Natalie Wood had been acting since she was a small child, and by 1981 she had three Academy Award nominations and a second marriage to the television star Robert Wagner, whom she had first married in 1957, divorced and wed again in 1972. That November she was in the middle of shooting a science-fiction film, Brainstorm, with Christopher Walken. Over the Thanksgiving weekend the couple took Walken out to Santa Catalina Island, twenty-odd miles off the Los Angeles coast, on Splendour, Wagner’s 58-foot motor yacht, with its captain, Dennis Davern.
What happened
On Saturday, November 28, the group went ashore for dinner and drinks at a restaurant in Two Harbors and returned to the yacht, moored in Isthmus Cove, late in the evening. Accounts of what followed have shifted over the years. The drinking went on after they were back aboard, and there was an argument; Wagner denied it at first and acknowledged it decades later in his memoir. Wagner’s spokesman said at the time that Wagner went to bed and, finding his wife and the boat’s small inflatable dinghy both gone, assumed she had taken it out, as she had done before; when she did not return, he raised the alarm with the harbor patrol. Two people on a nearby boat later said they heard a woman calling for help during the night.
A search began in the early hours. At about eight on Sunday morning Wood’s body was found in the water roughly a mile from Splendour, near Blue Cavern Point. The dinghy was found beached not far away.
The investigation
County coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled the death an accidental drowning, with hypothermia contributing. The autopsy put her blood alcohol at 0.14 percent and detected small amounts of an anti-nausea medicine and an analgesic, either of which would strengthen the alcohol’s effect. It also listed bruises on her arms and legs and a scrape on her cheek without saying how they got there. Noguchi’s view was that she had been drinking and may have lost her footing while trying to get into the dinghy, then been unable to get out of the cold water. Within days the case was closed.
It reopened thirty years later. In 2011 Davern said publicly that he had not told investigators everything in 1981, that the couple had quarreled that night, and that a search was not started as soon as it could have been. The sheriff’s department sent homicide detectives back to the case. In the summer of 2012 the chief medical examiner, Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, issued an amended death certificate changing the cause from drowning to drowning and other undetermined factors and noting that how she entered the water was not clearly established. A ten-page supplement released in January 2013 said the number and placement of the bruises, together with the lack of injuries to the head or face, pointed to bruising that happened before she reached the sea, but that the evidence was too thin to call the death non-accidental.
The explanations
Three broad readings survive. The first is Noguchi’s: an intoxicated woman on a dark, wet swim step, a fall, and a cold sea. The second, pressed by her sister Lana Wood, rejects any idea that Natalie, who was afraid of deep water, would have left the yacht alone at night. The third is that something occurred aboard before she went over, a possibility the 2013 report would not exclude. In February 2018 Lieutenant John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told CBS’s 48 Hours that the department now regarded Wagner as a person of interest, saying his accounts did not match those of other witnesses; the department said he was not a suspect, and Detective Ralph Hernandez said investigators could prove neither a homicide nor an accident. Wagner has consistently denied any role in her death and has declined to be interviewed since the case was reopened.
Where it stands
No charges have been filed and the sheriff’s department lists the case as open. The physical evidence that might have answered the main question, how and when Wood entered the water, was never collected in 1981 and cannot be recovered now. Until someone produces new testimony that can be tested, the death certificate’s own phrase is the most accurate summary available: not clearly established.