wagner's yacht splendour

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.

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Yacht tied to natalie wood’s drowning removed from harbor.

• By Star-Advertiser staff
• Jan. 30, 2020

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.

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. Read more

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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.

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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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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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Natalie Wood’s Fatal Voyage

By Sam Kashner

I found my love in Avalon beside the bay, I left my love in Avalon and sail’d away. —From the song “Avalon,” made popular by Al Jolson.

‘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 .

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.

The 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.”

By Jack McCordick

By Katey Rich

By Chris Murphy

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.

In 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 stern 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 yarn 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.

It’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 well-to-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Cub, 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 Method-trained 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.

At 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 émigré 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.

Important 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.)

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.

The 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 stand-in 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.

With 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.

After 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.”

In 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 Al 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.

It 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, born 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 Seiten-sprung, the German word for switching partners while you’re dancing.

Wood 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 forged 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.”

These 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 best-actress 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.

Davern 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 chewing-gum 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 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.”

The 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.

The 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.”

At 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 broken-glass 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.”

At 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 1:30 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.

With 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.

Duane 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.

As 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 door—somebody 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.”

On 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.

Once 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 co-author, 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 off-camera. 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.”

In 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.

Photos: Natalie Wood Through the Years

Sam Kashner

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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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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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Revisiting the night of Natalie Wood’s tragic…

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Revisiting the night of natalie wood’s tragic death.

Natalie Wood and British film producer Richard Gregson are photographed on their wedding day on May 30, 1969, outside the Holy Virgin Mary Church following their Russian Orthodox wedding ceremony in Los Angeles. The couple had a daughter, Natasha, in 1970, but divorced in 1972, after Wood reportedly had Gregson escorted from the family home after she discovered he was having an affair with her secretary.

Bettmann/Getty Images/Bettmann Archive

Actor Robert Wagner bends over to kiss flower covered casket of his wife, actress Natalie Wood, during graveside ceremonies for her at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery.

Natalie Wood poses with her pet poodle, Fifi, on on Oct. 28, 1955, at a studio in Hollywood.

Craig Molenhouse/AP

Robert Wagner and his step-daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, right; and his daughter Courtney, left; pause for a few moments at the grave of Natalie Wood at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on May 31, 1982, in Los Angeles.

Natalie Wood is photographed on Nov. 25, 1959, in Los Angeles.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

From left, Natasha Gregson Wagner, 11, Katharine Wagner, 17, and Courtney Brooke Wagner, 7, leave the gravesite Natalie Wood after funeral services for her at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on Dec. 2, 1981, in Los Angeles. Natasha is Wood's daughter with her ex-husband, Richard Gregson; Katharine is Wagner's daughter with his ex-wife, Marion Marshall and Courtney is Wood's and Wagner's daughter.

Courtesy Lana Wood via Newsmakers/Getty Images

Lana Wood, left, is seen with her sister, Natalie Wood in this undated photograph.

Steve Wood/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Actor Robert Wagner and former wife Natalie Wood, on board the Queen Elizabeth II in April 1972.

Robert Wagner and his wife, Natalie Wood, arrive for the premiere of "Some Came Running" on Dec. 18, 1958, in Los Angleles.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Natalie Wood seen in 1981.

Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Recently remarried couple Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner arrive at the world premiere of the film "The Godfather" on Aug. 24, 1972, in London.

New York Daily News

Nov. 30, 1981: Natalie Wood Dead -- Natalie Wood's body was found floating in the Pacific Ocean on Nov. 29, 1981, off Catalina Island near the Southern California coast.

Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner are photographed on Aug. 28, 1957, four months before their first marriage.

Natalie Wood, 33, is with her almost 1-year-old daughter, Natasha, on Sept. 19, 1971, at Heathrow Airport in London.

Jack Albin/Getty Images

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood leave the church just after their wedding on Dec. 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Ariz. It wasn't long before the couple separated in June 1961, and divorced in April 1962.

Paul Harris/Getty Images/Getty Images

Splendour, the boat owned by Robert Wagner, docked off Catalina Island the day after Natalie Wood drowned.

Robert Wagner holds the hand of his 7-year-old daughter, Courtney, as they leave Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery after funeral services for his wife, Natalie Wood, on Dec. 2, 1981, in Los Angeles.

Actress Jane Wyatt, right, adjusts the hair ribbon for actress Natalie Wood on Oct. 26, 1949, in Hollywood.

Paul Harris/Getty Images

The body bag containing Natalie Woods body is carried to a Sherrifs helicopter before flying it back to Los Angeles for an autopsy on Nov. 30, 1981.

Roger Jackson/Central Press/Getty Images

Actors and spouses Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood are photographed on April 23, 1972, following their reconciliation in Great Britain. While Wood's divorce to Richard Gregson was being finalized, she got back together with her ex-husband Wagner, and the couple remarried on July 16, 1972, slightly over ten years after the divorce of their first marriage to each other.

Natalie Wood holds her two children Natasha, left, and Courtney at a studio party on Aug. 17, 1979, in Los Angeles.

Robert Wagner and his former wife actress Natalie Wood, divorced ten years ago, leave from Heathrow Airport on May 4, 1972, in London to start a two week holiday in Nice. They arrived in Great Britain from the U.S. on April 23, on Queen Elizabeth 2. Wagner has been launching his new film, "Madame Sin" in this country.

Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Natalie Wood poses with her second Golden Globe, the Henrietta Award for "World Film Favorites," on Feb. 28, 1966, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Earl Leaf/ Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Natalie Wood, 18, and actor Robert Wagner, 26, attend a Paramount Ice Cream Party on July 23, 1956, in Los Angeles. Wood, who had reportedly long-admired Wagner as a teenager, also went on a date with the star on her 18th birthday, three days earlier.

Actress Natalie Wood poses in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 25, 1959.

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Natalie Wood is on the set of the film "The Great Race" on Sept. 18, 1964, in Paris.

Robert Wagner sports a mustache as he and his wife Natalie Wood arrive for the 51st Annual Academy Awards on April 9, 1979, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

Splendour, the yacht owned by Robert Wagner, is docked off Catalina Island on Nov. 30, 1981, the day after Wood's body was found floating in the Pacific Ocean, off Catalina Island near the Southern California coast. Wood drowned after falling into the water from the boat, which was moored off the coast of Catalina Island. Captain Dennis Davern and Wagner's friend and Wood's co-star in "Brainstorm," actor Christopher Walken, were also aboard that fateful evening. Amid changing details of his story, Wagner says he last saw his wife after she went to their room while he and Walken stayed up talking the early morning hours of November 29.

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Natalie Wood is seen circa 1980, in Los Angeles.

William Lovelace/Express/Getty Images

Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood attend the Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 9, 1962, in Santa Monica, Calif. Wood's performance received rave reviews and garnered her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Fe

Christopher Walken joined Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner on a yacht the night the actress drowned.

Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Natalie Wood is photographed as she prepares for her wedding to Richard Gregson, circa 1969.

The body bag containing Natalie Wood's body is carried to a Sheriff's helicopter on Nov. 30, 1981, before flying back to Los Angeles for an autopsy.

The inflatable dinghy that Natalie Wood was initially said to have used to leave the Splendour before she drowned, is seen on Nov. 30, 1981, moored to a dock on Catalina Island, off the Southern California coast, secured after it washed up on the rocks on Catalina Island. Before the case was reopened decades later, police originally said her death was accidental and a coroner found that she had drunk seven or eight glasses of wine before the incident. Wood's bruised body was found floating in the water on November 29, a mile away from the boat and dinghy.

Robert Wagner bends over to kiss the flower-covered casket of his wife, Natalie Wood, during the graveside ceremony for her at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on Dec. 2, 1981, in Los Angeles.

Damian Dovarganes/AP

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau Lt. John Corina, far left, discusses the most recent details of the Natalie Wood death investigation at a news conference on Feb. 5, 2018, in Los Angeles. Officials, seen behind from left are, Comdr. Steve Katz, Capt. Christopher Bergner and detective Ralph Hernandez. There's renewed interest in the decades-old death of Wood, with the lead detective in the case saying her widower, actor Robert Wagner, 87, is considered a person of interest. Her death was initially declared an accident, but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role.

Former child actress and American film star Natalie Wood relaxes in her dressing room on Dec. 10, 1962, in Great Britain.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Natalie Wood, formerly Natasha Gurdin, is photographed circa 1960. The iconic actress, born on July 20, 1938, gained fame as a child movie star for her role in 'Miracle on 34th Street' (1947) and went on to receive three Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role before she was 25 in the films 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955), 'Splendor in the Grass' (1961) and 'Love with the Proper Stranger' (1963), among numerous award nominations and three Golden Globe wins. Decades later, her body was found floating in the Pacific Ocean on Nov. 29, 1981, off Catalina Island near the Southern California coast following a night aboard Splendour, her family's yacht, with her husband, Robert Wagner, her 'Brainstorm' co-star Christopher Walken and the boat's captain, Dennis Davern. Wood's death is still shrouded in mystery. She was 43 when she died. In 2018, after years of following up on scores of tips after the case was re-opened by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in 2011, and Wood's autopsy report was revised in 2013 to include bruises on her arms and legs that seemed to be fresh and possibly having occurred before she entered the water, Wagner was labeled a 'person of interest' by one of the lead investigators. Wagner has refused to speak to authorities about the event after his attorney stated in 2013 that he had nothing to do with his wife's death.

Natalie Wood is photographed on Jan. 17, 1979.

Actress Natalie Wood joined her husband Robert Wagner and actor Christopher Walken in late November 1981 on her family’s yacht, Splendour, off Santa Catalina Island in California.

Little did she know it would be her last night alive.

The actress, who won three Golden Globes, was reportedly discovered missing around midnight on Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend by either the captain of the boat, Dennis Davern, or Wagner. Also missing was the boat’s dinghy.

It wasn’t until the next morning, Nov. 29, that the 43-year-old’s bruised body was found floating a mile away from both the boat and the dinghy.

She had been wearing a flannel nightgown, knee-high socks and a red down jacket.

An initial investigation by police concluded that her death was an accident and that Wood took the dinghy to shore, slipped and fell into the water. The L.A. coroner at the time said Wood launched the dinghy and fell overboard and died of hypothermia.

In the hours before Wood went missing, the four passengers dined at the restaurant Doug’s Harbor Reef, where staff later said they remember them drinking heavily and that Wood’s behavior was volatile.

Waitresses have said Wood was flirting with Walken after they had several bottles of champagne.

The restaurant’s manager, Don Whiting, warned the harbormaster to keep an eye out for their safety as they headed back to the Splendour, Vanity Fair reported . He also told police that “he was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife” after a glass was broken or thrown.

Theories of foul play have been swirling ever since Wood’s death.

Wagner and Wood were one of Hollywood’s iconic on-again, off-again couples, married from 1957 to 1962 before divorcing. They remarried in 1972 and remained together until her death.

The actress had famously publicly reiterated her fear of dark water and had said she didn’t know how to swim.

Davern maintains that the fall wasn’t an accident — but rather the result of jealousy, fighting and drama that played out over the weekend, fueled by alcohol. He recalled to Vanity Fair that Wood was “definitely flirting” with Walken.

Wood was allegedly jealous of Wagner’s relationship on-set with William Holden’s girlfriend, Stefanie Powers, and Wood reportedly had an infatuation with Walken that Wagner couldn’t bear to witness.

Wagner maintains Wood’s death was an accident and when the case was reopened in 2011, he refused to cooperate with investigators.

In his 2008 memoir, “Pieces of My Heart,” he wrote, “nobody knows” what caused her to fall of the boat — but that her disappearance followed an argument.

“There are only two possibilities: either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy,” Wagner wrote. “But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened.”

He said the last time he saw her she was fixing her hair at the vanity in the bathroom.

“I went below, and Natalie wasn(1)t there,” he continued in “Pieces of My Heart.” “Strange. I went back up on the deck and looked around for her and noticed the dinghy was gone. Stranger. I remember wondering if she(1)d taken the dinghy because of the argument, and then I thought, No way, because she was terrified of dark water, and besides that, the dinghy fired up so loudly, and we would have heard it, whether we were in the salon or on deck.”

In a 2002 Larry King interview he said he was in “total shock.”

“I don’t think you ever overcome it,” Wagner told Larry King in 2014. “And why should you?”

Walken — who was starring with Wood in “Brainstorm” when she died — discussed the night of Wood’s death publicly for the first time two years later.

“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,” Walken said. “It was an accident.”

In his memoir, Wagner admitted to getting into a fight with Walken on the yacht and smashing a bottle on the table after a night of drinking.

Davern changed his story from his initial report, which is what led investigators to reopen the case in 2011. He recalled an argument and fighting between the couple.

Wood was accompanied by Davern to shore the night before she went missing because Wood reportedly couldn’t handle the tension on the boat, according to the captain. Wood and Wagner stayed at the Pavilion Lodge in two separate rooms, where a receptionist said they both appeared to be intoxicated.

The next morning Walken woke up to Wood asking if he was going to stay as she was going to take the sea plane black. She ended up remaining on the boat and making breakfast.

“Everyone acted like nothing happened,” Davern recalled. “And everything was beautiful again.”

It was revealed Thursday that Wagner was a “person of interest” in Wood’s murder, a suspicion her sister Lana Wood had all along.

“Only RJ [Wagner] and Natalie know what happened,” she told Piers Morgan in 2011. “And only one of them can speak.”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in an upcoming “48 Hours” special that after continuing the investigation over the years, Wagner, now 87, is considered a person of interest since he was the last person to see the star.

“As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s more of a person of interest now,” L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant John Corina said. “I mean, we know now that he was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared.”

“Natalie Wood: Death in Dark Water” will air on Feb. 3 at 10 p.m. on CBS, featuring new witnesses, evidence and theories as to what happened the night of her death.

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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 .

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Natalie Wood death: 48 Hours documentary reveals details of why Robert Wagner is now 'person of interest'

Detectives tell cbs programme they have witnesses who can corroborate the evidence of yacht skipper dennis davern, who claims he heard the actor in a drunken row with his wife at the stern of the boat, article bookmarked.

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She was found floating face down 100 yards from shore, a woman who had declared herself “terrified of water , dark water, seawater”.

The actress Natalie Wood, once “the most beautiful teenager in the world”, a luminous talent who garnered three Oscar nominations before she was 25, was dead from drowning aged 43.

This, the world was soon told, had been a tragic accident. James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause co-star had died after falling from the 60ft yacht Splendour she shared with her husband Robert Wagner, of TV’s Hart to Hart.

Just two weeks after the actress was found dead off California’s Catalina Island, the case was closed: “Strictly accidental”, ruled the Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas T Noguchi.

Ms Wood had probably slipped and fallen into the water on the night of 28 November 1981 as she tried, on her own, to untie the yacht’s 13ft inflatable dinghy and climb into it.

The grief-stricken Mr Wagner took to his bedroom, refusing all visitors including the actress Elizabeth Taylor.

“If I'd been there,” he wrote decades later, “I could have done something. I wasn’t.

“I would have done anything in the world to protect her. Anything. I lost a woman I loved with all my heart.”

Now though, a very different version of events has emerged.

Mr Wagner, the grieving husband, has now been described by the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department as “a person of interest” in the case.

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• Robert Wagner 'person of interest' in death of Natalie Wood

And in a CBS 48 Hours documentary broadcast on Saturday night, Mr Wagner was recast as a jealous husband, angry at the attention his wife was paying to Christopher Walken, her co-star in the upcoming thriller Brainstorm.

Aged 38 to Wagner’s 51, an Oscar nominee to Wagner’s film career in B-movies, Walken had been invited onto the yacht despite Hollywood rumours about how close he was getting to Wood.

The 48 Hours documentary didn’t just repeat the testimony of the yacht’s captain Dennis Davern, that Wagner had smashed a wine bottle and screamed at Walken – “Do you want to f*** my wife?”- before having a violent drunken row, alone, with Wood, and telling her “Get off my f***ing boat”.

The programme went further and said a pair of detectives had now found two new witnesses who could for the first time corroborate Mr Davern’s evidence of a row between Wagner and Wood near the stern of the yacht.

One witness supposedly heard the row. The other, 48 Hours reported , “Saw figures, a male and a female, whose voices they recognised as being Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood arguing in the back of the boat.”

The witnesses were not named, nor were their whereabouts when they heard the row made public. But the detectives said they were “very credible”, and 48 Hours reported that they also backed Davern – who first went fully public in 2011 – in one potentially sinister detail: they claimed the argument stopped suddenly, to be followed by complete silence.

The detectives, it should be said, have not declared Mr Wagner as a suspect in the case. Indeed, the 87-year-old actor has never been named as a suspect and has never wavered from his insistence that he was both grief-stricken and innocent when his wife died.

But now, inevitably, speculation is focusing on where Mr Wagner’s showbiz image might end and his reality begin.

It is hard to miss the irony that when his wife died after disappearing from a 60ft yacht, Mr Wagner was the star of the popular TV series Hart to Hart : “Millionaire sleuths solve mysteries while enjoying wedded bliss,” was how one fan remembered it fondly.

“My favourite part was to see such a happy and nice looking couple as Jonathan and Jennifer [Hart]”, remembered another fan.

“The people they fought were incidental to the show to me,” she added.

Of course they were. On TV, the baddies – who most weeks were murderers – were always caught and the mystery neatly resolved by the end of every episode. Allowing the fabulously wealthy Harts to get on with living the American dream.

“What I liked most about the show,” wrote the fan, “Was how close the Harts were and also how very happily married.”

Which was precisely the role America ordained for Wood and Wagner when they first married in 1957.

She was the 19-year-old named by LIFE magazine as “the most beautiful teenager in the world”.

He was the 27-year-old “golden boy” with matinee idol looks. Their marriage was described as " the glittering union of the 20th Century" .

• Riddle of Natalie Wood's final hours

“People expected [their] place to be the last word in the American dream,” recalled their friend , the playwright Mart Crowley, “A doll's house with dolls living in it.”

And yet by 1962, they were divorcing, with Ms Wood alleging “mental cruelties” by her husband.

Robert Wagner once told a television interviewer: “It was basically my inadequacy that didn’t make it work”.

48 Hours has now alleged more disturbing detail. The documentary said the detectives had traced a former neighbour, who claimed to remember that when he was 12, a terrified Natalie Wood had banged on the door of his family house late one night.

The programme quoted Lieutenant John Corina, of the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department as saying: “She was so afraid of him. She ran to a neighbour's house yelling … ‘he's gonna kill me’. And looking for help and looking for safety. And so a neighbour took her in.”

Wood returned home the next morning. The detectives told 48 Hours they have found no other allegations of possible violence in the first Wood-Wagner marriage.

And friends said that despite divorcing, the couple remained “besotted” with each other.

By 1972 the couple had split from their respective new partners to get back together and remarry.

Ms Wood’s younger sister Lana, however, now seems to have rather lukewarm memories of the reunion.

She told 48 Hours that after telling her she was remarrying Mr Wagner, Ms Wood “looked down, and said, ‘Sometimes, it's better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don't.’"

But by 1977 Wood and Wagner seemed to be back living the American dream.

The couple invited a TV interviewer into their beautiful home. With Ms Wood’s daughter Natasha – by Richard Gregson, her second husband – playing piano in the background, Mr Wagner smiled and said: “I’m sure glad it’s all worked out.”

At about the same time, Ms Wood told an interviewer about her fear of dark water.

"I had a mean director one time who threw me in the ocean," she revealed. "I was terrified, petrified, because we were in the open ocean.”

And then, in 1981, came the Thanksgiving weekend on the yacht, with the married couple, the skipper and Walken.

At the time, in public, even suggestions of an argument between Walken and Wagner were played down.

When the coroner tentatively mentioned a “non-violent argument” between the two men, a sheriff’s homicide investigator told the Los Angeles Times : “I don’t know where the coroner got that information.”

And as to what Ms Wood, a weak swimmer terrified of dark water, would be doing with a dinghy, late at night in rough seas, while wearing only a nightgown, socks and a red down jacket, the investigator had a ready answer: “According to the people we talked to, it was not uncommon for her to take the dinghy out on a nice night. She was very familiar with it.”

Mr Wagner developed his own theory, one that might explain both the bruises found on his wife’s body, and, possibly, the scratch marks on the rubber dinghy.

In his 2009 autobiography Pieces of My Heart , he wrote that as he was on one of the top decks while his wife was trying to sleep in the cabin: “Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat.

“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."

But despite – or perhaps because of – officialdom wrapping it up so quickly, the case was the subject of whispering and innuendo almost from the start.

And much of it stemmed from the skipper, Mr Davern. 48 Hours and others have said he has not been an entirely consistent witness.

He told investigators in 1981 that he had seen nothing untoward. But eventually, Mr Davern started selling another story – or partial versions of it – to reporters.

One of the first versions, given to the Globe as “Natalie Wood, the Shocking Truth About Her Death”, revealed a row on the night of 28 November – but only between Walken and Wagner, with no mention of any confrontation between husband and wife.

This version could, in fact, have been said to have tallied with what Wagner wrote in his 2009 autobiography, in which he too admitted an argument with Walken, about Ms Wood’s career (rather than the Oscar winner’s intentions towards his wife).

Then, having co-authored a book about the case, in 2011 Mr Davern gave a statement to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

This seems to be the version he has stuck with ever since – and it was sufficiently explosive to see the whole case reopened.

He claimed Mr Wagner had confronted Walken about wanting to “f*** my wife”. Then, he said, after Walken retreated to his cabin and went to sleep, he heard the sounds of a “terrible argument” between Wood and Wagner in the stateroom cabin.

“I heard things (objects, possibly people) hitting the walls and things being thrown at the ceiling,” the skipper said in his 2011 statement.

“Then I heard voices again on the deck.

“The only full sentence I could completely decipher during the entire argument was ‘Get off my f***ing boat’ said by Robert Wagner.”

When he arrived on the rear deck 15 minutes later, Mr Davern said, “Only Robert Wagner was present. [He] appeared sweaty, flustered, anxious, nervous and dishevelled. He told me ‘Natalie is missing’.”

Mr Davern said he wanted to radio for help, but with the dinghy also missing, Mr Wagner instructed him to wait before raising the alarm, suggesting Ms Wood had gone ashore and would return.

“Robert Wagner opened scotch and poured alcohol for me,” wrote Mr Davern. “He encouraged me to drink. He discussed with me the repercussions of bringing immediate attention to the situation.”

According to Mr Davern, the star of Hart to Hart had seemed keen for his real marriage to appear as untroubled as his onscreen one.

“Robert Wagner,” he wrote, “Claimed he did not want to tarnish his image by drawing public attention to the situation.”

Mr Davern said the coastguard was only called at 3.30am, some three hours after Mr Wagner first told him his wife was missing.

And then, claimed Mr Davern, after Ms Wood’s body was found, “I was told to say nothing and that I was to see an attorney in the next day or two to sign a statement being prepared for me, which I did sign, after barely reading it.”

The skipper said Mr Wagner invited him to live with him at his Beverly Hills home.

“Mr Wagner even secured a job for me as a general-extra actor on his TV show Hart to Hart,” wrote Mr Davern.

But, he said, his conscience began bothering him – he would later tell journalists that staying at the Wagner mansion was like being kept a virtual prisoner.

“I couldn’t walk out the front door,” he claimed. “Somebody was always there, usually Wagner’s bodyguard. I felt really closed in.”

He wasn’t, he insisted, telling his story for the money. “What I really want,” he insisted in 2011, “Is to give Natalie a voice.”

Via his publicity team, however, Mr Wagner responded with a statement strongly hinting that some people were trying to cash in on his wife’s passing: “The Wagner family … fully support the efforts of the sheriff's department and trust they will evaluate whether any new information comes from a credible source or those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death."

And in this, Mr Wagner was backed by one of the original detectives, Duane Rasure.

“Obviously he [Davern] was trying to sell a book and make money off of it,” Mr Rasure told reporters in 2011.

“If I have ever the slightest inkling there was a murder, something suspicious, I would have worked it. I did not cover for anybody and I wouldn't cover for anybody.”

Mr Rasure added that he accepted Wagner’s explanation that he waited before raising the alarm because he had been under the impression she had gone ashore in the dinghy.

“He [Wagner] did call and have the people on the shore search,” Mr Rasure added.

The reopening of the 2011 case seemed, ultimately, to have altered little.

The only visible change was that in 2012 Wood’s death certificate was amended to change the cause from “accidental death” to “drowning and other undetermined factors”.

This, reporters were told, was because investigators couldn't rule out that some of the bruises on Ms Wood's body happened before she went into the water.

But now Detective Ralph Hernandez, of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, has told 48 Hours that those two dozen bruises had made Wood look “like the victim of an assault”.

He and his colleague John Corina told the documentary that behind the scenes, the publicity surrounding the reopening of the investigation in 2011 prompted new witnesses to come forward, yielding between 100 and 150 new clues – and the new witnesses who seem to back up Mr Davern.

For all the previous shifts in his evidence, the two cops now believe the old skipper is a credible witness.

Mr Corina told 48 Hours: “His version of events … Makes more sense of what happened and is corroborated by other people.”

But as for Wagner – who has always denied rowing with his wife on the night in question – Corina told 48 Hours : “I haven't seen him tell the details … that match … all the other witnesses in this case. I think he's constantly … changed … his story a little bit.

“And … his version of events just don't add up.”

Mr Corina and Mr Hernandez told 48 Hours that despite several attempts, including a trip to Aspen, where Wagner lives with the actress Jill St John, his third wife, the star has declined to speak to them.

That may, of course, simply be because Wagner now feels he has no new information to add.

His attorney Blair Berk said as much in 2011, issuing a statement which read: "Mr Wagner has fully cooperated over the last 30 years in the investigation of the accidental drowning of his wife.

"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."

Mr Corina and Mr Hernandez, for their part, are insistent that they won’t close the case “until we get the truth”.

• Natalie Wood: A Life, By Gavin Lambert
• Robert Wagner speaks of the 'shattering loss’ of wife Natalie Wood

What they could do with that truth, however, is another matter. As 48 Hours confirmed, after more than 36 years the statutes of limitations have run out on all possible offences except murder. And to prove murder, the cops will need to prove someone deliberately forced Ms Wood into the sea with the intention of killing her.

Without the intent to kill, manslaughter, even failing to help Ms Wood once she was in the dark water would yield no criminal legal action.

And, for now, as Detective Hernandez acknowledged, “The ultimate problem is we don't know how she ended up in the water. We have not been able to prove this was a homicide. And we haven't been able to prove this was an accident, either."

Unlike in the cosy fictional world of Hart to Hart , it seems the real life case of Robert Wagner’s wife Natalie Wood will have no simple, definitive ending.

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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.

GALLERY: Mysterious Hollywood Deaths

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36 Years Later, the Twists and Turns of the Investigation into Natalie Wood's Drowning Death

Wood drowned in 1981 while sailing with her husband, Robert Wagner, on their yacht, Splendour

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on April 13, 2016. On Thursday, CBS News published a report quoting an investigator who described Robert Wagner as “more of a person of interest now” in then-wife Natalie Wood’s drowning death.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Natalie Wood on Nov. 29, 1981, while sailing off of Catalina Island outside Los Angeles, have become the stuff of Hollywood legend and mystery.

Wood, 43, drowned while sailing with her husband, Robert Wagner , on their yacht, Splendour. Christopher Walken , Wood’s then-costar in the movie Brainstorm , and the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, were also on board.

At the time, Wood’s death was classified as an accidental drowning. Thirty-six years later, the case, which was reopened in 2011, is still making headlines.

“We continue to look into it and we will continue to look into it until we can come to some conclusion,” L.A. County Sheriff Lt. John Corina told PEOPLE in 2016.

For an upcoming 48 Hours ‘ episode on the case to air in February 2018, Corina told CBS, “As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s [Wagner is] more of a person of interest now. I mean, we know now that he was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared.”

Wagner’s attorney did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment about the 48 Hours report.

In Wagner’s 2008 memoir, Pieces of My Heart , he wrote that after a night of drinking, he got into an argument with Walken over Wood’s career.

At one point, Wagner wrote, “I picked up a wine bottle, slammed it on the table and broke it into pieces.”

As for what caused her to fall off the boat, Wagner wrote it was “all conjecture. Nobody knows. 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.”

Speaking to PEOPLE for a cover story in 2016 , Wagner said the family was left in despair over Wood’s death. “We were all so shattered by the loss, and we were hanging on to each other,” he said.

In his memoir, Wagner also wrote of his grief and shock following his wife’s untimely death.

“Did I blame myself?” he wrote. “If I had been there, I could have done something. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her. The door was closed; I thought she was [below decks]. I didn’t hear anything. But ultimately, a man is responsible for his loved one, and she was my loved one.”

RELATED VIDEO: Natasha Gregson Wagner’s Memories Of Her Mother, Natalie Wood

Three years after Wagner’s memoir was released, the case took a strange turn when the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department reopened the case after Davern came forward claiming he lied to investigators about certain details related to Wood’s death.

At the time, a sheriff’s spokesperson made clear that Wagner was not a suspect.

Wagner also released a statement through his spokesman expressing support for the sheriff’s investigation, stating his family would “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.”

Corina, who declined to discuss details of the investigation at the time, said detectives did travel to Hawaii to inspect the yacht: “I can’t tell you what we did because it is still part of the investigation.”

Two months after the case was reopened in 2011, a sheriff’s department official told the L.A. Times that detectives found no new evidence to dispute the official findings.

“At this point, it is an accidental death,” said William McSweeney, chief of detectives for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. “Nothing has been discovered to suggest changing that at this time.”

A year later, Wood’s death was reclassified from accidental drowning to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

In 2016, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s office told PEOPLE the case will remain undetermined “unless additional evidence is brought forward.”

Investigators to Talk With Captain Who Says He Lied About Natalie Wood's Death

Dennis davern was on the splendour in november 1981 with natalie wood, robert wagner and christopher walken, by jonathan lloyd • published november 18, 2011 • updated on november 18, 2011 at 11:13 pm.

Two homicide investigators have been assigned to take another look at the 1981 death of actress Natalie Wood, whose drowning death off Santa Catalina Island was ruled accidental.

The department conducted a news conference Friday to discuss the case, but provided few details regarding what prompted them to reopen the investigation. When asked whether Wood's then-husband, Robert Wagner, is considered a suspect, Lt. John Corina said, "No."

"Recently, we received information that we felt was substantial -- enough to take another look at this case," said Corina.

The news conference came just hours after a "Today" show interview with the captain of the yacht Splendour. He said Friday he lied to investigators about the death of Wood and urged authorities to reopen the investigation into her 1981 drowning death .

"We'll probably end up talking to the captain," said Corina.

Wood's death -- she drowned in November 1981 while boating off Santa Catalina Island with Wagner and actor Christopher Walken -- was ruled accidental. But the LA County Sheriff's Department announced Thursday that homicide investigators were "contacted by persons who stated they had additional information about the Natalie Wood Wagner drowning." Dennis Davern, captain of the Splendour, was on the yacht with Wagner, Walken and Wood. He told the "Today" show Friday that he urged investigators to reopen the case, adding that he lied to investigators 30 years ago and said Wagner was responsible for Wood's death.

Corina said information was provided by "several sources" that led investigators to reopen the case, but did not provide details regarding the information or who provided it.

Davern was asked several times during the "Today" show interview for details about what new information he can provide. He repeatedly mentioned that he made "mistakes," but provided few specifics.

"I'm not saying anything different," Davern said. "It's just up to investigators to do an investigation.

"I made some terrible decisions, mistakes. It's just going to be left up to the investigators. I did lie on a report years ago."

When asked for details, he said he lied "about everything that took place that weekend." A fight between Wagner and Wood led to her death, he said, adding that Wagner tried to make the case a low-profile investigation.

"We didn't take any steps to see if we could locate her," Davern said. "I think it was a matter of, we're not going to look too hard. We're not going to turn on the searchlight, we're not going to tell anyone at the moment."

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Davern was recently interviewed for a project involving Vanity Fair and the TV series "48 Hours Mystery." He was quoted in the magazine as saying Wood and Wager fought in the Splendour's cabin before her disappearance.

The magazine article also noted that Davern has pursued a book deal for years and often told his story through tabloids. Late Thursday, Wagner released a statement through his publicist. "Although no one in the Wagner family has heard from the LA County Sheriff’s department about this matter, they fully support the efforts of the LA County Sheriff’s Dept. and 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," the statement said.

Coroner's officials ruled her death an accidental drowning that might have been caused by her slipping off the boat while trying to tie down a dinghy. "There are only two possibilities," Wagner wrote in a 2008 autobiography. "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.'' Born Natalia Zakharenko in San Francisco, Wood became a child star at age 4 after playing the role of Susan Walker in “Miracle on 34th Street.” Among the other classic films she went on to star in were "West Side Story" and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

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What Really Happened to Natalie Wood?

It’s been almost 40 years since film icon Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of California’s Catalina Island at the age of 43. Her death was ruled an accident at the time, but in the decades since, questions have persisted about what really happened that night. Was her death a terrible accident, or was there foul play involved? In the new HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind , out May 5, Wood’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner looks at her mother’s life and confronts the mysteries surrounding her death, including her stepfather Robert Wagner’s rumored role in the incident.

Below, what we know about the death of Natalie Wood.

1981: The boat trip.

On November 28, 1981, Natalie Wood was on a weekend trip to Catalina with her husband, Robert Wagner, aboard his 55-foot yacht, Splendour . Also with them: the ship’s captain, Dennis Davern, and the actor Christopher Walken, who was filming the sci-fi film Brainstorm with Wood at the time.

Wood was a former child star who began her career in film when she was only 4 and had managed to make the transition into a respected actress, earning three Academy Award nominations before she was 25. She and Wagner were on their second marriage to each other. They had been married for five years, from 1957 to 1962, and then divorced. Then, after Wood had a brief marriage to British producer Richard Gregson, she and Wagner reconciled and remarried in 1972.

On the night of her death, Wood had been partying with Wagner and Walken. The two men got into an argument and Wood left. Wagner said that when he went to bed that night, she wasn’t there. According to the L.A. Times , Wagner’s spokesperson said he had assumed his wife had taken a small dinghy out on the water, as she had done before, but when ten to 15 minutes passed and she didn’t come back, he called Harbor Patrol. Authorities found her body the next morning at 8 a.m. floating in the water a mile from the Splendour , with a small dinghy beached nearby.

A postmortem report said that Wood had bruises on her body and arms and an abrasion on her left cheek. After a two-week investigation, a coroner ruled the actress’s death an accident, concluding that she had been drinking, and may have slipped and drowned while trying to board the yacht’s dinghy.

Many of Wood’s friends and fans were unsatisfied with this conclusion at the time, and rumors started to swirl. On December 3, 1981, the L.A. Times reported that a woman who had been on a nearby boat at the time told police she had heard a woman screaming on the night of Wood’s death.

2011: The investigation into Wood’s death is reopened.

In November 2011, 30 years after Wood’s death, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced that it was reopening her case. “Recently, sheriff’s homicide investigators were contacted by persons who stated they had additional information about the Natalie Wood Wagner drowning. Due to the additional information, Sheriff’s homicide bureau has decided to take another look at the case,” the department said in a statement .

In an interview with the Today show around the same time, Davern said he believes that Wagner was responsible for Wood’s death, though he didn’t specify how.

Wagner and Walken had gotten into a terrible argument that night, Davern said, and when Wood left the room in embarrassment after Wagner smashed a wine bottle, Wagner followed her and started arguing with her. Soon after, he says, Wood went missing.

“We didn’t take any steps to see if we could locate her,” Davern added. “I think it was a matter of ‘We’re not going to look too hard. We’re not going to turn on the searchlight. We’re not going to notify anybody right now.’”

In a statement, Wagner’s publicist said the actor supported the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and hoped it would be careful in evaluating information from someone “trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death.”

(Walken has denied having any knowledge about what happened to Wood that night. When asked about the incident in an interview with People in 1986, he replied, “I don’t know what happened. She slipped and fell in the water. I was in bed then. It was a terrible thing. Look, we’re in a conversation I won’t have. It’s a fucking bore.”)

In August 2012, Wood’s death certificate was amended to say that she had died of “drowning and other undetermined factors.” A copy of the certificate obtained by the Associated Press at the time said “the circumstances of how she ended up in the water are ‘not clearly established.’”

2018: Wagner is named a “person of interest.”

In February 2018, 37 years after Wood died, L.A. County Sheriff’s Department investigators named Wagner, then 88, a person of interest in her death. In a press conference that month, Lieutenant John Corina told reporters : “I think, before, we were all believing this story that she must have gotten in a dinghy and tried to go into town in her nightgown, in her socks, by herself when it is raining out and the seas are really rough — you can’t even see at midnight — which made absolutely no sense if you really think about it.”

In an interview with CBS News’  48 Hours around that same time, Detective Ralph Hernandez also said the autopsy results showed what looked like fresh bruises on Wood. “She looked like the victim of an assault.”

Hernandez went on: “We have not been able to prove this was a homicide. And we haven’t been able to prove that this was an accident either. The ultimate problem is we don’t know how she ended up in the water.”

Wagner has denied having any involvement in Wood’s death. Natasha Gregson Wagner, for her part, believes her stepfather, writing in her new book , More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood : “My mother no longer has a voice of her own but I do and this is what I know — RJ [Wagner] loved Natalie ‘more than love.’ No one in my world questioned my dad’s love for my mom or his utter despair at her loss.”

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Natalie wood’s yacht captain claims robert wagner held him “hostage”.

Natalie Wood's yacht captain, Dennis Davern — who was on board the boat the night the actress died — claimed in a new interview that her former husband Robert Wagner held him hostage to prevent him from telling the truth.

By Evan Real

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Nearly 37 years after Natalie Woods died, the late actress’ yacht captain Dennis Davern is sharing what he remembers about her mysterious death.

During a Wednesday morning appearance on Megyn Kelly Today , Davern doubled down on his previous claim that he believes Wood’s former husband Robert Wagner pushed Wood off the side of the boat.

“I was interviewed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, a lengthy interview, and I gave them all the information that I could give them,” Davern said of his most recent conversations with authorities. In his original testimony, Davern didn’t name Wagner as a potential suspect.

Davern continued: “After I gave them all that information, they asked me if I’d be willing to take a polygraph from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department and I said, ‘Yes, I would.'”

He then told host Megyn Kelly that he passed the polygraph test with “flying colors.”

In the 2014 book, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour , Davern and co-author Marti Rulli allege that Wagner pushed Wood off the yacht to her death. Rulli appeared on Kelly’s show alongside Davern, where the writer attempted to defend Davern for waiting years to tell police what he believes to be the truth. 

“The first year after [Davern] stayed with Wagner, he wanted Dennis under his wing. So it was very hard to talk with his family, his family, his friends,” Rulli said of Davern, who continued to work for Wagner for a full year after Wood’s 1981 death. “And when I finally did get involved, and that’s when [Davern] planned to move away from L.A., we started early. This has been decades of effort.”

Davern — who hosts a new podcast,  Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood ,  with Rulli — also alleged that Wagner held him “hostage,” suggesting that the actor did so in an effort to bar him from telling the truth about Wood’s tragic incident.

“When I was at Robert Wagner’s house, I was actually there for just about a year. Robert Wagner got me a job at the studio. He was doing the TV series called Hart to Hart . If I would have a morning call, or something like that, to go to the studio, his driver would pick me up and take me from the house to the studio,” he said. “At the end of my work day, the driver would bring me back to the house. When I would go to bed for the night, you’d close the door [to my room] and there was sort of like a magnetic lock to where you couldn’t open the door.”

Added Davern: “I couldn’t get myself out of my own room. I thought maybe the whole house has this security system. Whether it did or not, I don’t know, but to me it was a very locked-in feeling.”

Wagner, now 88, had no comment when contacted by Megyn Kelly Today .

Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina in November 1981 after she went missing from her family’s yacht, Splendour. Wood, Wagner, Christopher Walken and Davern were all on board the night before Wood was found floating in the water, wearing a red down jacket and flannel nightgown. She was 43. 

Davern and Rulli’s interview comes months after police named Wagner a person of interest in the investigation back in February. The death was originally ruled an accident, following a two-week investigation, but in 2011, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department reopened the death investigation, and a year later the L.A. coroner’s office amended Wood’s death certificate to change the manner of death from accidental drowning to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

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Russian rebellion timeline: How the Wagner uprising against Putin unfolded and where Prigozhin is now

A Putin ally called Friday for rebellion. It was all over by Saturday evening.

LONDON -- A chaotic armed rebellion that threatened the longstanding leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin began Friday and appeared to have been quelled by Saturday evening.

MORE: Russia-Ukraine live updates: 'Mystery' why Prigozhin stopped march, US official says

The uprising, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the paramilitary Wagner Group , began in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Forces loyal to Prigozhin marched toward Moscow, before turning back Saturday night.

Here's how the news unfolded. All times are Moscow Standard Time.

Friday, June 23

Prigozhin threatens rebellion.

Prigozhin appeared to threaten an armed rebellion against Russia's military leadership. He accused Russian officials of deliberately shelling his forces on earlier in the day.

MORE: Wagner mercenary chief calls for armed rebellion against Russian military leadership

"There are 25,000 of us and we are coming to sort things out ... Those who want to join us, it's time to finish with this mess," Prigozhin said.

Saturday, June 24

Putin is briefed on 'armed rebellion'.

Putin was briefed on an "attempted armed rebellion" overnight, according to Russia's state-run media.

A late-night statement from Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov suggested that the Kremlin considered Wagner Group's move into Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian city close to the border with Ukraine, to be a "rebellion." The statement did not mention Prigozhin by name.

Wagner Group claims control over Rostov military facilities, airport

Prigozhin said at about 7:30 a.m. on Saturday that his forces had taken control of the Southern Military District and all military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian city near the southern border with Ukraine.

"We will destroy anyone who stands in our way," he said in one of a series of video and audio recordings posted on social media.

He threatened he would go to Moscow, the capital, saying, "We are moving forward and will go until the end."

Wagner Group marches toward Moscow

Wagner Group forces were roaming the streets of Rostov-on-Don, gathering outside the Southern Military District headquarters, when Prigozhin made his announcement.

Forces loyal to Prigozhin began traveling north "almost certainly aiming to get to Moscow," the U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Twitter about two hours later.

Prigozhin's rebellion amounted to the "most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times," the ministry said.

"Over the coming hours, the loyalty of Russia's security forces, and especially the Russian National Guard, will be key to how the crisis plays out," the ministry said.

Putin addresses nation on TV, calling the acts 'treason'

Putin in a televised address that aired at about 10 a.m. said actions taken by Prigozhin, who was a longtime ally, amounted to a "stab in the back."

Putin didn't mention Prigozhin by name, but said that "necessary orders have been given" to defend Russia.

"Actions that divide our unity are in essence defeatism before one's own people," he said. "This is a stab in the back of our country and our people."

The powerful head of Chechnya, the semi-independent Russian region, Ramzan Kadyrov, said in a statement that he would support Putin.

He said his forces were already moving to "zones of tension."

Ukraine says there's 'so much chaos' in Russia

An advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there was a "deafening" silence from Russia's elites.

"The next 48 hours will define the new status of Russia," Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter at about 11 a.m. Moscow time. "Either a full-fledged Civil War, or a negotiated Transit of Power, or a temporary respite before the next phase of the downfall of the Putin regime."

Zelenskyy said later that Russia appeared to be suffering "full-scale weakness."

"Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government. And now there is so much chaos that no lie can hide it," he said on Twitter.

Wagner forces continue march to Moscow

A column of Wagner forces drove through the Voronezh region, about 300 miles south of Moscow, in the early afternoon, a local governor said.

Russia's armed forces were conducting "operational combat operations" there as part of "counter terrorism operation," the official said.

The column later passed through the Lipetsk region, farther north, Russian state media reported.

Prigozhin orders halt on march to Moscow

Prigozhin said he ordered his mercenaries to halt their march on Moscow and return to their field camps, saying he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood.

The reasons the rebellion ended was a mystery, given that Prigozhin appeared to have been in a dominant position, a senior U.S. official told ABC News.

As part of a deal struck with Putin, Prigozhin would relocate to Belarus and would not be prosecuted, the Kremlin said.

Tuesday, June 27

Russia drops case against prigozhin.

The Russian Federal Security Service on Tuesday dropped the criminal case investigating the rebellion by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his forces.

Thursday, June 29

Prigozhin and putin meet in russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin days after the rogue paramilitary leader launched a failed uprising, the Kremlin said on Monday, July 10.

The June 29 meeting came about a week after the rebellion failed, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"Indeed, the president had such a meeting, he invited 35 people to it -- all the commanders of the detachments and the management of the company, including Prigozhin himself," Peskov said Monday, according to Interfax, a Russian newswire. "This meeting took place in the Kremlin on June 29, it lasted almost three hours."

Thursday, July 6

Prigozhin is in russia, belarus president says.

Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, said Prigozhin was in Russia. The statement came after St. Petersburg media outlets reported seeing Prigozhin accepting some of his confiscated weapons in the city.

“As for Yevgeny Prigozhin, he is in St. Petersburg,” Lukashenko said. “Where is he this morning? Maybe he went to Moscow in the morning.”

Lukashenko also said he saw no risks should Wagner troops be deployed in Belarus, but added that at the moment they were "in their camps."

ABC News' Tanya Stukalova, Patrick Reevell, Tomek Rolski, Nadine El-Bawab, KJ Edelman, Shannon K. Crawford, Luis Martinez, Rashid Haddou, Anastasia Bagaeva and Martha Raddatz contributed to this story.

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After its march toward Moscow, what's next for Russia's Wagner Group?

Joe Hernandez

Members of Wagner Group stand on the balcony of a building in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday. Roman Romokhov/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Members of Wagner Group stand on the balcony of a building in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday.

It was a shocking provocation in a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a firm grip on power: a convoy of militarized mercenaries advancing on the capital Moscow calling for the resignation of top defense officials.

The weekend march by the Wagner Group ended before a possible confrontation with Russian forces. But experts say it revealed weaknesses in Putin's regime and raised questions about the fate of the private military company that has been key to some of Russia's successes in conflict zones across the globe.

The mercenary group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said in an audio message released Monday that Wagner's goal was not to topple the Russian government but rather to protest the elimination of the private military company and call attention to the failures of Russian military leadership in Ukraine.

The mercenary group didn't want to fight the Russian military, he added, and only fired on Russian troops after they attacked Wagner fighters from the air.

Prigozhin also noted that the ease of a Wagner column's march on Moscow — when he said his forces came within 120 miles of the city — highlighted disarray at the Defense Ministry.

In Prigozhin's words, his forces had conducted a "master class" in how Russia's armed forces should have taken Ukraine when they invaded in February of 2022.

Prigozhin said he ordered his forces to turn back outside of Moscow late Saturday because going further could have meant fighting Russian forces.

Nicknamed "Putin's chef," Prigozhin was once a close confidant of Putin, and the Wagner Group has been an indispensable part of Russia's military engagements in Ukraine and other parts of the world, including Africa and South America.

But Prigozhin's weekend rebellion against Russia's top military brass may have upended the soldier's fortunes.

Putin accuses Wagner Group of a treasonous 'military uprising' in Russia

Prigozhin won't face charges for the mutiny, according to the Kremlin, but he's been branded a "traitor" by Putin and Russian officials said he would head to neighboring Belarus.

Meanwhile, it's unclear whether the Wagner Group will be disbanded and what impact such a move could have in Ukraine and other places where Wagner mercenaries have been operating.

President Biden said Monday that he was working with allies to coordinate their response to the situation in Russia and that the U.S. was not involved in the rebellion, saying the U.S. had "nothing to do with it."

A feud between the Wagner Group and Russian defense officials preceded the uprising

Long before the weekend, the Wagner Group and Russia's Ministry of Defense had been engaged in a war of words.

Prigozhin accused Russian military leaders of bungling the war effort in Ukraine and claimed that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and others withheld ammunition from Wagner fighters out of bitterness.

Wagner Group chief says his mercenaries will halt their march on Moscow

Earlier this month, Shoigu announced that members of private military companies, including the Wagner Group, would be required to sign contracts with the military by July 1.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, told NPR that Shoigu's order likely motivated Prigozhin to organize the march on Moscow.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, right, sits inside a military vehicle posing for a selfie photo with a local civilian on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on Saturday. AP hide caption

"Prigozhin said that he would not obey it, and clearly as the clock was ticking toward July 1, he was desperate to try to think of ways to stop that order," Alperovitch said.

Wagner had been planning to return some vehicles to the Ministry of Defense when it came under fire from the Russian military, Prigozhin said, which allegedly left 30 Wagner fighters dead and prompted the march on Moscow.

He added that Russian military aircraft attacked the Wagner convoy along its route, forcing the mercenaries to fire back.

Other Russia experts saw Prigozhin's gambit as a bid to gain more resources for his fighters and increase his influence over the military strategy in Ukraine.

"He staged this very theatrical rebellion that clearly threw the Russian leadership off balance. I don't think they were expecting anyone to challenge Putin's authority this much head on," Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told NPR.

"But at the same time, the core goal was not to overthrow the Russian regime. It was to unlock more standing and authority for Prigozhin himself."

After the public spectacle, the Wagner Group's fate is uncertain

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said late Saturday that authorities would drop charges of "inciting an armed revolt" against Prigozhin.

Wagner forces that took part in the march would also not be prosecuted, and Wagner forces that didn't participate would sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Kremlin added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen on monitors as he addresses the nation on Saturday after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, called for armed rebellion. Pavel Bednyakov/AP hide caption

But it wasn't immediately clear if Russia could afford to suddenly disband the Wagner Group, which has helped the country achieve gains in its war against Ukraine. The private military company was responsible for the high-profile capture of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut last month.

Others say the Wagner Group gives Putin and other officials deniability , and turning a blind eye to the losses suffered by the mercenaries allows Russia to hide the true costs of war.

"They became Russia's weapon of choice between 2014 and today," Sean McFate, a professor at National Defense University, told NPR's Morning Edition .

However, Prigozhin is unlike Putin's other political rivals who have spoken out against the country's leadership because has a "powerful army at his back," McFate said, and it is not uncommon for guns for hire to stage rebellions against the governments that hired them.

"Mercenaries are the second oldest profession," McFate said, "and there's a long history of mercenaries turning on their masters."

The Wagner Group has been dubbed a "transnational criminal organization" by the U.S. Treasury Department and faced sanctions — including against Prigozhin himself — for waging war in Ukraine.

The mutiny in Russia may be over. But it still damages Putin

Weiss said Putin had created "a bit of a Frankenstein monster for himself" in the Wagner Group, which operates as a de facto fighting force for the Russian state but with more autonomy than the military.

"There's no easy way for Vladimir Putin to defang or demobilize the Wagner units," Weiss said. "The challenge is always going to be: will they play ball with the Russian military leadership and act in coordination with them in pursuit of Putin's military objectives in Ukraine?"

Prigozhin's spokesperson told the Russian media outlet RTVI on Sunday that he "says hi to everyone" and would take questions once he got better cellphone reception.

The episode may have little impact on Wagner's involvement in Ukraine

Weiss said the Wagner Group could continue to play a key role in the war in Ukraine, where the mercenaries have conducted offensive operations against Ukrainian military forces.

Alperovitch suggested that there had been "minimal impact" on the war in Ukraine following the Wagner march on Moscow and noted that Prigozhin himself said operations would continue despite his spat with the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Ukraine invasion — explained

Yevgeny prigozhin, 'putin's chef,' has emerged from the shadows with his wagner group.

But Alperovitch stressed that the saga is not yet over. A weakened Putin will be left to respond to the failed rebellion, he said, and Prigozhin has yet to make any public comments since the Kremlin announcement that he was going to Belarus.

"Prigozhin is still there. Wagner still exists. They have a lot of arms. They've shown themselves to be highly capable, and the Russian Ministry of Defense have shown themselves to be incapable of defending Russian territory," he said.

"It's really important for us to reserve our judgment and see how things play out over the coming days, and in particular to watch what Prigozhin is going to say and where he's going to pop up in the coming days."

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Prigozhin's Wagner mercenaries appear to be on the march towards Moscow

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

Russia's Wagner paramilitary forces appear to be headed toward the capital, Moscow.

Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin claims to be leading a "march for justice."

Speaking early on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused his former ally of "treason."

Wagner mercenary forces appear to be headed toward Moscow after a stunning overnight seizure of a regional capital home to more than a million people and a key Russian military base.

Following the seemingly bloodless capture of Rostov-on-Don, a strategically important port city, Wagner forces — commanded by their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin — headed north to the region of Voronezh, where Russian state media reported Saturday that an oil depot was on fire. Video posted to social media, which has not been independently verified, appeared to show a Russian Kamov Ka-52 "Alligator" helicopter attacking the facility .

Photos and videos now appear to show Wagner forces and their armored vehicles in the region of Lipetsk, which is a roughly eight-hour drive from Rostov-on-Don — and less than six hours from Moscow. The governor of the region, Igor Artamonov, had earlier announced that highway traffic was blocked, The New York Times reported , and that a military convoy was moving through the area. He later confirmed that Wagner forces were moving through the area, state media reported, and urged civilians to stay in their homes.

Prigozhin, a former ally of President Vladimir Putin, claims to be leading some 25,000 men, characterizing his day-old rebellion as a "march for justice" aimed at overthrowing Russia's military leadership, which he accuses of misleading the president and mismanaging the war in Ukraine.

The "march" began Friday after Prigozhin accused Russia's defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, of ordering an air strike on Wagner forces in Ukraine. He has repeatedly accused Shoigu and other military leaders of undermining Wagner forces in Ukraine.

Ukraine's military intelligence unit on Saturday said that Prigozhin's forces now appear to be on their way "towards the capital," with Russian military equipment that had been in reserve or deployed near the border now "being withdrawn to Moscow." Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has also pledged to combat Wagner and help Russia " defend its statehood ."

The apparent march toward Moscow comes after the city's mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, earlier on Saturday morning said that the capital was adopting new "counter-terrorism measures" to reinforce security, according to the state news agency TASS. The British Ministry of Defense had also said earlier that Wagner units were moving north from Rostov-on-Don through the Vorenezh Oblast, "almost certainly aiming to get to Moscow."

Igor Girkin, a former Russian military commander who has been critical of both Wagner and Russia's leadership, said Saturday that Prigozhin appeared to be throwing his "most combat-ready shock units" into "a raid on Moscow."

By tomorrow morning, he posted on Telegram, "we will find out" if the strategy worked.

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: [email protected]

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