage of the Wood case:

Robert Wagner’s action after Natalie Wood’s death ‘doesn’t make any sense,’ detective says

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators say they’re closer to understanding exactly how actress Natalie Wood died while boating off Catalina Island nearly four decades ago, but say they would still like to hear from her husband, Robert Wagner.

Feb. 5, 2018

L.A. County coroner changes Natalie Wood’s cause of death

Jan. 14, 2013

Entertainment & Arts

Authorities still want to interview Wagner in reopened Wood probe

Jan. 17, 2013

Detective’s comments ignite new interest in Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning

The mysterious death of Natalie Wood off Catalina Island has sparked more than three decades of speculation about whether it was an accident or murder.

Feb. 1, 2018

How The Times covered Natalie Wood’s mysterious death in 1981

The mystery surrounding the 1981 death of actress Natalie Wood has long troubled law enforcement officials while fascinating the public.

Detectives running out of time in Natalie Wood mystery

Robert Wagner initially said Natalie Wood must have drowned while trying to leave their yacht in a small inflatable boat.

Feb. 6, 2018

Mystery of the reopened Natalie Wood case

Nov. 19, 2011

Review: Natalie Wood’s death is still big business. In HBO’s new doc, her family fights back

In HBO documentary “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind,” the star’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner offers a personal counterpoint to true crime gossip.

May 5, 2020

Intimate portraits piece together the puzzle of Natalie Wood, the person and mother

Natalie Wood’s daughter, actress Natasha Gregson Wagner, has written a memoir of life with the legend and produced an HBO documentary about her career.

Violence, secret affairs afflicted Natalie Wood’s life and death, sister says in book

In ‘Little Sister,’ Natalie Wood’s sibling Lana shares research on Natalie’s drowning, allegations about Kirk Douglas and Sydney Pollack and more.

Nov. 9, 2021

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Remembering Natalie Wood on Her 85th Birthday: A Glamorous Life, and a Mysterious Death After Boat Accident

The star would have turned 85 this year, and her 1981 death is still unsolved

By Tim Gray

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Some celebs achieve strange immortality because they died young, beautiful and under mysterious circumstances. There have been years of conspiracy theories about Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Whitney Houston, for example. But Natalie Wood is a special case because officials redefined her death, three decades after the fact.

Wood would be 85 this year; she was born July 20, 1938, and died Nov. 29, 1981. She and Robert Wagner — her husband from December 1957 to April 1962, then again from July 1972 until her death — were on their boat Splendour in Catalina for Thanksgiving weekend, along with guest Christopher Walken and the captain, Dennis Davern.

Popular on Variety

Wood was found floating in the water, wearing a flannel nightgown and down jacket. On Dec. 1, 1981, Variety headlined that it was ruled “accidental.” L.A. County coroner Thomas Noguchi theorized she had been trying to board an inflatable dinghy and missed her step. He said “her intoxication was one of the factors involved in her inability to respond to an emergency situation.” 

Among the questions were why she would get on a dinghy on a cold, rainy night, whether she and Wagner had been fighting that evening and why there were so many bruises on her body and arms.

As Variety predicted, the speculation and questions continued for decades, fueled by the tabloids.

Wagner’s 2008 memoir offers the theory that Wood fell into the water as she was re-tying the dinghy that had been banging against the boat. The following year, Davern wrote his own book; he alleged Wagner had argued with Wood then pushed her in the water. Davern claimed he’d withheld info in 1981 because Wagner had intimidated him into silence. People from nearby boats said they’d heard arguments but hadn’t volunteered that information since it had been declared an accident.

Wagner declined to speak to investigators and in February 2018 was named a person of interest, but he was not named a suspect.

Wood’s sister Lana wrote her book in 2021 and again points the finger at Wagner (“I don’t think that it was planned. It’s not first-degree anything, but it happened.”)

Walken has remained silent for the entire time. In 1981, he was starring with Wood in MGM’s “Brainstorm,” a science-fiction movie directed by the great Douglas Trumbull. Wood only had five days remaining on the film, but they included key scenes. For a year after her death, Variety carried multiple stories as MGM, the filmmakers and insurance carriers decided whether to complete the film or abandon it.

Finally, in fall 1983, “Brainstorm” was ready. Variety’s review said it was all about the visuals, not character or plot: “Majority of players, including stars Walken and Wood, seem merely along for the ride.”

But Wood’s death hung like a cloud over the film — and, to some, over her whole career.

She worked frequently as a youngster in titles like “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!” (which also included Monroe in the cast), “Father Was a Fullback” and “The Silver Chalice.” But she first made an impact in the 1947 Christmas classic “Miracle on 34th Street.” (which was oddly released during the summer).

The 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause” established her as a teen fave and a real actor; at 17, she earned her first Oscar nomination. (The film, still admired, stars three young actors who all died tragic deaths: Wood, James Dean and Sal Mineo.)

After a key role in “The Searchers” (1956) with John Wayne, Wood starred in two 1958 dramas, “Marjorie Morningstar” with Gene Kelly, and “Kings Go Forth,” with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis.

But a peak years was 1961, with “Splendor in the Grass” (her second Oscar nom) and “West Side Story.” Variety praised Wood and Warren Beatty in the former film (which showed “great care, compassion and cinematic flair”) and raved about “West Side Story” saying Wood was “entrancing.”

Her third and final Oscar nom came with the then-daring “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963), in which she becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with Steve McQueen.

In 1965 and 1966, she co-starred with rising star Robert Redford in “Inside Daisy Clover” and “This Property Is Condemned.” (Wood and Redford had originally met, briefly, when both attended Van Nuys High School.)

After three years away from acting, she had a big hit with Paul Mazursky’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969); she didn’t make another film for six years, aside from a cameo as herself in Redford’s “The Candidate.”

Like most actors, she had career ups and downs, and her output wasn’t prolific; fans remember the classics and ignore the low points. Younger generations may not know most of her work, but might remember hearing about her death; it was a lonely and sordid ending for someone who had been in the public eye most of her life. Wood played many characters who were true-blue reliable, and others who were high-strung and neurotic. In every case, audiences liked her and wanted to see her have a happy ending — which is just one reason why real life is tougher than movies. 

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Natalie Wood’s drowning now considered a ‘suspicious death’

FILE - This Nov. 30, 1981 file photo shows the “Prince Valiant,” the inflatable dinghy used by Natalie Wood, moored at the harbor in Avalon, Calif., after it washed up on the rocks on Santa Catalina Island. Patrolmen discovered the actress’ body 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island, 100 yards away from the boat after a seven hour search. Investigators are now calling her husband, Robert Wagner, a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP Photo/Paul J. Harrington, File)

FILE - In this April 23, 1972 file photo, actor Robert Wagner and his former wife, actress Natalie Wood, pose at the Dorchester Hotel in London, England. Investigators are now calling Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of his wife Natalie Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP File Photo)

FILE - This Nov. 29, 1981 file photo, the 55-foot yacht “Splendour,” belonging to actor Robert Wagner and his wife, actress Natalie Wood, sits in the waters at Avalon, Calif., on Santa Catalina Island, near where rescuers found the body of Wood, an apparent drowning victim. Investigators are now calling Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP Photo/Paul J. Harrington, File)

FILE - A Dec. 1, 1981 file photo shows actress Natalie Wood. Investigators are now calling 87-year-old actor Robert Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of his wife Natalie Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role. (AP Photo/File)

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — New witnesses have emerged in the 1981 drowning of actress Natalie Wood, prompting investigators to deem it a “suspicious death” and name her former husband, 87-year-old actor Robert Wagner, a “person of interest,” Los Angeles sheriff’s officials said Thursday.

For nearly four decades, mystery and speculation have swirled around the death of the actress who was nominated for three Academy Awards and starred in “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

She was on a yacht with Wagner, actor Christopher Walken and the boat captain on Thanksgiving weekend of 1981. After a night of drinking, her body was found floating in the waters off Southern California’s Catalina Island. She was 43.

Investigators initially ruled it an accident but reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role after the boat’s captain said he heard the couple arguing the night of her disappearance. The coroner’s office amended Wood’s death certificate the next year to include “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

In a statement Thursday, sheriff’s spokeswoman Nicole Nishida said new witnesses interviewed since the case was reopened gave statements that “portray a new sequence of events on the boat that night.”

One of the witnesses described hearing yelling and crashing sounds coming from the couple’s stateroom, she said. Shortly after that, separate witnesses heard a man and woman arguing on the back of the boat and believe the voices were those of Wood and Wagner, Nishida said.

The statements differed from the original version of events provided by witnesses, including those who were on the boat, she said.

The sheriff’s department said Wagner is considered a person of interest.

“Do we have enough to make an arrest at this moment? No,” Nishida said.

The police statement was issued after CBS News aired an interview with Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. John Corina, who said he doesn’t believe Wagner has told the whole story about what happened.

Investigators have said Wagner has not been interviewed since the probe was reopened. They said in 2013 that they had tried at least 10 times to interview him but he refused.

Wagner has denied any involvement in his wife’s death and no charges have been filed. His publicist, Alan Nierob, declined to comment Thursday.

Conflicting versions of what happened on the yacht have contributed to the mystery of her death. Wood, Wagner and Walken had all been drinking heavily in the hours before the actress disappeared.

Wagner wrote in a 2008 memoir that he and Walken argued that night. He wrote that Walken went to bed and he stayed up for a while, but when he went to bed, he noticed that his wife and a dinghy that had been attached to the yacht were missing.

Follow Michael Balsamo on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 .

A Complete Timeline of Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death

The events are re-examined in HBO's new documentary, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind .

There are few Hollywood mysteries more enduring—or more heartbreaking—than the one surrounding Natalie Wood's tragic death.

Below, a timeline of the known events of Wood's passing, which remains cloaked in mystery to this day.

Late November 1981

After Thanksgiving 1981, Wood and Wagner began planning one of their frequent boat trips to Catalina Island, off the coast of California. According to several interviews in Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind , the actress invited multiple friends to join them on the trip, but most of the invitees declined, citing the less-than-ideal sailing weather that weekend. Wood's Brainstorm costar, Christopher Walken, who was in town for the film, but not from Los Angeles, was the only person to accepted, joining Wood, Wagner, and Dennis Davern, the captain of the couple's yacht, Splendour .

November 28, 1981

Wood, Wagner, Walken, and Davern enjoyed a champagne-filled dinner at the restaurant Doug's Harbor Reef in Catalina before re-boarding the yacht for the evening. Don Whiting, the night manager of the restaurant, later said he was worried that all four were too intoxicated to make it back to the boat safely in their dinghy after the meal and even went so far as to ask Kurt Craig of the Harbor Patrol to make sure the group made it safely back to their yacht when they left the restaurant at 10:30 p.m. The toxicology report released after Wood's death revealed that the actress had a blood alcohol content of 0.14 percent at the time of her death.

In the HBO documentary, Wagner describes having a heated conversation with Walken after dinner, during which Wood was not present, but believed to be safe elsewhere onboard.

At around 11:05 p.m. that evening, other passengers realized that Wood had gone missing and began looking for her. Around this time, they realized that the boat's dinghy was also gone.

November 29, 1981

At 1:30 a.m., a ship-to-shore call was made and two hours later, at 3:30 a.m., the Coast Guard was finally called . This part of the timeline has become of particular interest to investigators.

"There are many, many things that should be examined, but mainly the four-hour wait to call for the Coast Guard," Marti Rulli, co-author of the book, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour previously told CNN .

At around 8 a.m., Wood's body was found about a mile south of the couple's yacht, off an isolated cove known as Blue Cavern Point.

November 30, 1981

Dr. Joseph Choi, a deputy medical examiner at the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office performed an autopsy on Wood. Noting Wood's blood alcohol levels and several bruises on her arms, legs, and face, believed to be consistent with a fall overboard while she was trying to board the dinghy, the office ruled the death an accident, according to Huffington Post .

September 1, 1997

Walken broke his silence on the night of Wood's death, offering a theory as to how she died. The actor's account of the evening, given during an interview with Playboy Magazine , was consistent with investigators' initial findings.

In the interview, Walken said, per The Hollywood Reporter :

"Anybody there saw the logistics—of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining—and would know exactly what happened. You hear about things happening to people—they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way—and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.

"What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone. She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery—I had walked on it myself. She had told me she couldn’t swim; in fact, they had to cut a swimming scene from [ Brainstorm ]. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat."

November 17, 2011

Thirty years after her death, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened their investigation after receiving "additional information" from unidentified sources who contacted the authorities.

November 18, 2011

In an interview with NBC's Today, Davern said he lied about Wood's death when he was originally questioned by police. He also claimed that Wagner was actually responsible for the tragedy.

January 14, 2013

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officially changed Wood's cause of death from an accidental drowning to "drowning and other undetermined factors." The change came after investigators determined that some of the bruises found on Wood's body during her initial autopsy may have been sustained before she drowned. However, coroners said they couldn't definitely confirm when exactly the bruises were inflicted.

February 1, 2018

Wagner was officially named as a person of interest in Wood's death for the first time. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Lieutenant John Corina disclosed the update during an interview with CBS News' 48 Hours .

In Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind , her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, confronts Wagner on-camera about speculation that he had something to do with Wood's death. He denied the accusations and Gregson Wagner offered her emphatic support, stressing that she does not believe he was involved in her mother's death in anyway.

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What to know about Natalie Wood's still unsolved 1981 drowning death

— -- The drowning death of Natalie Wood remains one of Hollywood's biggest mysteries.

After nearly 40 years of speculation, detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, in a last-ditch effort to solve the case, are making a final push for witnesses to come forward, including Wood's then-husband, actor Robert Wagner , who has been called a "person of interest" in the case.

"We want to talk with Robert Wagner," Homicide Bureau Lt. John Corina told reporters Monday.

"He's a person of interest because he was the last person with her before she went in the water," Corina added. "He was the last person with her, arguing, before everything went quiet."

Blair Berk, Wagner's attorney, did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

In 2013, Berk said that Wagner had nothing to do with the death.

"After 30 years, neither Mr. Wagner nor his daughters have any new information to add to this latest investigation," she said then in a statement, blaming publicity seekers for exploiting the case.

At the news conference Monday, detectives admitted that they are running out of time to finally solve the mysterious circumstances around Wood's death.

"Our biggest challenge is time," Corina said. "Many witnesses have passed away, who were on boats nearby. The original investigator has passed away. We're reaching out one more time to see if people will come forward with information."

Below, find out what is known so far about one of Hollywood's biggest cold cases, the death of Natalie Wood.

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What happened

Wood, who was best known for her roles in "Miracle on 34th Street," " West Side Story " and " Rebel Without a Cause ," was 43 when she died on Nov. 29, 1981. The actress went sailing in the family yacht the night before off the coast of California's Catalina Island with her Wagner, now 87, and her "Brainstorm" co-star Christopher Walken . The next morning, Wood was discovered floating face down, although it's unclear exactly how she entered the water.

Accidental death

Wood's drowning was quickly ruled an accident by the coroner. Thomas T. Noguchi said at a news conference days after her death that the actress slipped into the water and drowned while trying to board a small inflatable dinghy tied to the yacht. He said bruises on Wood's left cheek were consistent with injuries she might have sustained if she hit the yacht while falling.

Case reopened

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened the investigation into Wood's death in fall 2011. Two years later, her autopsy report was revised to include bruises on her arms and legs that "appeared fresh and could have occurred before she entered the water." The cause of death was also changed from "accident" to "drowning and other undetermined factors."

"The location of the bruises, the multiplicity of the bruises, lack of head trauma, or facial bruising support bruising having occurred prior to entry in the water," chief medical examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran wrote in the report. "Since there are unanswered questions and limited additional evidence available for evaluation, it is opined by this medical examiner that the manner of death should be left as undetermined."

After the sheriff's department announced it was reopening the case, Corina said they received "more than 100 tips and we followed up on every single one." On Monday, they detailed a new sequence of events of that fateful night, using new witness statements.

"A witness provided details about hearing yelling and crashing sounds coming from the couple’s stateroom," the department's statement from last week said. "Shortly afterward, separate witnesses identified a man and a woman arguing on the back of the boat. The witnesses believed that the voices belonged to Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner.

"As you may recall, Natalie Wood was later reported missing from the boat. The statements from these new witnesses differ from the original version of events as related by previous witnesses, including the individuals on the boat," the statement added.

What the boat captain said

Among those on the boat that night was the yacht's captain, Dennis Davern. In his 2009 book, "Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour," Davern wrote that Wagner and Wood had an argument while having dinner on the boat in which Wagner broke a wine bottle on the table.

Davern later wrote that Wood left to go to her stateroom afterward, but he heard the two arguing in their room, making him turn up the volume on his radio. He wrote that he later looked outside and saw that Wagner and Wood had come out onto the desk, and appeared to be arguing.

What Christopher Walken said

Walken, Wood's co-star in her last film "Brainstorm," told Playboy magazine in 1997 that only Wood knows what happened that night, as she was alone.

What Robert Wagner said

Wagner reportedly called Wood's death a tragic accident and has publicly expressed support for the new investigation. He has been interviewed by police previously, though not in recent years. Corina said that, in light of the new witness statements, his account no longer "make sense."

"It doesn't add up," he said.

Is there a suspect?

Corina emphasized that right now the department is "not pressing charges on anyone. We're still just trying to figure out what happened."

As for Wagner, he remains a person of interest. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department told ABC News last week in a statement, "Wagner has always been a person of interest. This is not new; nothing new to add."

What happened to Wood's children

Natasha Gregson Wagner, Wood's daughter with second husband Richard Gregson, was 11 when her mom died. At the time, it was decided that Wagner, her stepfather, would continue to raise her and younger sister Courtney, who is Wagner's daughter with Wood.

"We were all so shattered by the loss, and we were hanging on to each other," Wagner told People magazine in 2016. "My bond with Natasha is very, very intense. We've hung onto each other through the years and she means the world to me."

He continued: "They'd always been together. So Richard [Gregson], her birth father, and I sat down and came to the conclusion that we felt it was best that Natasha stay with her sisters [including Wagner's daughter with Marion Marshall, Katie] and be raised in the environment that she'd been raised in up to that point -- to the point of Natalie leaving us."

ABC News' Joi-Marie McKenzie, Marilyn Heck, Julie Sone and Alex Stone contributed to this report.

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The Mystery Surrounding Natalie Wood's Death

It soon emerged that Wood had spent Thanksgiving weekend aboard her yacht, Splendour, with her husband, actor Robert Wagner , her Brainstorm co-star, Christopher Walken , and the ship's young captain, Dennis Davern, before an accident of some sort left her lifeless in the water.

On November 30, Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the L.A. County Coroner's Office, announced his determination of an "accidental drowning." He noted the "superficial" bruises on Wood's body, likely from falling in the water, and the scratch marks on the yacht's dinghy, Prince Valiant, as evidence of her attempts to climb on board before succumbing to exhaustion.

Two days later, Hollywood mourned Wood's passing at a star-studded funeral, marked by a teary Wagner kissing her coffin, and the investigation was formally closed on December 11.

READ MORE: Inside Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner's Tumultuous Relationship

Associates raised questions as recollections changed

Although an accidental drowning seemed fully plausible, nagging questions lingered for those paying attention.

Noguchi himself raised some of those questions in his 1983 book, Coroner . Why, he wondered, did Wood slip out to the yacht's stern in the middle of the night and untie the dinghy? Where was she going? And why did it take so long for the men aboard to realize she was gone?

Wood's sister Lana, who followed by publishing Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister (1984), was also puzzled by the supposed chain of events. How was it possible that Wood, with her long-known fear of "dark water," would venture out into those very environs, alone, on a starless night?

Elaborating on things in the 1986 book Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner , the actor described how he and Walken were engaged in a "political debate" for much of the evening, prompting his bored wife to check out of the discussion and head to bed. He theorized that she was unable to sleep with the dinghy banging against the yacht and fell and hit her head while attempting to tighten the line.

However, his recollection of impassioned discussions differed from an original description to police, in which he admitted to arguing with Wood about her extended time away from the family. It was just one of the many inconsistencies that surfaced as accounts of the night's events evolved over the years.

The ship’s captain came forth with his version of events

Still, with Wagner sticking to his general version and Walken saying next to nothing, the case likely would have lain dormant if it weren't for the efforts of Davern. After years of trying to get publishers and tabloids to bite on the story, he began leaking more revealing details to the mainstream press.

In a March 2000 story for Vanity Fair , the captain divulged that Wood and Walken had been flirting throughout the weekend and that things turned nasty after the foursome returned to Splendour after an evening spent drinking on the island. According to Davern, Wagner at one point smashed a wine bottle on the table and yelled at Walken, "What are you trying to do, f**k my wife?"

Wood stormed off and slammed the door of her room, with Wagner eventually heading down to confront her, setting off what Davern recalled as an epic fight. He claimed to have heard the dinghy being untied before Wagner returned, "tousled" and "sweating profusely."

With Walken in bed for the night, the two remaining men stayed up for more drinks, before Wagner, at around 1:30 a.m., said he would check on his wife. He returned with the news that he couldn't find her, prompting Davern to conduct his own search.

At that point, the captain recalled, Wagner rejected his suggestions to turn on the floodlights and look for Wood in the water. "We don't want to do anything, Dennis, because we don't want to alert all these people," the actor allegedly said, before they finally radioed for help.

Wagner revisited the case one more time in his 2008 memoir, Pieces of My Heart . "There are only two possibilities – either she was trying to get away from the argument or she was trying to tie the dinghy," he wrote. "But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened."

The case was reopened in 2011 and later reclassified as ‘suspicious'

In 2009, Davern finally published his long-gestating tell-all, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour . Two years later, he was among the 700-plus people who signed a petition over the flawed investigation into Wood's death, prompting the L.A. County Sheriff's Department to reopen the case in November.

The following summer, the L.A. County coroner added emphasis to the newfound urgency by changing the cause of death to "drowning and other undetermined factors," citing a closer examination of bruises that suggested Wood was assaulted.

Yet another wrinkle emerged in February 2018, when the sheriff's department reclassified the death as "suspicious" and named Wagner "a person of interest" following interviews with former neighbors and fellow boaters.

At almost 90 years old, Wagner was no longer interested in talking to the police about his wife’s death. Still, it was clear that other people were, leaving open the possibility of finding some real answers after four decades of question marks.

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What Really Happened to Natalie Wood?

The Hollywood star's death was declared accidental decades ago—but now, investigators aren't so sure.

We originally published the following investigation of Wood's death in 2018.

On a cool November day 37 years ago, four adults went for a cruise off the southwest coast of Los Angeles aboard Splendour , a 55-foot yacht. Three of those adults would come safely back to shore. The fourth would never see home again. She’d never work again or see her children reach adulthood. She was discovered floating in the water in a flannel nightgown, socks, and a down jacket the next morning.

In this story, the unlucky adult was also the most famous adult, movie star Natalie Wood , who was 43 at the time. She had been a beloved child actress, first capturing national attention in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street— she played the skeptical, precocious Susan Walker—and then as a beautiful ingenue in such films as the 1961 musical West Side Story , in which she played a graceful Maria. By the age of 25, she had been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Actress, for her leading roles in Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass , and Love With a Proper Stranger.

But perhaps because of her tragic end, when you hear the name “Natalie Wood” today, you don’t think first of her storied career. To wit: There are 38 million Google results for the search term “Natalie Wood death.” While the circumstances surrounding her death remain murky and controversial, we can agree that in dying so young, and so mysteriously, Wood’s talent was denied a proper legacy.

In 1981, Natalie’s death was classified as an accident and “probable drowning in ocean.” Prominent Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi cited in his report “numerous bruises to arms and legs” that were “superficial and probably sustained at the time of drowning” and wrote, “No other trauma noted and foul play is not suspected at this time.”

The investigator’s report attached to Noguchi’s document said that Wood and a small party that included her husband, Robert Wagner, had left the Splendour for a restaurant dinner on Catalina Island. At about 10 p.m., the “intoxicated” group returned to the yacht, using its dinghy, Valiant . Robert Wagner told the investigators that Natalie retired for the night in the couple’s cabin at about 10:45, but after talking for a while longer with their guest, Natalie’s co-star at the time Christopher Walken, Wagner went to join her in the cabin, only to find her missing.

Wagner and the others soon discovered the dinghy was also missing, and they “immediately” radioed for help. Harbor Patrol, private searchers, and eventually the Coast Guard all combed the water and island coastline, and a Sheriff’s Department helicopter eventually spotted Natalie’s floating body. She was pronounced dead at 7:44 a.m. on November 29th.

Wood’s funeral, held on December 3rd, showed a devastated, weeping Wagner, surrounded by friends, family, and the cream of the entertainment world: Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, and Rock Hudson.

Instead of finality, Wood’s death only seemed to provoke questions , and three decades later, in 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation . And at a press conference in February of 2018, Captain Christopher Bergner of the homicide department said “new witnesses” and those with relevant information had been identified and a different timeline had emerged of Natalie Wood’s last hours on the boat and when help was requested.

At that February press conference , John Corina, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau, said that Robert Wagner, 88, was “a person of interest” in her death and they would like to speak with him again and hear his version of events. The new witnesses, he said, were people in boats moored near the Wagner yacht who heard a couple loudly arguing as well as a woman calling for help.

“[Wagner] is a person of interest, because he was the last one with Natalie Wood. And somehow she ends up in the water and drowns," said Corina.

Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood

“The case is still open,” says Suzanne Finstad, author of Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood . (Natasha was the name her Russian family called her.) When Finstad’s book was published in 2009, it contained startling claims about arguments between Wood and Wagner shortly before she was declared missing from their yacht. The source was the fourth person on the boat, its captain, Dennis Davern, who is now 70. In the February press conference, Corina said the witness statements from those who heard a couple fighting matched up with what Davern has said in recent police interviews.

Corina added that his department have also talked to witnesses who saw the group on Catalina Island that weekend as well as people who knew Wagner and Wood. Some of the details that have emerged about the last hours of the yacht are ugly, with whispers of drunkenness, rage, and accused infidelity.

The life of Natalie Wood is like a Russian matryonshka doll, a set of wooden dolls nesting in one another. When you pick up one doll, you find another inside, over and over. Even those who thought themselves familiar with the life story of the sparkling Wood would be taken aback by the reality of her childhood.

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, Wood was the daughter of Russian immigrants. (Studio executives changed Natalia’s name to Natalie Wood when she first started acting as a child.) Her father, Nikolai Zakharenko, was a laborer given to violent alcoholic rages, and her mother, Maria, was a fantasist and abusive taskmaster who drove her tiny daughter to become the family breadwinner, according to Finstad’s biography and other books, documentaries, and articles about Wood.

Maria’s family fled to China after the Russian Revolution, and when she was a child, she said she had her fortune read by a gypsy in Harbin. The fortune teller told her that her second child “would be a great beauty, known throughout the world.” But she also said that Maria must “beware of dark water.” Maria passed on that fear to her second daughter, while pushing her to fulfill that first prophecy.

There are harrowing stories of Maria’s career as a stage mother. She was determined that her daughter, after receiving small parts, would be cast in the 1946 film Tomorrow Is Forever alongside Orson Welles. The character was that of an emotionally fragile girl orphaned by the Nazis. To win the part, Wood would have to be able to cry on cue. Her mother wasn’t sure she could do it. At the studio, clutching her seven-year-old daughter before her screen test, Maria whispered to her to think of the death of the family dog.

But she went much further than that, according to Finstad’s book. “Her mother pulled her to the side, where no one else could see, ‘took a live butterfly out of a jar and tore the wings off it.’ Tenderhearted Natasha went into hysterics as her mother called out, ‘She’s ready!’ grabbing her by the hand and pushing her in front of the camera.”

Wood was so moving in the film that she won a long-term studio contract. She was famously hard-working, learning not just her lines but everyone else’s, and earning the nickname “One Take Natalie.” She performed in a dizzying number of movies, including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir , and, as she reached her teen years, wore braids and frilly dresses so she could play younger roles.

But, unsurprisingly, Wood rebelled from her mother’s tight control and her ultra-wholesome image by the time she was 16. She wanted to be a “real” actress, an artist, and with some difficulty won a part in Rebel Without a Cause , co-starring James Dean and Sal Mineo.

This period also launched her sexual rebelliousness. Wood, 16, had an affair with the 44-year-old director, Nicholas Ray, and also slept with her co-star Dennis Hopper, according to Finstad’s book. In the next few years she would date entertainers like Elvis Presley and heartthrob Tab Hunter. In Hunter’s case she was playing the part of beard, since the gay actor was then in the closet.

Wagner was different. She had long had a crush on the handsome actor, and they went on their first date on her 18th birthday. They married one year later, in 1957, becoming Hollywood’s golden couple. But the marriage did not last. Following their divorce in 1962, Wood dated Warren Beatty before marrying British producer Richard Gregson in 1969. It was with Gregson that she had her first daughter, Natasha .

To the delight of her fans, after she divorced Gregson in 1972, Wood got back in touch with Wagner. They remarried that same year, one decade after their divorce. This time, the marriage flourished, and they had a daughter, Courtney. Wagner’s career took off when he found a hit TV series in Hart to Hart . During that time, Wood made fewer films. Some say she wanted to devote more time to her family, but she was also finding it hard to get good parts after 40.

Wood’s last movie was Brainstorm , in which she played a scientist married to a fellow scientist portrayed by Christopher Walken. The New York-based actor had just won an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter . Wood told friends she was worried that she looked older than Walken onscreen (she was five years his senior), but they struck up a friendship, and rumors swirled about their connection.

The film’s first assistant director, David McGiffert told Wood’s biographer, “It wasn’t like they were lovey-dovey on the set or anything like that, but they just had a current about them, and an electricity.”

.css-4rnr1w:before{margin:0 auto 1.875rem;width:60%;height:0.125rem;content:'';display:block;background-color:#9a0500;color:#fff;} .css-gcw71x{color:#030929;font-family:NewParis,NewParis-fallback,NewParis-roboto,NewParis-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.625rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.8125rem;line-height:1.1;}}.css-gcw71x b,.css-gcw71x strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-gcw71x em,.css-gcw71x i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} "It wasn’t like they were lovey-dovey on the set or anything like that, but they just had a current about them, and an electricity."

For the Thanksgiving weekend of 1981, Wood and Wagner invited Walken to join them as they sailed around Catalina Island, a rocky getaway about 22 miles off the shores of Los Angeles. Wagner loved his yacht Splendour and the family spent as much time on it as they could; in a 1979 TV interview, Wood talked about how it allowed the family to escape the public eye. “It’s easy with the boat,” she said with a smile.

Davern, a family friend as well as Navy vet, was the captain that fateful weekend. He has said in multiple interviews—and in a book that he co-wrote with Marti Rulli , titled Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour— that after Natalie Wood’s body was found, Wagner him and Walken to stick to the original story. That was the timeline that showed up in the 1981 coroner’s report : Natalie went to bed first; when Wagner after chatting with Walken went to join her, he saw she was missing and so was the dinghy.

However, Davern now says, that wasn’t the whole truth.

“The argument started the day before,” Davern told Nancy Grace in a televised interview years later. “The tension was going through the whole weekend. Robert Wagner was jealous of Christopher Walken.”

According to Davern, Wood and Walken spent hours at a bar on Catalina Island, laughing and seemingly flirting. When her husband showed up, he was fuming. The four proceeded to have dinner at Doug’s Harbor Reef Restaurant, drinking champagne, two bottles of wine, and cocktails. At one point, Wood or Walken threw a glass at the wall, employees of the restaurant told Finstad.

The restaurant manager saw how drunk the members of the group were becoming, and worried they would not be able to reach their yacht safely when they staggered out just after 10 p.m. Using their inflatable dinghy, Valiant , the group did reach Splendour that night, but Wood was dead hours before sunrise.

The story of what happened when the four of them returned to the yacht has changed several times. According to Finstad’s book, Walken early on told the investigators that he and Wagner got into a “small beef” about a parent being away from young children for an extended time shooting a movie, as Natalie was doing. Apologies were made, and the spat died down.

However, in his most recent version , Davern says they resumed drinking wine and that a very heated argument exploded, during which Wagner broke a bottle of wine on a table and shouted at Walken, “Are you trying to f—-k my wife?”

Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour

Davern said Walken left to go to his own room “and that was the last I saw of him.” Wood also left for her state room, with Wagner following, and Davern heard the ensuing loud quarrel. While Davern did not see them at this point, he said he heard the argument continue on the deck of the boat, before “everything went silent.” After a time, he decided to check on the situation, and found Wagner alone on deck, saying, “Natalie is missing.” He asked Davern to start looking for her.

When his search was unsuccessful, Davern said he rejoined Wagner, who then told him, “The dinghy is missing too.” With Natalie Wood being “deathly afraid of water,” Davern says he doubted she would have taken out the small boat herself. He has said in multiple interviews that Wagner, saying he didn’t want to attract bad publicity, refused to turn on the boat’s flood lights and delayed calling for help.

Sheriff’s investigators have referred to a key witness statement from Marilyn Wayne , who happened to be in a boat moored 80 feet away at the time. Wayne said that around 11 p.m., she heard a woman calling out, saying, “Somebody please help me, I’m drowning.” The cries went on until almost 11:30 pm. When Wayne’s boyfriend tried to call the harbormaster, no one answered. Also, there might have been a party on another boat moored off the island, so they wondered if it was all a joke.

Most troubling, it seems there was a critical gap before anyone learned Wood was missing. Far from notifying authorities “immediately,” according to Finstad’s reporting in her book as well as Davern in his many television and print interviews, Wagner did not make the first call to shore until 1:30 a.m.

Lana Wood , Natalie’s younger sister, has often called for Wagner to say more about what happened that night. “She would never have left the boat like that, undressed, in just a nightgown,” said Wood in one TV interview.

In 2013, Wagner released a statement through his attorney, Blair Berk, as reported by E! News : "Mr. Wagner has fully cooperated over the last 30 years in the investigation of the accidental drowning of his wife in 1981. Mr. Wagner has been interviewed on multiple occasions by the Los Angeles sheriff’s department and answered every single question asked of him by detectives during those interviews.”

The sheriff’s department said in February that the team is still working to see if more witnesses can still remember the night and may help fill in the timeline and provide more clues about when exactly Wood went into the water. “We’re doing our last shot here to see if anyone else will come forward,” said Corina at the press conference .

Finstad said that something could still advance the investigation: “In the past several months I’ve sent the lead detective two new incriminating eyewitnesses to Natalie’s injuries. After my book was published I found a key witness Davern called in a panic hours after Natalie drowned to confide how she went overboard,” the biographer told Town & Country.

Wagner has never been charged with any crime in connection to the death of his wife, meaning that if he chose to give further statements to the police, it would be purely voluntary. According to the Associated Press , “Investigators made at least 10 attempts to interview Wagner again after reopening the investigation in 2011, including tracking him down in Colorado. But either Wagner or his lawyer refused.”

“We would love to talk to Robert Wagner,” said Corina. “He’s refused to talk to us….We can never force him to talk to us. He has rights and he can not talk to us if he doesn’t want to.”

The Sheriff’s Department’s public acknowledgement that Wagner was a person of interest only deepens the tragedy for Finstad. “The L.A. Coroner, remarkably, officially changed her cause of death 30 years later—which means that Wood’s suspicious and gruesome death was never investigated and she was wrongly and publicly blamed and shamed as the drunken cause of her own death,” says Finstad.

Wagner, called “R.J.” by those who know him, appeared to have been shattered by the loss of his wife. He wrote in his memoir , “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.”

Natalie and R.J.’s daughter, Courtney, was seven years old when she lost her mother. Courtney has continually expressed her love and support for her father, praising his efforts to protect his children, and told one interviewer , “There are certain people in our lives that continue to drudge up all this speculation and stories every year for no other reason than to indulge themselves.”

Like Wagner, Walken has said very little in public about Wood’s death. In one of his few statements, he suggested that people couldn’t handle the strangeness, the randomness, of Wood’s drowning.

“Anybody there saw the logistics—of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining—and would know exactly what happened,” Walken said in a Playboy interview in 1997 , his fullest public response to the tragedy. “You hear about things happening to people—they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way—and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.”

For those who knew Wood, it is the ugliness of her death that is so deeply painful, for she was a kind, warm woman who took pride in looking her best. And up to that last fateful weekend, she seemed to have been deeply in love with her husband.

“I guess we do belong together,” she said in an interview with Hollywood columnist Shirley Eder , talking about her compatibility with Robert Wagner. “Yeah, I think we do.”

Or as adorable Susan Walker said in A Miracle on 34th Street, “I believe, I believe. It’s silly, but I believe.”

Nancy Bilyeau, a former staff editor at InStyle, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, has written a thriller set in the 18th century art and porcelain world titled 'The Blue.' For more information, see www.nancybilyeau.com.

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Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage

The 1981 drowning of natalie wood, while splendour , the yacht belonging to her and her husband, robert wagner, was anchored off catalina island, remains one of hollywood's darkest mysteries. the star of splendor in the grass and rebel without a cause , whose tempestuous search for love had led her finally to remarry wagner, was terrified of deep water. how had she ended up in the pacific in the middle of the night drawing on the police report—which includes interviews with wagner, christopher waken (wood's then co-star), and others—as well as details from the yacht's captain, sam kashner reveals the jealousy and rage of that deadly evening..

Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage Sam Kashner March 2000

"This is the Splendour , needs help." With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour , sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner's wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned. Approximately six hours later, Wood's body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating facedown in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour , had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to "off," the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.

The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. "It's hard to describe the horror of this thing," said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner's character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner's Office and the Sheriff's Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?

"I'm afraid of water that is dark," she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.

As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken, then 38, with whom she had been filming a science fiction thriller called Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27. They anchored off Avalon, the island's main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug's Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant's staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood's part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant's manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour .

"I remember her sitting there saying, I think my biggest fear would be to drown."

What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.

A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night. Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, "Help me, someone please help me!" The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn't responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just "playing around." Indeed, they had heard a man's very drunken voice respond mockingly, "O.K., honey, we'll get you." They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.

T he public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had "superficial skin bruises" on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood's apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden's longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner's then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden's drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor's privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant's side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy's side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, "What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn't so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night. "

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a "psychological autopsy" to find out why Wood "felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night." However, when the report "on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood" came in, Noguchi "decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call 'gory' and 'sensational.' The report did not alter the official coroner's conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over 'too many details,' I reluctantly filed away that report."

Noguchi's discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

I n his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—"Wasn't it strange that the two men on the yacht didn't even know that she had left the boat? Hadn't she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stem of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?" and also "When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn't she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily"—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yam about Wood's clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.

Through his attorney, Paul Ziffren, and friends, Wagner gave his story, saying that the cruise had been a happy one before ending in the freak accident of Wood's death. Two years later, Walken spoke for the record. "The people who are convinced that there was something more to it than what came out in the investigation will never be satisfied with the truth. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident." Other than that, the two have maintained silence about the incident. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Doubts about the accident theory have, in fact, never died down, especially in the tabloid press. The principal reason for that is the only other person on the boat that night: Dennis Davern, who claims he has always believed that something more sinister occurred. Davern, now 51, says that the account he gave to police investigators in the days after Wood's death was incomplete, sanitized, and in some places downright false. Over the years he has offered parts of his story—for money—to various tabloids, and has occasionally appeared on television, most notoriously in February 1992, on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told, when he was filmed without his knowledge discussing an argument aboard Splendour and implying that he knew how Wood got into the water. In the early 1990s he visited New York publishers in an unsuccessful attempt to interest them in a book on the subject.

Despite the fact that Davern is not the most savory witness, he tells a compelling story, one that has been fairly consistent in its various public incarnations even as it has grown with damning details. Now, it seems, widespread interest in the case is about to ignite once again, as two new biographies of Wood are in the works (one by Gavin Lambert with the cooperation of Robert Wagner; another, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, author of several true-crime books).

Recently, Vanity Fair spoke with Dennis Davern and also with Duane Rasure, the lead police investigator on the case. Rasure shared a copy of the police report, which at last gives us crucial details and testimony from all involved. Surprisingly, in almost all instances, the interviews with witnesses— waiters, hotel clerks, other yachtsmen, and, most notably, Christopher Walken, whose police interrogation is the only detailed account we have from him—tend to back up Davern's story that Natalie Wood's fatal fall was not simply an accident, as Robert Wagner has maintained, but the final act in a two-day drama of jealousy and rage, fueled by round-the-clock drinking.

I t's as if we always knew her, growing up in America, watching Natalie Wood live out her 43 years in darkened movie theaters across the country. Photoplay and Modern Screen were devoted to her in the 1950s: Wood in a boat-necked shirt, her hair freshly bobbed, feeding the porpoises at Marineland with Nick Adams, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause; Wood being playfully spanked by handsome, blond Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros, tried with little success to team romantically with her in The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.

Her youthful marriage to Robert Wagner, then a promising contract player, was catnip to the fan magazines. The envied couple were often seen nestled in an outsize red banquette at Jean Leon's La Scala in Beverly Hills. Tom Wolfe described Wood's "great big marvelous huge mothering brown eyes," but she was really an American girl, struggling to grow up in film after film, from the doubting child who comes to believe in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street to the rebellious teenager in Rebel Without a Cause to the yearning high-school girl destined for madness in Splendor in the Grass.

"She was right there at the apotheosis of the 50s," a friend of Wood's once said. After all, she hung out with both James Dean and Elvis Presley. (The two days she spent with the latter in November 1956 in Memphis were a big disappointment. "He can sing," she later confided to her younger sister, Lana, now 54 years old and the head of Lana Wood Casting in Hollywood, "but he can't do much else") She had been a child star for 13 years when, in the summer of 1956, she had her first date with Robert Wagner, known as "R.J." to his friends. She was 18, he was 26. She was the sought-after veteran of 25 films and had just made the rare successful transition to adult actress; he was an aspiring actor at Twentieth Century Fox, the son of a wellto-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Club, where he caddied for such stars as Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. His first real break came in 1952 when studio head Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role as a shell-shocked soldier in Walter Lang's With a Song in My Heart. Susan Hayward, playing real-life music-hall entertainer Jane Froman, sings to Wagner's tremulous soldier while tears run down his face. Thousands of fan letters poured in, auguring bigger roles to come. Two years later, however, he was stuck playing Prince Valiant in a pageboy wig and a padded body stocking complete with rubber calves. The $3 million CinemaScope epic did all right at the box office, but it was lethal to a budding career as a serious actor. Wagner later recalled wincingly that the Methodtrained actors at the studio used to drop by the set to laugh at his ridiculous getup, and Dean Martin mistook him for Jane Wyman because of his wig.

"I do not know which came first, the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

A t the same time, Wood was becoming a different kind of star. In 1955 she had played Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, which established her as a teen idol and won her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. (She lost to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden.) While campaigning for the part, she was briefly hospitalized after a serious car accident with Dennis Hopper, then 18 years old and her co-star in the movie. When Wood was called a "juvenile delinquent" by the police, she was ecstatic and made sure Rebel's 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray—who had been skeptical because of her good-girl image—knew about it. It wasn't long before the under-age actress fell into an affair with her director, meeting him secretly at the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset Boulevard. Hopper remembered in Bernard Eisenschitz's Nicholas Ray: An American Journey that he "got into terrible problems" with Ray, "because we were both fucking Natalie Wood.... Nick snitched on me. I was furious with him: the studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow."

Wagner, on the other hand, cultivated older, established stars, such as Spencer Tracy, who became a mentor after the two worked together in Broken Lance (1954) and The Mountain (1956). Even though "Natalie was running around with people R.J. wouldn't have in his house," as a friend remembers, a romance ignited and became one of the most publicized in the history of Hollywood. Wagner shared his love of boats with Wood. In fact, the two consummated their relationship during a moonlit sail on Wagner's boat My Lady— and, according to Lana Wood, continued to celebrate the anniversary every year.

They were married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber later described them as being "the most photographed, talked-about, envied couple since Wally Simpson and Edward VIII." Many speculated that the marriage would boost Wagner's career.

The couple spent much of their honeymoon on the water, first cruising the Florida Keys, where they met with a potential disaster at sea. Writing in Modern Screen in April 1958, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that

Mrs. Wagner got on the long distance phone to tell me, "We're just now catching our breath. You've never seen anything like the storm that hit Florida just as we arrived to board the boat we'd chartered for a cruise." ... It was Bob on the telephone now. "The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! ... You'll never believe what was happening to that boat as we tried to make our way back to port. It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing all over the galley.... It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her."

After returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds dropped anchor just off Catalina aboard My Lady. The small island, with its rich Hollywood history, would become a favorite escape. "I love being on the water and near the water," Natalie would later say, "but not in the water."

"Hollywood prepares you for life in front of the camera," Lana Wood once observed, "but it doesn't prepare you for private life."

The writer Thomas Thompson, a close friend of Natalie's who first met her when he was assigned to interview her for Life magazine, recalled that at the beginning of the marriage "Natalie was in emotional ruins." She was insecure and suspicious of everyone, even of Wagner. Controlled by the studios and her ambitious Russian emigre stage mother, Maria Gurdin, who had pushed her into movies when she was only five, Wood suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was—she had spent her life taking on the roles of other people. "I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life," she later said.

Wood had terrible insomnia, lying awake at night trying to figure out why she was so unhappy. She began to rely on sleeping pills and finally told Wagner that she wanted to consult a psychiatrist. "For eight years she spent lunch hours every day— every day!—with her analyst, and she turned down important film roles because they would take her away from the couch," Thompson observed.

I mportant roles nevertheless continued to come her way. Even the box-office disappointments of her two 1958 films, the hotly anticipated Marjorie Morningstar, based on the Herman Wouk best-seller, and Frank Sinatra's Kings Go Forth, didn't knock her off the A-list. Wagner, however, continued to have career troubles. Seven years earlier, he had been spoken of in the same breath with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, but Twentieth Century Fox was putting the boyishly handsome actor in such clinkers as Sail a Crooked Ship and Say One for Me.

"Here was Natalie, starring in a major movie like Splendor in the Grass, and here was R.J. doing dogs like Stopover Tokyo," one film director recalled. Wood attempted to resuscitate her husband's career by appearing with him in the 1960 film All the Fine Young Cannibals— an overripe Tennessee Williams knockoff. "I was white trash, looking for money" is how Wood described her role in the film. "Bob was a trumpet player living with a black woman who was a singer. We all wore wigs." The movie was an embarrassing flop. Wagner wouldn't appear on-screen again for nearly two years, while Wood began filming one of her most important movies, William Inge's Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty.

With this movie Wood's and Wagner's real troubles began. "I do not know which came first," Lana Wood said, "the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

Splendor in the Grass, set in Kansas in the 1920s, was directed by the celebrated stage director Elia Kazan. Wood breaks your heart in the role of Deanie Loomis, who's nearly destroyed in the struggle between her love for her high-school sweetheart, Bud, played with immense appeal by Beatty, and the puritanical tyranny of small-town America, embodied by her interfering mother, played by Audrey Christie. Under Kazan's brilliant direction, Wood has an on-screen breakdown that is almost too painful to watch: Deanie, clad in a red dress, tries to drown herself in a reservoir. (For her work in the film, Wood would win her second Academy Award nomination.)

"Id never in a million years seen them fight like that before... stuff getting thrown around."

Beatty was making his film debut in the movie; he had been championed for the part by Inge, who had become enamored of the handsome actor during the 1959 Broadway run of his play A Loss of Roses, in which Beatty had played the lead. At first, Beatty and Wood did not get along, and there was concern that their love scenes were not generating sparks. Beatty was living with Joan Collins at the time, but at some point during filming, the passionate kissing on-camera began to catch fire. Kazan believed, as he later wrote, that "it was clear to Natalie ... that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac." One day Wagner arrived on the set and found Beatty's arm wrapped around Wood's waist while they were waiting for the lights to be set up. Beatty accused Wagner of keeping tabs on them. Wagner reacted with embarrassment and barely controlled rage. Kazan noticed the storm brewing, but he felt that if the budding affair between his two young actors helped their love scenes, he didn't mind. The director regretted only the obvious pain the affair was causing Wagner. What made it even worse, according to Kazan's autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was that Wagner's "sexual humiliation was public."

Wagner finally walked out and went to stay on his boat at Newport Beach. His and Wood's separation and subsequent divorce in 1963 shocked Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have become so upset that she had to take to her bed. "Why does she need sedating?" asked Wood, who had a famously competitive relationship with Taylor. "It's my marriage that just collapsed."

To many observers, Wagner suffered the most. His career continued to decline, while Wood's flourished. "It just didn't seem fair," wrote a friend of Wagner's. "It must be admitted, he was probably jealous of her continued success. Natalie, however, had an enormous, single-minded ambition, and nothing was going to stop her."

While her marriage was crumbling, Wood made some of the best films of her career— West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy in 1962. To help prepare her for the role of the brainy burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Beatty took her to a strip club to watch two featured strippers: Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should. He also showed up on the set of Gypsy nearly every day.

T he sea would play a dangerous and fateful role throughout Wood's life. While filming Splendor in the Grass, the actress's fear of the water came to Kazan's attention. A few days before shooting the reservoir scene, Wood confided to the director that she had a deep-seated "terror of water, particularly dark water, and of being helpless in it." Kazan, schooled in Stanislavskian method, remembered thinking how perfect that was for the scene. Wood asked him if it couldn't be shot in a small studio tank, but the director refused. He explained that the reservoir was shallow and her feet would always touch bottom. She wasn't reassured, but she did the scene and did it well. But back on dry land, Kazan remembered, Wood shivered with fear and then laughed hysterically with relief.

It was not the First time that Wood's phobia had become an issue. When she was 11, in 1949, on the set of RKO's The Green Promise, she was supposed to cross a bridge that was rigged to collapse once she reached the other side; however, somebody pulled the lever when she was halfway across, and she fell into the water below. "I don't even remember them fishing me out," Wood later recalled.

An even more harrowing incident occurred while filming The Star with Bette Davis in 1952. Ironically, it happened off Catalina, on a freezing January morning. The director, Stuart Heisler, wanted Wood to leap over the railing of Sterling Hayden's private yacht. "Just jump," Heisler told her. "There will be men in rowboats to pick you up." When she hit the water she panicked and began screaming. Davis threatened to quit if they made Wood do the scene again. When they reshot it with a double, the standin became entangled in the kelp and nearly drowned. "After all that," Wood said later, "they cut the scene from the movie."

Four years after making Splendor in the Grass, Wood had yet another heart-stopping moment at sea, while filming a scene with Robert Redford in Santa Monica Bay for Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover. A giant rogue wave suddenly reared up, separating a small boat containing Wood and Redford from the crew and technicians. Mulligan recalled that "there was no way we could get Natalie and Bob off the boat, and the lines to keep them in place were breaking right and left." Redford thought the whole thing was a lark, but Wood was terrified.

W ith their careers going in opposite directions, who would ever have predicted that Wood and Wagner would be reunited, as they were in 1972. In the nine years between their divorce and remarriage, Wagner moved to Europe to try to change the course of his nearly moribund career. He had better luck there, landing an important cameo in Darryl Zanuck's 1962 World War II epic, The Longest Day, and showing an unexpected gift for light comedy in Blake Edwards's 1964 movie The Pink Panther; he also married his second wife, Marion Marshall Donen, who had recently been divorced from the director Stanley Donen.

"I grew up at last," Wagner has said of the period, during which his good friend Paul Newman offered him the role of a lifetime: that of a weak rich man's son who turns out to be the villain in the 1966 film Harper. "That's the part that made me. For the first time, I got some damn good reviews," he recalled. The whole course of Wagner's career would soon change again, however: he would make his mark not in film but on television.

"In the sixties," Wagner later said about the film business, "everybody was an antihero. There weren't many parts for a guy like me." Then Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA, called Wagner into his office and pulled out a copy of TV Guide. "This is where you belong!" he said. When the opportunity came for Wagner to play the debonair ex-con in the new ABC television series It Takes a Thief, he was ready. Premiering in 1968, the show became a hit, earning Wagner $10,000 per episode and giving him the role—that of "a small-screen version of Cary Grant"—for which he was perfectly suited.

Lana Wood noticed that her sister reacted with dismay when she learned of Wagner's marriage to Donen; she was inconsolable when she heard that the couple was expecting a child. Wagner showed up at La Scala passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter Katharine in 1964; Natalie happened to be there that night, sitting in "their" booth. When he passed by Wood's table, "they looked at each other across years of melancholy," Thomas Thompson later wrote.

A fter Beatty reportedly picked up the hatcheck girl at Chasen's and left Wood alone and humiliated at the table (Suzanne Finstad, who says she has spoken to almost 400 people for her upcoming biography of Wood, calls this incident "unsubstantiated, recycled gossip"), Wood embarked on a string of paramours: Arthur Loew Jr. (heir to the theater chain); David Niven Jr.; the English actor Tom Courtenay; and Ladislav Blatnik, a Yugoslav playboy shoe magnate who, as a parlor trick, would eat Wood's Baccarat crystal glasses. She was miserable. One afternoon in late 1966, just after Beatty stopped by, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately she was found by her friend and secretary, Mart Crowley, later a playwright and the author of The Boys in the Band. Crowley saved her life by rushing her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. "All I know is this," Crowley later said. "Warren came by and they were talking. Then I heard raised voices and Warren left. Natalie went upstairs to her bedroom. That's when she took the pills."

But it wasn't just Beatty or his ill-timed visit; it was an accumulation of sorrows. A journalist who had befriended Wagner had predicted that "Natalie Wood will end up the real loser."

Then Richard Gregson, a charming English agent and producer, rescued her from all that. Their 1969 Russian Orthodox wedding was spectacular, held at the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral in Los Angeles; Wood's silk wedding dress had been designed by Edith Head. Her good friend Robert Redford was best man. However, the marriage was short-lived; the couple separated just months after the September 29, 1970, birth of their child, a girl they named Natasha (Natalie's Russian name). She threw Gregson out of the house when she reportedly learned he was having an affair.

A few months earlier, Wagner and Marion Donen had filed for divorce. As work took him away from his family for longer periods, the marriage had deteriorated.

Wagner briefly dated Tina Sinatra, even becoming engaged to her and hanging out at the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. But once Wood had put Gregson out of her life, Wagner came calling.

"Things happened fast," Lana Wood observed. "They fell as hard, if not harder, than they had the first time. They were thrilled and confused."

They chose the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to re-emerge in public as a couple. As they stepped out of a limousine, their appearance caused pandemonium. Lana Wood recalled: "It was a reunion the whole world felt sentimental about."

I n spring 1972, Wood accompanied Wagner to London aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on a junket to promote a new television film he'd made with Bette Davis, Madame Sin. But the morning after the couple left New York Harbor for Southampton, a freak storm with 70-foot swells rose up and engulfed the ocean liner for four days. According to Warren G. Harris, author of Natalie and R.J., Wood and Wagner hid out in their cabin, fatalistically drinking champagne and eating caviar. When they emerged unharmed on the other side of the Atlantic, they decided to remarry.

They were married for the second time aboard Ramblin' Rose, a borrowed yacht, on July 16, 1972. The yacht cruised along the California coast and stopped near Malibu at Paradise Cove. After letting the guests off the boat, the newlyweds made their blissful way to Catalina for their second honeymoon.

The history of Catalina is entwined with the history of Hollywood. Clark Gable filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in those island waters; Errol Flynn swashbuckled as Captain Blood off the Catalina coast. The pretty tourist town of Avalon, a one-square-mile village named for the mythical isle where King Arthur's body was taken after his death, inspired the 1920 song "Avalon," one of A1 Jolson's big hits. A film crew once imported a small herd of buffalo for a 1924 movie; their progeny—400 strong—still roam the remote, craggy hills high above the blue waters of the Pacific. Since the 1920s, Hollywood stars including Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne have moored their yachts in Avalon's sparkling harbor.

Throughout their second marriage, Wood and Wagner spent many weekends enjoying the pleasures of Catalina. "Our life started again—really beautifully—on that boat," Wagner told a longtime friend. The waters of Catalina were not supposed to be the scene of a tragedy.

I t is considered bad luck to change the name of a boat, but when Wagner and Wood bought Challenger in 1975, they nevertheless rechristened it Splendour, after a line in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Wood loved the poem, which, as Deanie, she had movingly read in Splendor in the Grass, but she always insisted the name wasn't a reference to Kazan's film, from which she wanted to distance herself because of the infidelity and jealousy that had erupted on the set. Those passions were safely in the past—or were they?

The couple hired the young man who had helped bring the boat from Florida to California to serve as their captain. Dennis Davern had been around boats since he was six years old. His first vessel was a rowboat his parents had bought him when his family lived in Margate City, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City. Davern is still lean, lanky, and agile, though his long hair and beard have darkened. He says he has always loved the sense of freedom the sea gives him. "I was always the black sheep," he says. "Everyone else stayed in New Jersey. I was the one to go."

Davern remembers that " Splendour was a big boat, with four staterooms and a full deck, and handrails all the way around. Even if you don't like boats," he says, "it would be like going on a cruise ship. You'd feel safe.... R.J. only paid 125 grand for it because it wasn't a powerful boat. The original 16-cylinder diesel engine had been replaced with a pair of 8-cylinder diesels, not worth a whole lot, but Natalie wouldn't have cared that the boat was underpowered. She was happy to go along at 10 miles an hour when you're supposed to be going 30. If you went fast in the boat with her in it, you'd be pushing your luck."

Wagner and Wood often included their skipper in festivities aboard Splendour. "With a lot of boat owners, you just try to stay out of the way. But as the years went by, we really got to know each other. We'd barbecue on the boat, and R.J. was the one who liked to put on the steaks, and Natalie would make the salad."

Davern loved working for the Wagners, and was impressed that they brought their children on board for outings almost every other weekend. By 1974 the Wagners' brood had grown to three: Katie, aged 10, from R.J.'s marriage to Marion; Natasha, Natalie's 4-year-old daughter with Gregson; and Courtney, R.J. and Natalie's daughter, bom on March 9, 1974. The couple finally seemed to have all the happiness that had eluded them the first time around. "I'm glad we divorced," Wood once told Thomas Thompson. "The intermission is what did it for us." Wood was fond of quoting Mickey Ziffren (the wife of the Wagners' lawyer Paul Ziffren), who had characterized the couple's nearly 10-year separation as Seitensprung, the German word for switching partners while you're dancing.

W ood and Wagner had switched not just partners but places as well. Wagner was at the apex of his career, portraying the suave Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, while Wood wasn't working much. "[Natalie] had a past," Lana Wood observed, "but [R.J.] had the present." And if Wagner's fame as a television star was a few notches below his wife's status as a film icon, so be it: television had made Wagner rich. Besides income from his own successful shows, the Wagners' production company would end up with almost half of the profits from the hit series Charlie's Angels, as part of a deal he had foiled with Aaron Spelling.

If television had rescued Wagner's flagging career, he reasoned, it might do the same for his wife's, so he started easing her into television, beginning with The Affair, in 1973, made when Natalie was pregnant with Courtney. Another television project that delighted her was playing Maggie the Cat opposite Wagner's Brick in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

"When she had things to do," Davern recalls, "she was excited. She'd get a lot of movie scripts, but nothing would ever come of them."

By 1981, Wood had become a spokeswoman for RainTree's line of beauty products ("Keep your age a secret with RainTree"). Her film career had been in trouble for a long time. After This Property Is Condemned in 1966, there would be only six more films, and a cameo in Robert Redford's The Candidate in 1972. Her role in 1969's hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was seen as something of a comeback, but then followed such flops as the private-eye spoof Peeper, with Michael Caine, in 1975, and the disaster movie Meteor, with Sean Connery and Henry Fonda, in 1979.

Part of the problem was that Natalie was "Old Hollywood even though she wasn't old," Lana Wood said. She was a product of the studio system who came into her maturity when that system was going out of style.

It wasn't just Wood's and Wagner's careers that underwent a reversal of fortune; their private lives followed suit. There was much speculation about the on-camera heat being generated between Wagner and the striking, brunette 39-year-old Stefanie Powers. Although Wood knew that Powers had, for a long time, been William Holden's girlfriend, she was jealous. One day she appeared with Natasha and Courtney on the set of Hart to Hart while Wagner and Powers were filming a love scene. The two girls began to cry, and Wood comforted them by saying, "This is just the way Daddy makes a living."

T hese were some of the pressures the couple took with them on weekend outings to Catalina. Davern recalls how he'd often "knock down a few bottles of wine with [Natalie and R.J.] Natalie was the real partyer. I'd tell her, 'I'll give you five quaaludes if you give me 10 Valiums,' because at that time I liked taking a Valium in the morning and floating all day long.... So it would be, 'Let's eat these quaaludes, let's chase them down with some wine.' They had total trust in me, so they could do anything they wanted."

The captain of Splendour was well aware of Wood's fear of the water. "We could sit in Catalina, on the mooring cable, and R.J. and the kids would be swimming off the back of the boat, and me and Natalie would be on the bridge.... We were each other's therapists sometimes. I remember her sitting there saying, 'I think my biggest fear would be to drown.' ... I remember it was a sunny day when she said that."

But it wasn't a sunny day when Wood invited Christopher Walken to join her and Wagner on Splendour over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend. It was gray and cold, and the sea was rough.

Walken, who had won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter two years earlier, was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm, a science-fiction thriller, which also featured Louise Fletcher, who had won the bestactress Oscar in 1976 for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Cliff Robertson, who had won best actor in 1969 for Charly.

According to Davern, Wood became infatuated with Walken during the filming and openly flirted with him. "When they were in North Carolina together, rumors were going around about Chris Walken and Natalie, so R.J. went down there," Davern explains. "He had a few days off from Hart to Hart ... but he wasn't about to make a fool of himself over this." Lana Wood also believed her sister had an infatuation with Walken. In her 1984 book, Natalie, Lana wrote, "I don't know if Natalie's [love affair] with Chris was imaginary or real, though my strong suspicion is that it was all in her mind and that perhaps she was only wishing it to be so." At least it seems that no romantic intrigue occurred on the set of Brainstorm, because Walken's wife, Georgianne, had been present for the duration of the shoot.

Then, out of the blue, Davern got word that Walken was coming on the boat for a weekend cruise to Catalina. "I don't think R.J. knew Christopher," Davern says. "He was more the young movie star, where R.J. had been around for years." It was a volatile situation, which may have been why Wood also invited Mart Crowley, who had been made a producer on Hart to Hart, and Peggy Griffin, her secretary. Both begged off, pleading too much work.

D avern didn't like Walken from the moment he appeared on the dock at Marina del Rey. The weather was miserable. "The heaters were on in the boat. We were only doing it because of Christopher ... who comes on board wearing a navy pea coat with the collar up. I don't know this guy from Adam, and I guess I felt the way R.J. felt."

They left around noon on Friday. Davern says he noticed that Wagner seemed put out by all the attention Wood was lavishing on their guest. "Christopher and Natalie are sitting in the salon together and giggling, and I'm looking at R.J. and thinking, He doesn't look too happy. R.J. was getting annoyed, and plus, we're drinking.... I was seeing R.J. getting mad. The boat just starts getting smaller. You can't look for a whole lot of escape."

Shortly after they left port, however, Walken got seasick and spent most of the rest of the crossing sleeping in his stateroom. When he emerged, the yacht was already in the harbor at Avalon. Since there were no moorings available, they had to anchor a quarter-mile off Avalon's Casino Ballroom, built in 1929 by William Wrigley, the chewinggum tycoon. Around five P.M., Wagner, Wood, and Walken went into town, while Davern stayed aboard to make dinner.

The trio shopped at a number of boutiques and then headed for El Galleon, a restaurant facing the harbor. They had a few beers and discussed how to get one of Avalon's jewelers to lower his prices. Darkness was falling when they reboarded Splendour, where Davern was preparing a barbecue. Walken, still feeling ill, decided to skip dinner and returned to his stateroom to lie down.

Then, according to a December 10, 1981, interview Davern had with police (in the presence of two attorneys, Stephen Miller and Mark Beck, whom Wagner had hired), since it was "'a grumpy sea' ... R.J. wanted to move the position of the boat, and Natalie said it wouldn't do any good ... [so] she said she would rather spend the night ashore."

Wagner's interview with police, on December 4, 1981, largely agreed with this story: "The sea was pretty rough. He [Wagner] recalled he did move the Splendour closer to shore to get out of the heavy sea. There had been some disagreement as to this move by Natalie and he told her to take Dennis [Davern], the captain, ashore and stay in a hotel for the night."

Today, however, Davern tells a different story about what happened: "There was some kind of argument going on. Christopher went down to take a nap or something, and Natalie and R.J. started fighting. I thought, I don't believe this! I don't believe this fight is still going on. This was later in the afternoon. Natalie says to R.J., 'You're being so silly.' It went back and forth and back and forth. Natalie finally says to R.J., 'I'm going ashore,' and she asks me, 'Dennis, will you take me ashore?'"

Wood wanted to leave, Davern says, because "the tension on the boat was unbearable." She had had enough and wanted to go home. Concerned that the fighting was getting out of hand, Davern says, he knocked on Walken's stateroom door and asked him to intervene. Walken refused, cautioning him, "Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife."

Walken's main interview with police, which took place on December 3, 1981, in the actor's room (No. 601) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, corroborates Davern's new version that an argument occurred between Wood and Wagner: "Being very ill he [Walken] returned to his bunk. He stated he felt he was aware of some kind of hubbub up above. There was no yelling. Approximately 20 minutes later he thought he heard the sound of an anchor chain. He then recalled Natalie coming to the door of his cabin and telling him, 'He wants to cross during the night.' He then recalled she left. He next remembered the captain contacting him and wanting him to come up to get involved. He stated he told the captain, 'Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.'"

Davern took Wood ashore in Valiant (which Wagner had jokingly named after what he considered his worst film) and the two headed for El Galleon. There, according to Paul Reynolds, the manager of the restaurant, in his police interview of November 29, 1981, they "requested to use the telephone to see if they could locate rooms for the night. He [Reynolds] stated he asked the victim if she had a boat and she replied 'no, is there a boat going back.' He advised her that the f next boat returning from the mainland would be at 10 a.m. the following morning. Mr. Reynolds then made a telephone call to the Pavilion Lodge [a nearby hotel in Avalon] and reserved two rooms for Ms. Wood. He further said Ms. Wood and this other man were sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks prior to leaving for the hotel."

T he Pavilion Lodge was not chosen for privacy—the rooms face an interior court off Avalon's main street, right on the harbor—but it was one of the few hotels that had rooms available on such short notice. Ann Laughton, the night receptionist at the Pavilion Lodge, recalled for police in her November 29, 1981, interview that Wood and Davern arrived at 11:15 P.M. and registered for two rooms. "[Laughton] further recalled that during registration they had asked her for some ice and she had shone [sic] them how to get it from the ice machine. She further added that they both appeared very intoxicated."

On November 29, 1981, in the first of his two interviews with police, at the sheriff's station at Isthmus harbor, Davern told police that "all four of them spent the night on the boat." The police, however, had prior knowledge that this wasn't true. They confronted Davern with his lie, and the boat captain "stated before answering that he'd rather talk to 'R.J.' and possibly an attorney." In his second interview, on December 10, in the presence of Wagner's attorneys, Davern admitted he had spent the night with Wood, because, in the Dragnet prose of the police report, "whenever Ms. Wood, victim, went ashore, he was usually directed to go with her to act as her bodyguard."

Davern now clarifies that he ended up staying in the room with Wood. "We just drank the wine and went to sleep," he says. "We thought it was best for me to stay with her, for protection. She knew I wasn't going to make any kind of play for her—she was comfortable with me."

The police report confirms that Socorro Meza, an employee at the Pavilion Lodge, told investigators that Davern's room "had the appearance of being unused." Walken and Wagner spent the night on Splendour .

T he next morning, according to Linda Winkler, a day clerk at the Pavilion Lodge, Wood "looked fine but seemed somewhat disoriented." Winkler told police on November 30, 1981, that "during [their] conversation Ms. Wood had asked where she could catch boat transportation back to the mainland and [Winkler] had directed Ms. Wood to the proper location. Ms. Winkler further told investigators she'd been amazed at the fact that a movie star like Ms. Wood would be taking public transportation back to the mainland."

Then Wood changed her mind. With middle age, she had become particularly self-conscious about her appearance. Though still beautiful, she had complained to Lana about the accumulating years: "I'm fighting every damn one." Perhaps more important, she didn't want to abandon Walken, who was still aboard Splendour , so she and Davern returned to the yacht.

Walken told police that "he was awakened the next morning by Natalie, and she made some remark about she was going to take the sea plane back and wanted to know if he was staying. He recalled making the statement to her, 'I'm not in this.'"

So Wood went to work rustling up a big breakfast of huevos rancheros for everyone. "Everyone acted like nothing happened," Davern recalls, "and everything was beautiful again."

A t around 11 A.M., R.J. took the boat up to Isthmus Cove, at the other end of the island. Out on the water, Walken told police, "Robert Wagner was trying to talk him into doing some fishing and setting up some fishing poles. He [Walken] recalled R.J. thanking him for smoothing everything over."

After they arrived that afternoon in Isthmus Cove, Davern recalled, Wood sat in the main salon and read while he, Wagner, and Walken went to their staterooms to take naps. After Walken woke up, he and Wood went ashore in Valiant, settled into Doug's Harbor Reef, and began drinking. Sometime later Wagner and Davern took the water taxi to shore and joined them.

Davern says now that when they arrived Walken and Wood "were out of it—giggling and laughing. Me and R.J. are pretty sober— we don't drink around the clock."

Michelle Mileski, a waitress at the restaurant, told police on November 29, 1981, that Wagner and Davern had preceded Walken and Wood at the bar. Then when Wagner made reservations for an early dinner, Wood had expressed dissatisfaction with the wine list, stating, "We could go shopping on the Splendour and get our own wine." Davern remembers that he and Walken returned to Splendour for that purpose. Aboard Valiant, Davern says, he and Walken smoked a joint, so when they returned to the restaurant with some wine, he felt "right in tune with Christopher and Natalie—high as a kite."

The party's waitress, Tina Quinn, told police in a November 29, 1981, interview that "during this dinner party [the Wagner foursome] consumed the two bottles of wine and that [one of the men] had been drinking daiquiris, further she remembered that other parties in the bar had bought two bottles of champagne for the Wagner party. During the meal she said the victim did not eat much of her dinner and was doing a lot of the complaining about small things such as there was too much light on the table, the table was too big, the fish was not fresh, and it appeared to the witness that the victim was not in the best of moods. Ms. Quinn recalled an incident where she saw the victim throw a water glass to the floor.... As they were starting to leave she recalled Robert Wagner lifting a large dark colored jacket and she felt it was being used as a shield because the victim appeared to be stumbling slightly. She then recalled all of the Wagner party leaving together and it was her opinion they were not in the best of moods. She clarified this statement saying that throughout the evening the victim appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing and sometimes solemn."

Don Whiting, the restaurant manager, recalled for police, also on November 29, 1981, that "he thought at the time there was some possible problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, the victim. He remembered some glass was broken, possibly thrown. He was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife."

Walken later explained away the brokenglass incident to police by saying, "It was my fault. I was making a toast while drinking. At the conclusion of this toast, I threw my glass to the floor as I always do. I remember Natalie, and I think everybody else, did the same."

Whatever the reason, it wasn't the first time Wood had broken a wineglass when angered or upset. According to Lana Wood, Natalie had crushed a crystal glass in her hand the day that Wagner had left the house after the demise of their first marriage. She re-created the gesture in the television drama The Affair in a scene in which Wagner's character abandons her.

Davern recalls today that throughout dinner Wood "was definitely flirting with [Walken]. They were like all giggling and touching. She was excited by Christopher— here's this good-looking guy." Wood didn't want to return to the boat after dinner, Davern says.

Both William Peterson, the shore-boat operator, and Kurt Craig, in the harbor-patrol office, told police that they watched the Wagner party board Valiant and motor back to their yacht. Craig later told police that as the four were descending the ramp to the dinghy "what he described as a scream [came] from the female. He thought she may have been drunk and was unhappy at something that happened at the restaurant."

A t his press conference Thomas Noguchi stated that, according to information he had obtained from police investigators, a "nonviolent argument" had occurred aboard the yacht just prior to Wood's disappearance. This electrified the media.

To quell the ensuing rumors, Robert Wagner put out his version of the final hours. This is how it's quoted in the 1986 hagiography Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner:

We reached the boat in a happy frame of mind after spending a few hours at the restaurant eating and drinking. During dinner, I got into a political debate with Walken and we continued it aboard the yacht. There was no fight, no anger. Just a lot of words thrown around like you hear in most political discussions such as "you don't know what you are talking about!" Natalie sat there not saying much of anything and looking bored. She left us after about a half hour, and we sat there talking for almost another hour. Then I went to kiss her good night, and found her missing.

Wagner goes on to theorize about how Wood had gotten into the water:

It was only after I was told that she was dressed in a sleeping gown, heavy socks, and a parka that it dawned on me what had really occurred. Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat. It happened many, many times before, and I had always gone out and pulled the ropes tighter to keep the dinghy flush against the yacht. She probably skidded on one of the steps after untying the ropes. The steps are slick as ice because of the algae and seaweed that's always clinging to them. After slipping on the steps, she hit her head against the boat.... I only hope she was unconscious when she hit the water.

Wagner's two interviews with police were even less detailed. In the first, at 9:54 on the morning of the tragedy, he stated simply that "they were in the Salon when victim [Wood] went below to her bedroom. Shortly after they noticed she and the [Valiant] were missing." Since Wagner "was in an emotional state," the interview was terminated almost immediately. In the somewhat more detailed December 4 interview, Wagner related only that "after they were aboard awhile, Natalie went down to bed and at this point in time, he recalled Chris Walken stepping out on deck for awhile. When Chris returned inside the salon, they continued talking. He estimated approximately 15 minutes passed. When he went to check on Natalie he noticed she was gone."

When the police pressed Wagner "as to the discussion they had had prior to her going to bed," he told them "it was about her being away from home and the kids so much_He missed her being around."

When questioned about the broken glass which police investigators had found in the main salon of Splendour in their search of the boat that began at 12:45 P.M. the day of the tragedy, Wagner explained that "it was probably from the rough seas."

Davern, in his December 10 police interview, was a bit more forthcoming, but not much: "He recalled that RJ and Natalie got into a discussion about her being gone and how RJ missed her. During the discussion Chris Walken entered into it, supporting Natalie's views. He felt RJ was getting upset over this and Chris Walken getting up and going outside around this time. Natalie went to the master stateroom to go to bed. Chris Walken came back into the main salon and he was going to bed. Here this was normal procedure for Natalie. In the evening she would just leave, prepare herself for bed, and usually return after ten or fifteen minutes to say goodnight.... After some time past [SIC], he stated, RJ went to see where Natalie was. When they noticed she was gone, about the same time they noticed the [Valiant] was gone."

Today, however, Davern tells a different and darker story: Back on board, he says, he offered to make tea for everyone. "While the tea is brewing, the wine is flowing. We opened another bottle [probably Wood's favorite, Pouilly-Fuissé]. Then Natalie lit her beeswax candles. R.J. was drinking scotch by then, and I joined him. So we're sitting there, and Chris and Natalie are giggling and carrying on, the same as before, totally forgetting that me and R.J. are there. I'm saying to myself, Oh my God, this is getting to be too much right now.

"All of a sudden," Davern says, "R.J. grabbed a bottle of wine and smashes it right on the table in front of them. Glass goes flying all over. '"Jesus Christ,' R.J. says to Christopher, 'what are you trying to do, fuck my wife?'

"Christopher got up in two or three seconds and headed right out the door. Now Natalie says, 'I'm not standing for this a minute longer!' She goes down to her stateroom and slams her door. Christopher goes right down to his stateroom. Now I'm left alone with R.J. I say, 'R.J., let's just calm down.' We stayed up there for a little while, then R.J. says, 'I'm going to go down there and see Natalie.'"

Davern says that as he remained on the bridge, located right over the Wagners' stateroom, he could hear the couple "fighting like crazy.... I'd never in a million years seen them fight like that before. I just couldn't believe it.... You know, stuff getting thrown around." It was, according to Davern, a ferocious argument fueled by drink—"so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit" at the rear of the yacht. Davern says he next heard "the dinghy being untied— you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on."

And then, Davern says, there was silence. It seemed like a long time to him before Wagner, "tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind," came back up to the bridge, where the two men emptied another bottle of wine.

Davern says that it was about 11:30 when Wagner returned. "We were up there drinking until 1:$0 in the morning. Then R.J. said, 'I'd better go back down and check on Natalie.'"

After a few minutes, Wagner appeared and told the captain, "She's gone."

"She's gone? Where the hell is she?"

"I don't know."

Davern decided to go look for her. "I thought maybe she went into my stateroom, feeling she could confide in me. So I went up and she's not there. So I looked in the empty stateroom—nothing. I look in Christopher's stateroom. He's in the top bunk and he's asleep. I looked in his bathroom, and thank God she's not in Christopher's room. I knew that wouldn't happen, because there's too much rage going on. So I go back up and say, 'She's not down below.'"

Davern walked out on deck to look for her, and that's when he noticed that Valiant was gone.

Davern was baffled. He believes that if Wood had decided to return to shore at night he would certainly have been asked to go with her. "If the stars aren't out, it's total darkness. There's no place to go. Darkness all around. I wouldn't go out on [Valiant] at night."

Davern says he then told Wagner that he was going to turn on Splendour' s floodlights in order to look for her, but Wagner told him not to: "Dennis, don't turn that on." Davern then offered to fire up the yacht's engines and cruise around looking for Wood. According to Davern, Wagner refused.

"Don't do that. Let's think about this. We don't want to do anything, Dennis, because we don't want to alert all these people," Davern says Wagner told him.

W ith the police report, we at last have Christopher Walken's description of the crucial hours preceding the tragedy. It is a story closer to Davern's than to Wagner's. In the first of his two interviews, at 10 on the morning of the tragedy, he told police, "After they were aboard the boat he and Robert Wagner got into a small beef. He left the cabin and went outside on deck for a few minutes, when he returned victim [Wood] was sitting there and she seemed to be disturbed. He recalled she then went to her room and he thought she had gone to bed. He next remembered the captain dennis make [sic] a remark 'the dinghy is gone.'"

Walken's more detailed, December 3 interview produced this version:

They were in the salon talking; he [Walken] stated they had all been drinking and they had one of those conversation [sic] going were [sic]—and he used the reference—"you put all your cards on the table." RJ was making statements and complaining that she was away from home too much. She was away from the kids, it was hurting their home life. Mr. Walken stated he also got involved with discussion supporting the victim's views—she was an actress, she was an important person, this was her life. He suddenly realized he was violating his own view about getting involved in an argument between a man and a wife. He stepped outside for some air and when he returned, everybody was apologizing, particularly Robert Wagner and everything seemed fine.

D uane Rasure is a big man—six feet three— who dresses like a cowboy now that he's in retirement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Homicide Bureau. He and his wife, Joy, live in a remote town in Arizona called Eagar. Rasure still wears a belt buckle that proudly displays the number 187, the number of the section of California's penal code for murder. When he got the call to investigate the Wood drowning, he had been a homicide detective for 11 years. He and his partner had helped break the case of the Hillside Strangler in the late 70s.

"They called me about 8:30 in the morning. They told me I got the case of Natalie Wood drowning in Catalina, which surprised me. The news threw my wife into shock, and from then on it was a matter of getting dressed, heading for the heliport, where I was transported to Catalina to do my investigation."

Twenty minutes after Rasure's arrival, a helicopter brought Wagner and Walken to the sheriff's office on the island. "I introduced myself and my partner [Roy Hamilton] to Wagner, and told him what we were going to do. I could see he's at a loss. He's just in trouble. He's hurting. It took just a short time to get a general idea of what had happened. It seemed accidental from the first, probably because of the way I got the information—the way it was presented: 'Someone fell overboard and drowned.' Nothing in the world would make us think at the time that there might have been something suspicious."

Rasure would soon feel the pressure of the investigation. He started getting calls from old friends who knew he'd been assigned to the case. Quite a few tough homicide detectives were touched by Wood's death. "They would call me up," Rasure recalls, "and say, 'Duane, tell me what happened. I loved that girl. I watched her grow up.'"

A week after the drowning, at one in the afternoon on December 4, Rasure visited Wagner's home in Beverly Hills in order to question the actor a second time. "The first time I interviewed him he was just as cooperative as could be," Rasure recalls. "But I didn't get enough information at the heliport. So I went to interview him again, and his attorney says, 'I don't think so. I think you have enough.'

"At that time, we had a sheriff who was a very powerful man here," Rasure explains. "We went to lunch, and I told him I was having this little handicap, this little problem with this attorney, and he says, 'Oh.' I had my appointment [with R.J.] the following day."

Rasure arrived and was taken upstairs. Wagner was in bed during the entire interview, with his lawyer Paul Ziffren in the room. "I let him tell me what happened, going into more detail." Once again, Rasure was satisfied. Roy Hamilton would tell the Los Angeles Times that "we talked to Wagner and Walken and there was no indication that there was any argument." (This is rather astonishing, considering the police interviews with Walken.)

Despite the fact that there were obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of the three principal witnesses, the police investigation was closed on December 11, less than two weeks after the tragedy, with the conclusion of "accidental drowning." Rasure, who subscribes to the theory that Wood slipped while trying to retie the dinghy, says, however, that he doesn't really know for sure what happened to the actress.

"I can't tell you exactly how she got in the water," he says today.

A s a witness, Dennis Davern presents many problems. The first is why he didn't initially tell police the version he tells today, rather than letting it out piecemeal to journalists and tabloids over the almost 20 years that followed.

Davern claims that in the days after the tragedy he became a virtual prisoner in Wagner's Beverly Hills home: at first, he and R.J. would wake around 10 each morning and "cry on each other's shoulders, with a scotch glass in one hand and an arm around each other." After several weeks, however, it slowly dawned on Davern, he says, that it would be very difficult to leave. He had a girlfriend he wanted to visit, and he began to wonder when and how he could go see her. She had already come to the house and had been rebuffed, he alleges. "When the alarm system kicked in at night, you couldn't even open your door. It was like being in a vault. The first night I was there, I wanted to go downstairs to watch television, but I couldn't get out.... There was no phone in the room. I couldn't walk out the front doorsomebody was always there, usually R.J.'s bodyguard. I felt really closed in."

"In the daytime," Davern says, "I would go downstairs and the staff would say, 'Let me make you some drinks, Dennis.' I'd go to the bar, pour a scotch, and R.J. would be up in his bedroom. It was like this for three months."

"When I look back on it," Davern now says, "I was a pure idiot. I had turned into a real drunk. I felt that I was a part of R.J., that he was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K."

Davern says that Wagner went as far as to bring him to his own psychotherapy sessions. "I was having dreams like crazy. I'd wake up with some weird dreams. And R.J. said, 'Dennis, I'm having bad dreams, too.' So R.J. and I would go to his shrink together. We would sit down, sometimes in the same session, sometimes alone."

O n December 2, 1981, Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery while a balalaika played softly under the warm afternoon sun. Robert Wagner plucked gardenias from Natalie's casket, handing one each to Wood's mother, to her sisters, and to her daughters. Then he bent down and kissed the gold-trimmed white coffin.

After the funeral, Davern says, reporters began tailing him, trying to get his story by posing as potential boat buyers or by luring him with beautiful women. He claims one tabloid offered him $200,000. When Davern told Wagner about the offer, Davern recalls, he cautioned him, "Dennis, they're never going to pay you." He further warned Davern that the F.B.I. would be asking him questions, and Natalie's fans would be after him. "So I was cut off from everybody.... They said they were protecting me."

Wagner got Davern into the Screen Actors Guild, Davern says, and although Davern had never acted before in his life, he started getting small roles on commercials and on Hart to Hart. "He [Wagner] used to give me checks," Davern recalls, "a thousand, two thousand. My friends said it was hush money and that R.J. wouldn't want anything to do with me after Splendour was gone. I used to tell them that R.J. wasn't like that, that he was a real friend to me."

Davern eventually decided to get his yacht broker's license and live on the boat while he tried to sell it for R.J. It was his way, he felt at the time, to escape finally from R.J.'s protective scrutiny. "I took the boat somewhere where nobody would know it. I had a friend up in Oxnard who had a house with a dock in the back. So I took the Splendour up there. But nobody wanted anything to do with this yacht. It had become a bastard boat." Wagner ended up donating it to the Sea Scouts, a youth boating club.

O nce Splendour and Wagner were out of his life, Davern made his way back to South Florida. In the intervening years, the former sea captain has resurfaced periodically to try to tell his version of what happened that night. He has not been his own best advocate, holding back information and implying that he knows more than he's saying. He sold part of his story to the Globe ("World Exclusive, NATALIE WOOD, the Shocking Truth About Her Death"), revealing that an argument occurred with Walken in the salon, but not revealing the alleged details and severity of the subsequent argument between Wagner and Wood in their stateroom.

There was also a disastrous appearance on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told in 1992, 10 years after the drowning, in which Rasure and Davern were asked to give their account of what happened that night for a "jury" comprising Raoul Felder and two other trial lawyers. By now Davern was writing a book about his experiences, and he arrived at the television studio with his coauthor, a longtime friend named Margaret "Marti" Rulli. But he found the interview hard going, and he interrupted it several times so he could confer with Rulli offcamera. Then Davern was prompted, "They were yelling and screaming at each other to get off the boat ..." He responded, "Oh God, I don't know if I can tell them that or not." Rulli, exasperated, replied, "Ten years of this, Dennis! This needs to be cleared up! We have to say how she got in the water, Den." But Rulli changed her mind—or perhaps just realized how stubborn Davern could be—and she said, "Don't you tell them how she got into the water.... We put that in the book and we'll make billions from it."

Without their knowledge, Davern and Rulli were being filmed in their unguarded moments "off-camera," and that's what was televised on Now It Can Be Told. Rivera then essentially dismissed Davern's testimony as compromised, but asked his panel of lawyers to comment anyway. All three agreed: the important fact was that Davern modified his police testimony, which almost always warrants a new investigation. Their unanimous verdict: reopen the case.

After the taping, Wagner sent Davern a letter warning him not to discuss the matter further.

Davern and Rulli also pounded the sidewalks trying to sell their manuscript to New York publishers. Davern says, "We went up to this publishing house and they said, 'Who's your agent?' They must have thought we were total jerks! Nothing ever came of it. But it's a good thing it never worked out—I never even told Marti the whole story."

One former book editor, who met with the two, remembers being "chilled and intrigued by their tale, but we didn't see how they could stretch it out into a full-length book. Also, we wondered where was the backup for his story. It was basically his word against Wagner's."

I n Coroner, Noguchi admitted he had trouble with Wagner's theory that Wood was bothered by the noise of the dinghy striking the side of the boat and slipped into the water while trying to retie it. "I found that theory plausible," wrote Noguchi, "particularly because it explained her nightgown-and-socks apparel. And yet there was a possible flaw. The dinghy was rubber, and, according to Paul Miller, our expert who owned a similar boat [which by another curious coincidence in the case was moored to the same buoy, in front of Splendour, the night Wood died], a rubber dinghy makes little or no noise when it strikes a yacht." (But, Noguchi allowed, "silence is relative.... Other sailors say that the noise might be amplified to an annoying degree.")

In addition, Noguchi wrote, "forensic evidence, such as the fingernail scratches on the side of the dinghy, the brush-type abrasion on her cheek, and the untouched algae on the swim step, seemed to indicate that she was trying to board the dinghy, not just adjust its rope, when the accident happened."

In the end, Noguchi, like Rasure, is not really sure how and why Wood ended up in the water. Perhaps Noguchi knows more than he is telling, thanks to his unreleased "psychological autopsy." In a brief phone interview, he claims the document could be found with both the police report and the autopsy report. Scott Carrier, the information officer at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, says, "I have no idea where that report would be. Everything that was in the Natalie Wood file was sent to you. We have no additional reports."

Davern says he has stopped trying to make money off his tale. He claims he recently turned down a $50,000 offer from a tabloid, although he still hopes the book he began writing many years ago about his life with the Wagners might one day be published. "I think she deserves an explanation for her death," he says. He still has dreams about being aboard Splendour. He's married now and raising three young children on a quiet street in a small Florida town, where he paints and restores boats. He named his first child Natasha.

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“Natalie Wood’s Drowning Was Not an Accident”: A New Book’s Shocking Findings

By Suzanne Finstad

In 1981, big screen legend Natalie Wood went missing from the yacht she shared with her husband, Robert Wagner —only to be found approximately six hours later, floating facedown in the Pacific Ocean. In 2000, Sam Kashner revisited the tragedy for Vanity Fair, detailing the ambiguities that have prompted decades of speculation about whether Wood’s drowning was really an accident. The next year Suzanne Finstad released Natasha, the definitive biography of Wood, which shed even more light on the night Wood died. In 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officially reopened its investigation into Wood’s death.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Finstad is rereleasing her book as Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography, an even more comprehensive volume that includes new details Finstad has learned about Wood’s death since her book’s first edition—details that, according to the author, show even more conclusively that Wood didn’t drown by chance. Below, the author reveals her most explosive findings—and explains why now, more than ever, she believes Wagner played a role in the fall that killed Natalie Wood.

As I was writing the last chapters of Natasha (the title of the first edition of this book), 20 years after Natalie Wood’s death, I felt a sense of urgency to get the pages into print. For more than four years, I had been the keeper of Natalie Wood’s deepest, darkest secrets—her crippling fears, harrowing superstitions, terrible incidents from her past that few knew of. Natalie never disclosed her history of trauma, except through her fragile vulnerability and in her tender, old- soul eyes.

As I plumbed her past, Natalie’s demons and their origins revealed themselves to me as if released from a genie’s lamp. Family violence. An alcoholic father. A pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother. Psychological abuse as a child star. Paranoias. Phobias. A bedroom of storybook dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her. Pimped at 15 to Frank Sinatra. Forced to return an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried to kill himself afterward. Exploited into a sexual liaison as a teenager with 42-year-old director Nicholas Ray to prove that she could play a “bad” girl in Rebel Without a Cause.

The secret that was buried deepest in Natalie’s closet of skeletons was the shocking end of her fairy tale first marriage to bobby socks idol Robert Wagner, known to his friends as R.J. To protect Wagner’s image, Natalie publicly took the fall for their sudden divorce in 1961. She never refuted fan-magazine gossip that her marriage to Wagner imploded over an alleged affair she had with her costar Warren Beatty while filming Splendor in the Grass. In time, the gossip, patently false, was reported as fact.

Only a trusted few knew Natalie’s account. I was told by three of Natalie’s close friends, by her mother’s best friend, and her sister, Lana, that Natalie came upon R.J. in their Beverly Hills mansion in flagrante with a man. Lana recalled Natalie’s arriving in hysterics at their parents’ house, her hand bleeding, and shutting herself in her old bedroom. Natalie woke up in a hospital, dazed and in shock, after taking an overdose of sleeping pills and going into a coma.

That was as much as I wrote. But there is more to that story too.

The fallout from a lifetime of psychological damage and abuse led Natalie to multiple suicide attempts, daily psychoanalysis, and a fear of being alone at night so primal and deep-seated that she regressed to her child self. Her greatest fear, I discovered, derived from a prophecy told to her superstitious Russian mother by a Gypsy—namely, that she would die in dark water.

I also discovered that Natalie Wood’s drowning was not an accident. Homicide detectives in the L.A. Sheriff’s Department keep what they call a “murder book,” the official record of a homicide investigation. I was given access to Natalie Wood’s murder book. There I found the buried clues to what really happened on the last weekend of her life. As the evidence slowly, painstakingly mounted, it became disturbingly clear to me that not only was Natalie’s death not an accident, but the ensuing investigation was almost nonexistent.

As a self-described dutiful child, Natalie was trained by her mother to keep silent, to not rock the boat. As she got older, she kept her silence, often to protect others, as was Natalie’s way. During her life, in death, even after her death, no one, that I could see, had ever protected her. Certainly not her mother, the directors who exploited her, the studio executives who looked the other way, the men who abused her, or the sheriff’s detectives and coroner’s examiners investigating her drowning in 1981.

In the archive of forgotten facts, hidden truths, and concealed evidence about Natalie Wood, what is most shocking is Robert Wagner’s role in her drowning. The man that Natalie Wood married not once but twice, who would often say, with glass raised, “She takes my breath away,” refused to search for two and a half hours when Natalie went missing from their boat in the waters off Catalina Island.

By Karen Valby

By David Canfield

By Savannah Walsh

Of all Natalie Wood’s secrets that I held in 2001, that secret was the reason for my urgency: I had come to realize the unimaginably horrible reason that she had drowned, and I needed to make public the dark and twisted facts of her drowning and its aftermath. I had uncovered the facts using the sheriff’s murder book, put them together, and strung them in a row like lights on a Christmas tree, revealing the full horror of that strange, doomed night. It would not change the outcome of Natalie Wood’s drowning, but it would be evident, after Natasha, that she did not cause her own death because she was drunk from wine and Champagne, as the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, stated. People would come to see, as I had, that Natalie Wood’s drowning was not an accident.

Recently, I’ve found three new witnesses. One is a confidential source that I put in touch with Ralph Hernandez, one of the investigators put in charge of the case when the L.A. Sheriff’s Department officially reopened its investigation into Wood’s drowning in November 2011. The source had information that Christopher Walken said he heard the fight between R.J. and Natalie, and that he told a friend not long after Natalie drowned that Wagner pushed her. Lana once asked Hernandez and Kevin Lowe, the two lead investigators, about Walken’s new statement. “Ralph said the only way Chris’d talk to them is if it was never disclosed. After they spoke with him, they told me they had enough to charge R.J. So…”

The other two new witnesses were present at Natalie Wood’s autopsy. Vidal Herrera, whom I learned about from a documentary producer, took photographs of Natalie’s body for the coroner’s office. Herrera told us he observed significant wounds to Natalie’s head. Ralph Hernandez, who took his sworn statement, has seen the original photos and concurs that Natalie’s head wounds are “troubling.” Head wounds that may indicate that she was in a violent fight, and was pushed, or tossed, in the water while unconscious.

Because the Wagners’ deckhand, Dennis Davern , omitted from his statement to police the “push” by Wagner that he acknowledged when he thought he was off-camera, Hernandez still lacks a witness to establish how Natalie got in the water or, in effect, who put her there. With that witness, the district attorney’s office might agree to take the case against Wagner to a grand jury. According to Lana, the district attorney told her that she wants a “smoking gun.”

Dr. Michael Franco may be able to provide a missing link. Franco, a family medicine specialist in Los Angeles, was an intern at the L.A. Coroner’s Office when Natalie Wood’s body was flown to Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center from Catalina. As a volunteer intern in 1981, he wasn’t listed as a coroner’s employee and therefore would not have been questioned. Franco observed what he is certain is critical physical evidence on Natalie’s body that establishes her death was a homicide.

For 40 years, Franco has kept silent, not wanting to be pulled into a media circus. After decades of reflection, and my persuasion, he decided that coming forward was “the right thing to do.”

What Franco observed, and found suspicious, were the bruises on Natalie’s anterior thighs and shins, bruises he described as “friction burns.” He told me what struck him as wrong: “I remember the striations were in the opposite direction of somebody trying to get onto a boat. It was almost like somebody being pushed off. And because of the significant amount of the bruising in the lower anterior thighs and shins, that’s what caught my attention. She would have had to have been pushed forcefully off, or there was a force that was pulling her off, or something. The amount of noticeable bruising to the thigh shouldn’t have been there.”

Franco took it up with Dr. Noguchi. “I mentioned to him the abrasions on Natalie. I told him I was having trouble understanding them. I said that they seemed to be in the opposite direction of what one would expect as to her cause of death. I remember when I told him who I was, he hesitantly stopped doing what he was doing, looked up at me, nodded his head, didn’t say anything, and then he continued doing what he’d been doing.

“What he said was, ‘Some things are best left unsaid.’”

Noguchi’s admission momentarily confused Franco: “I wasn’t sure what that meant initially, so, I stood there.” Noguchi, he came to believe, was acknowledging a cover-up in the coroner’s office. “However it was written up, that’s all you need to know,” Noguchi went on to say, according to Franco. Franco stood there, staring at him. “Again, he had his head down and wasn’t looking at me and he wasn’t saying anything. And I thought, This is my cue to step back. So I played with that for the rest of my life.”

Now Franco is ready to share what he saw with Hernandez. “Natalie Wood’s death wasn’t an accident. Somebody pushed her. I wasn’t following the case, so I didn’t know who all the players were. I wasn’t playing detective. I wasn’t interested in all that information. All I knew was what I saw. I knew this wasn’t a simple drowning. She had some abrasions that I could come to the conclusion that she was pushed off of whatever it was she was holding on to. There’s no reason to have those unless you’re being pushed off a surface. And they were deeper than just a simple slip-off because there is some back-and-forth.”

There’s another possibility. What if Wagner dropped the dinghy to make it look like Natalie had gone ashore, which was the story he gave to police? Davern said he heard the dinghy being dropped into the water after the horrible fight he’d overheard on the rear deck, and that he saw R.J. somewhere near the dinghy. The next time Davern saw him, he was sweating, looked like he’d been in a struggle, and said the dinghy was gone.

The last words that Davern heard him say to Natalie were, “Get off my fucking boat!” In his revised police statement, Davern said that R.J. refused to let him turn on searchlights to look for Natalie.

The striations that Franco saw on her body at the autopsy are consistent with the possibility that Natalie tried to hoist herself onto the dinghy from the water. “Someone,” Franco said, “was pushing her down and wouldn’t let her stay on.”

Franco believes that the L.A. Coroner’s Office covered up the true cause of Natalie Wood’s death. “Whatever they decided wasn’t going to be questioned.”

Allan Abbott, of Abbott & Hast Mortuary, handled transportation for Westwood Mortuary, the morticians who embalmed Natalie Wood’s body. He bore witness, literally, to a cover-up, reported in his 2016 book. “Natalie,” Abbott wrote, “was dressed in a huge fur coat, and was covered in bruises from where she had ‘hit the rocks’…they chose the coat so the bruising wouldn’t be visible with an open casket.”

Lana Wood now refers to Natalie’s death as “a murder.” She seethes thinking about Guy McIlwaine, the powerful Hollywood agent who represented her sister. A few days after Natalie drowned, McIlwaine dropped by to see Lana. He’d just been to R.J.’s house, and he said that R.J. told him what happened that night on the boat. “I would tell you, but I don’t trust you,” McIlwaine told Lana. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Well,” replied McIlwaine, “someday you’re gonna say something, and I don’t want R.J. hurt. Nobody needs to be hurt anymore.”

What about Natalie? In the memoir she began but ultimately deemed too revealing to publish, Natalie wrote, “Daisy Clover faced every major crisis alone. There was nobody to pull her out of trouble. I felt there was a lot of me in Daisy.”

Natalie had no one to protect her, in life or in death. She struggled alone in the dark sea, like the tiny, brave sailboat in her favorite painting, a Courbet she kept near to her; living out her worst nightmare, with no one responding to her calls for help.

All three men on the boat with Natalie Wood that night should be held accountable for her drowning. She went off the Splendour after a fight with R.J. so heated that it could be heard on other boats, yet hours passed before anyone with Natalie called for help. That chilling fact—and their silence afterward—twines Wagner, Davern, and Walken in a Chekhovian tragedy with no resolution short of a confession.

NATALIE WOOD: The Complete Biography by Suzanne Finstad. Copyright © 2001, 2020 by Suzanne Finstad. Used by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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First pictures: Inside the yacht where actress Natalie Wood died... where 'fan' has kept her bedroom untouched for 30 years

By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 13:15 EDT, 19 November 2011

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It has been 30 years since Natalie Wood died after a night on the Splendour - but little has changed aboard in the intervening years.

The stateroom contains many of the same tiles, the same blue bed remains in exactly the same spot and the initials WW are still etched into the captain's seat.

This is the first look inside the Splendour yacht, currently docked in the Hawaiian harbour of Oahu, where the Hollywood actress met her tragic end.

Memories: The boat has undergone some renovations, but many details have been preserved

Tribute: The stateroom with the blue bed, dubbed 'Natalie's Room' still has the same tiles it did when Robert Wagner owned the vessel

Exterior: The Splendour, where actress Natalie Wood died, is currently docked in the harbour of Oahu in Hawaii

Former United Airlines flight attendant Ron Nelson bought the boat from Robert Wagner in 1986.

He carried out small renovations, before taking two friends on a trip to Catalina Island, where the actress died. He said it was a 'last goodbye to Natalie'. 

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Afterwards, they made the two week trip to Hawaii where he has spent 10 years restoring the boat. He said he was now almost ready to begin chartering voyages.

He has tried to keep his makeover as close to the original as possible, and has kept the stateroom with the blue bed, dubbed 'Natalie's Room', and most of the tiles.

Home: The Splendour is currently docked in the Hawaiian harbour of Oahu

Purchased: United Airlines flight attendant Ron Nelson bought the boat in 1986

Reminder: New owner Ron Nelson with the initials WW etched onto the captain's seat

The initials WW are still etched onto the captain's seat, just as they were when Wagner and Natalie owned the boat.

Nelson said the 60ft boat's history was one of the reasons why he bought it, and told Hawaii's KITV.com said: 'I have read pretty much every article ever written about her death.'

And asked whether the yacht carried Wood's spirit, he said: 'I won't say yay or nay whether I believe or not.

'There's been a lot of strange things that have happened on the boat.'

Preserved: Many aspects of the Splendour remain the same

Out on deck: The investigation into Natalie Wood's death has now re-opened

The first look inside the boat comes as police re-open the investigation into Natalie Wood's mysterious death 30 years ago.

Robert Wagner is not being treated as a suspect.

Christopher Walken, who was on the boat the night the West Side Story actress died, has hired a lawyer in response to the new inquiry into the case, which was originally ruled an accidental drowning.

Wagner, 81, yesterday issued a statement welcoming the fresh push for evidence from authorities.

And Nelson revealed investigators had contacted him as they wanted to visit the yacht as part of their probe.

Orders: New owner Ron Nelson sitting in the captain's chair of the Splendour

Together: Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner embrace on their yacht Splendour two weeks before the tragedy. The couple married twice. First in 1957 before divorcing six years later and then again in 1972

Friends: Ms Wood with her co-star Christopher Walken - who was on the boat the night she died - during filming of her last motion picture Brainstorm

Share or comment on this article: Natalie Wood death: Pictures from inside the yacht where actress was on night she died

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Owner of ‘Splendour’, the Yacht Once Owned by Hollywood Stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner, Becomes Instant Celebrity

The Honolulu resident, who has had a mooring permit in the a small boat harbor in Honolulu, is the owner of the Splendour , a yacht once owned by Hollywood stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner.

The yacht, which will soon be inspected by Los Angeles investigators, may be a key part of the investigation reopened yesterday into the 1981 drowning death of Wood.

Reached by phone today, his wife said a number of media outlets are asking for interviews.

The Los Angeles Police Department said today in a press conference that using new DNA technology, investigators will examine the boat that Wood, Wagner and their friend Christopher Walken were on the night the actress died 30 years ago. They have not disclosed what they expect to find.

The boat captain Dennis Davern, who was with the trio the night Wood fell off the boat and drown, alleges that Wagner is responsible for Wood’s death and that he lied for Wagner in the past as a part of a cover up.

This comes as 48 Hour Mysteries and Vanity Fair magazine are about to release a special investigative report on the star’s demise.

48 Hours Presents Vanity Fair: Hollywood Scandal airs Saturday, Nov. 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, the network’s web site said.

Police so far maintain that Wagner is not a target of the investigation.

However, Wood’s sister also claims Wagner is responsible for the beloved star’s death.

She told TMZ  that Wagner  “left her to drown” and told the captain to ‘Leave her there, teach her a lesson.”

The captain said publicly today that he was prevented by Wagner from calling the U.S. Coast Guard for four hours.

Reports are that Wood, Wagner and Walken were drinking heavily that night, and Wood and Wagner had a volatile fight over whether Walken wanted to sleep with her. The captain claims to have turned up his music so he would not have to hear them argue.

The question police have to answer now is whether Wood fell, or slipped trying to get off the boat into a smaller dingy, or was pushed into the water while they were sailing off of Catalina Island.

Marti Rulli, who authored “ Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour” in September 2009 could not be reached for comment, but her investigation – and the other new publicity surrounding her death – may have contributed to police reopening the case.

Wagner has not made a statement about the LA police department’s decision.

A source close to the Wagner family told Hawaii Reporter that Wagner has been cooperating with the police and they don’t believe the captain’s story is credible.

A statement released from Wagner’s publicist is similar: “We trust they will evaluate whether any new information relating to the death of Natalie Wood Wagner is valid, and that it comes from a credible source or sources other than those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death.”

Wood, who was nominated three times for Oscars for her roles in West Side Story and Rebel with out a Cause , also starred  as a child in such films as the Christmas classic Miracle On 34th Street and The Ghost And Mrs. Muir .

Meanwhile when the Los Angeles police will arrive in Honolulu is part of the mystery – at least for now.

Honolulu Police Department has not been contacted so far by Los Angeles authorities to aid in the investigation, according to Caroline Sluyter, spokesperson for HPD.

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Natalie Wood's Death Boat Ready for Open Water Again

Owner of the splendour , the yacht the actress disappeared from in 1981, has finished renovations and is taking cruise reservations.

Robert Wagner ditched the boat where Natalie Wood spent her final hours years ago.

The Splendour has passed through several owners since and now, just as police are reexamining the strange case of the actress' death after 30 years, it is ready to set sail, E! News has exclusively learned.

First of all, where can people book a cruise on the infamous boat?

MORE: Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death: A Who's Who Guide

The Splendour , which Los Angeles Sheriff's homicide detectives say they'll be visiting as part of their investigation, has been docked in Honolulu for the past 25 years, since Ron Nelson bought it at a boat show in Long Beach, Calif.

Nelson's renovations on the pleasure cruiser have been "ongoing" since he brought it to Oahu in 1986 and now folks are calling him "non-stop" about it, he says—especially now that people are wondering once again whether or not the Splendour was the scene of a crime, rather than an accidental drowning.

It was eventually presumed that Wood slipped and fallen from the deck of the boat on the evening of Nov. 28, 1981, after consuming a few too many glasses of wine while docked off of Catalina Island with Wagner and her Brainstorm costar Christopher Walken —neither of whom are now suspects, according to investigators.

READ: Natalie Wood Case: What's the Yacht Captain's Motive?

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Dennis Davern , the former skipper of the boat and a longtime friend of Wood's, recently told detectives that he didn't tell the whole truth about what he witnessed that night 30 years ago, and then he said on Today that he felt Wagner was responsible for what happened to his then-wife.

And Nelson most certainly knows all about the lore—"I've read pretty much every article ever written about it," he says—and he tells E! News he never worried or felt superstitious about buying something with such an eerie history attached to it.

He says the boat will be ready to charter within the next two or three weeks and he's taking reservations at [email protected]. "As long as I own it, this is where it will be," he says.

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Natalie Wood

Updated on: February 1, 2018 / 5:29 PM EST / CBS News

In November 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department re-opened its investigation in the death of actress Natalie Wood nearly 30 years after the actress drowned in the waters off Southern California. It is one of Hollywood's most enduring mysteries.  

More than 36 years after her death, investigators spoke to "48 Hours" about what they learned. 

The drowning death of actress Natalie Wood in 1981 shocked the world. At the time of her death, Wood had been enjoying Thanksgiving weekend on the Splendour, the family yacht, with her husband, actor Robert Wagner, boat captain Dennis Davern, and her "Brainstorm" co-star, actor Christopher Walken.  After a two-week investigation, Wood's death was ruled an accidental drowning.

Dogged Investigators

Los Angeles County Sheriff's investigators, Lt. John Corina, left, and Det. Ralph Hernandez, have been working the Natalie Wood case ever since they reopened it in November 2011. Here, the detectives are pictured outside of Robert Wagner's home in California.

Death Investigation Reopened

In 2011, 30 years after Natalie Wood's death, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened the case. At the press conference, Lt. John Corina, center, was asked if Wood's husband, Robert Wagner was considered a suspect.  Corina responded, "No."

Natalie Wood's Death Certificate

Authorities amended actress Natalie Wood's death certificate on Aug. 1, 2012, to reflect some of the lingering questions about how the actress died in the waters off Catalina Island in November 1981. The changes include changing her manner of death to "Drowning and other undetermined factors" and adding the statement "Circumstances not clearly established" to address the question how did Wood end up in the water.

Natalie Wood's fatal voyage

What Happened That Night?

Years after Natalie Wood's death, Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour, changed his story about what happened that night, sold it to tabloid magazines, and collaborated on a tell-all book. But Davern says he was motivated by his conscience. In 2011, he told "48 Hours," "What I really want is to give Natalie a voice." He also said, "I believe that Robert Wagner was with her up until the moment she went into the water."

Homicide detectives with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department aboard the Splendour on their first trip to Hawaii in December 2011 to re-investigate the death of actress Natalie Wood.  Natalie Wood's death re-investigated in Hawaii

Dennis Davern, in yellow, former captain of the Splendour, with Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. homicide detectives in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

The Splendour

The 55-foot yacht Splendour, belonging to actor Robert Wagner and his wife, actress Natalie Wood, sits in the waters off Catalina Island in Santa Catalina, Calif., near the site where Harbor Patrol personnel and lifeguards discovered the body of Wood, an apparent drowning victim, Nov. 29, 1981. 

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood's yacht, Splendour. Wood drowned in 1981, after a night of partying with husband Wagner and "Brainstorm" co-star Christopher Walken on the couple's yacht anchored off Santa Catalina Island. 

A Life in the Movies

Natalie Wood got her first role at the age of four in the movie "Happy Land" (1943). By 1946, at age eight, she was making $1,000 a week.

Pictured: Natalie Wood with Orson Welles in "Tomorrow is Forever" (1946).

Iconic Role

Edmund Gwenn, as Kris Kringle, greets Natalie Wood in a scene from the 1947 Christmas classic, "Miracle on 34th Street."

Natalie Wood's Career

Young Natalie Wood played the daughter of Gene Tierney in the spectral romantic fantasy "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1947).

Actress Jane Wyatt fixes a hair ribbon for actress Natalie Wood in Hollywood, Calif., on Oct. 26, 1949. 

Wood continued playing roles of young girls until the age of 17, where she landed the role of Judy in the film "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), opposite James Dean and Sal Mineo.

Natalie Wood and James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as the girlfriend of Dean's troubled youth.

Actress Natalie Wood pictured in 1955. 

By 1950, Wood was the queen of fan magazines and the second biggest actress next to Elizabeth Taylor. During her career, Wood made 56 films for TV and the big screen, among them "West Side Story" (1961).

After spending years on the trail of an Indian party that kidnapped his young niece, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) finally comes upon Debbie, now 15 (played by Natalie Wood), in the John Ford classic "The Searchers" (1956), which also starred Jeffrey Hunter.

Movie Stars Marry

Actress Natalie Wood and actor Robert Wagner cut their wedding cake after their wedding in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Dec. 28, 1957. They divorced four years later - and remarried in 1972.

Natalie Wood starred with Gene Kelly in the romantic drama "Marjorie Morningstar" (1958).

Natalie Wood and husband Robert Wagner on the set of "All the Fine Young Cannibals" (1960). 

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in "Splendor in the Grass" (1961). Wood received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the tale of forbidden love.

Richard Beymer as Tony and Natalie Wood as Maria in the Oscar-winning musical "West Side Story" (1961). The film received 11 Academy Awards.

Natalie Wood starred as the stripper Louise Hovick - a.k.a. Gypsy Rose Lee - in the film version of the musical "Gypsy" (1962), which also starred Rosalind Russell as "Mama Rose." The real Gypsy Rose Lee visited the set during filming and offered Wood some pointers on stripping.

Actors Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood chat together at the Cannes Festival in May 1962. They were promoting their film, "Splendor in the Grass," a drama about teen love.

Natalie Wood in 1963.

Natalie Wood received a third Oscar nomination for her starring role in "Love With the Proper Stranger" (1963), in which she played a salesgirl who becomes pregnant after a brief affair with a musician, played by Steve McQueen.

Actress Natalie Wood, wearing Yves Saint Laurent, poses in Paris, Sept. 19, 1964.

In "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964), inspired by the advice book for young women by Helen Gurley Brown, Woods played psychologist "Helen Brown," who becomes the target of a tabloid reporter (Tony Curtis) seeking an expose.

Actor Paul Newman and actress Natalie Wood pose with their statuettes at the 23rd Golden Globe Awards dinner in Hollywood, Calif., Feb. 1, 1966. Wood received the World Film Favorite Female award and Newman was honored with the World Film Favorite Male award.

A picture taken in the 1960s shows actress Natalie Wood during a trip to France.

The counter-culture comedy about swinging couples, "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969), starred Elliott Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp and Dyan Cannon.

Wagner & Wood Remarry

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, who had divorced in 1962, were remarried on a borrowed yacht, the Ramblin' Rose, in 1972.

Romance Rekindled

Actors Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood pose at the Dorchester Hotel in London, England, April 23, 1972. The couple had one daughter together, and each had a daughter from previous marriages.

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood

Actress Natalie Wood and actor Robert Wagner arrive at Nice airport in Nice, France on May 4, 1972.

Playwright Tennessee Williams, left, actress Natalie Wood, and Robert Wagner pose for photographers at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1976. Wood and Wagner starred in a 1976 TV remake of Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Natalie Wood, her children Natasha, center, Courtney, right, and her husband, Robert Wagner, arrive at a London airport July 4, 1976.

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood are shown arriving for the 50th annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, April 3, 1978. At the time Wagner was starring in the TV series, "Hart to Hart."

Natalie Wood attends the 51st annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles on April 9, 1979. 

Playwright Mart Crowley, left, with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner on the couple's yacht, Splendour.

Actress Natalie Wood is seen on Jan. 17, 1979. 

The actors are shown in 1980.

Wood's Final Film

Natalie Wood died during production of the science fiction thriller "Brainstorm." Here she is pictured with co-stars Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson.

The gravesite of actress Natalie Wood Wagner is seen in the Westwood Village Memorial Park. Wood, a three-time Oscar nominee famous for roles in "West Side Story," "Rebel Without a Cause" and other Hollywood hits, was 43 when she died in November 1981.

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Marla adams, dina on ‘the young and the restless,’ dies at 85.

The Emmy winner also appeared on Broadway, played Natalie Wood's BFF in 'Splendor in the Grass' and starred on 'The Secret Storm.'

By Mike Barnes

Mike Barnes

Senior Editor

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Marla Adams, the Emmy-winning soap opera veteran who starred as the scheming Dina Abbott Mergeron during parts of five decades on The Young and the Restless , has died. She was 85.

Adams died Thursday in Los Angeles, Matt Kane, director of media and talent for Y&R , announced.

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Adams joined Y&R in 1982 but left when her three-year contract was up. She returned to Genoa City for brief stints in 1991, 1996 and 2008 before being asked by head writer-producer Sally Sussman to go it again in 2017.

“I remember when [Sussman told her], ‘I’m going to bring you back on The Young and the Restless , but you’ve got Alzheimer’s,’ and I said, ‘What!? You’re bringing me back so you can kill me off?'” she recalled in 2020. “And she said, ‘Oh no, it’ll be about a year.’ That dissolved into four years.”

Viewers watched the Abbott matriarch slowly and heartbreakingly unravel before dying in an episode in October 2020. In her final moments, she addressed her kids, Traci (Beth Maitland), Jack (Peter Bergman) and Ashley (Eileen Davidson), before being welcomed into heaven by her first husband, John Abbott ( Jerry Douglas ).

Eight months later, Adams received the lone Daytime Emmy of her long career.

“From all the characters I’ve played, from The Secret Storm to Broadway, this has been the most astonishing, amazing part I’ve had the privilege to play,” she said .

Marla Adams was born on Aug. 28, 1938, in Ocean City, New Jersey. She was named Miss Diamond Jubilee at the 75th anniversary celebration of her hometown in 1954 and graduated two years later from Ocean City High School.

Adams made her big-screen debut in the period drama Splendor in the Grass , which was Warren Beatty ‘s first movie, too.

After Belle made life miserable for Jada Rowland’s Amy Ames on The Secret Storm , she moved to Los Angeles when the soap was canceled and guest-starred on episodes of The New Dick Van Dyke Show , Harry O , Adam-12 , Starsky and Hutch , Marcus Welby, M.D. , Barnaby Jones , The Love Boat , Emergency! and Archie Bunker’s Place before landing on Y&R .

The actress also portrayed Mildred Deal on ABC’s General Hospital in 1963; the conniving Myrna Clegg — between turns by Carolyn Jones and Marj Dusay — on CBS’ Capitol in 1983; Helen Mullin on NBC’s Generations in 1989-90; Beth Logan on CBS’ The Bold and the Beautiful in 1990-91; and Dr. Claire McIntyre on NBC’s Days of Our Lives in 1999.

She was also nominated for a Daytime Emmy for her turn as Dina in 2018 before winning one three years later.

“On behalf of the entire company of The Young and the Restless , we send our deepest sympathies to Marla’s family,” Josh Griffith, executive producer and head writer of Y&R , said in a statement. “We’re so grateful and in awe of Marla’s incredible performance as Dina Mergeron as both Marla and Dina made an unforgettable mark on [the show].”

In her later years, Adams said she was still getting spotted in public. “I’m very big at Walmart,” she said with a laugh. “When I was younger, I was recognized all the time, and now that I’m older, people are like, ‘Is that her? No, that’s not her. It couldn’t be! Just some old lady in sneakers and sweats.'”

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