What Really Happened To Natalie Wood That Night On The Water?

I’ve always been terrified of water, and I still am, especially dark water and sea water. Do you believe Natalie Wood was murdered?

I think the circumstances are suspicious enough to make us wonder if something more happened. Do you believe that Robert Wagner knows far more about what happened to his wife than he has ever admitted?

Well, I think he absolutely does because he was the last one to see her. “Would you like to live alone?” “Megan, no.”

The love story between Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood stood as one of the great Hollywood romances. Natalie Wood was one of the biggest film stars imaginable, and she had even been linked with Frank Sinatra.

Robert Wagner represented a kind of old Hollywood elegance. He had become a hugely successful television star.

The story I wrote for Vanity Fair magazine explored Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood’s tragic death at sea. It ranked as one of the most shocking and staggering events in Hollywood history.

It was Thanksgiving weekend. A call came from Robert Wagner reporting that someone was missing from their boat.

Six hours later, the body of his wife Natalie Wood was found floating in the Pacific Ocean. At the time, her death was officially ruled an accident.

This new information feels substantial enough for us to want to examine the case again. Over the last six years, have you been able to gather even more evidence that makes you question whether this was truly an accident?

We have. There are witnesses who were near the Splendor that evening.

She got in the water somehow, and I do not think she entered it by herself. It was cold, rainy, and terrible weather conditions.

I was the captain on Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood’s yacht. There was a tremendous fight between them that night.

The fighting moved toward the back of the boat, and they kept arguing and arguing until it suddenly went quiet. I went down below and she was not there, and the dinghy was gone.

I looked around for her. I did not know where she was.

I believed that Robert Wagner was with her up until the moment she went into the water. We were so in love and we had everything, and in a second, in a second, it was gone.

“I wasn’t there,” Wagner said. “I wasn’t there for her.”

There were a number of bruises that appeared to be fresh. She slipped and hit the step and then rolled in; that’s what we think happened.

She looked like the victim of an assault. When this case was reopened, Lieutenant Corina was asked, “Is Robert Wagner a suspect?”

“No.” Has that changed?

Like Natalie Wood was in life, one of Hollywood’s most alluring actresses, in death she still reigns, but now as one of its most enduring mysteries. Actress Natalie Wood is dead at 43, the apparent victim of a drowning accident off Santa Catalina Island in California in 1981.

Natalie Wood’s death was quickly dismissed as an accidental drowning, but rumors and allegations of foul play, fueled in great part by the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, have never gone away. “I just didn’t want my whole life to go by without having the truth come out,” Davern said.

In 2011, thirty years after Wood’s death, Davern and more than 700 others signed a petition addressed to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It outlined what they consider flaws in the original investigation.

It was already determined to be absolute drowning, but the information we received made us want to take another look at the case. About nine months after the investigation was reopened, another stunning announcement came.

The medical examiner’s office changed the manner of death from accident to undetermined. This triggered an avalanche of news coverage and unleashed a flood of new leads.

Because of the press conferences we have, we found a lot more clues, a lot more evidence, and a lot more witnesses. For more than six years, veteran homicide detective Ralph Hernandez and Lieutenant John Corina doggedly pursued this case.

Six years later, we’ve followed up on all the clues, over 150 clues. We’ve followed up on them and talked to a lot of people.

These detectives even traveled to Hawaii twice to comb the Wagners’ yacht for clues. It was docked there by its new owner.

48 Hours showed up in Hawaii, but detectives wouldn’t talk then and refused to speak for six years. Then, for the first time, they spoke publicly about evidence they uncovered.

There was a lot to tell. Does that evidence lead you to believe that whatever happened to Natalie Wood was not an accident?

Well, it does. It actually confirms my suspicions even more that what was originally reported isn’t exactly what happened.

They point to the numerous bruises on Natalie Wood’s body that were photographed and noted in the autopsy report. It’s some of those bruises and where they were located that played a big part in convincing a medical examiner to change the manner of death.

Why are all these bruises suspicious to you? Because she looked like the victim of an assault.

Another red flag was the story the three men on the boat—Captain Dennis Davern, actor Christopher Walken, and Robert Wagner—told the original investigators. It didn’t fit the smell test; it didn’t make sense.

All three told the police that they assumed Natalie had left the Splendor on the yacht’s dinghy despite the late hour and stormy weather. That didn’t even make any sense to me.

Why would Natalie Wood, this big movie star, try to go on a dinghy in the middle of the night in her socks and her pajamas? At midnight in rough seas, is there any possibility that she would get in that boat and leave?

“No, not with a gun to her head,” her sister said. That story also makes no sense to Natalie’s younger sister, actress and former Bond girl, Lana Wood.

“Hi, I’m Plenty,” Lana said in a clip. “Lana Wood. But of course you are.”

Natalie reportedly had never operated the dinghy on her own, and there was that well-documented lifelong fear of dark water. “I’ve always been terrified, still am, of water, dark water, sea water,” Natalie had said.

When I think of her in that water in the dark, in the cold, and the one thing that she feared was water, and that’s where she finishes her life. I know it’s a cliché, but she really was America’s sweetheart.

Vanity Fair magazine contributing editor Sam Kashner said America had grown up with her. She was the little doubting girl in Miracle on 34th Street.

“Well, young lady, what’s your name?” the film character asked. “Susan Walker. What’s yours?”

Then she was running with a sort of troubled pack in Rebel Without a Cause. “I’m not going back in that zoo. I’m never going back.”

Then, of course, there was that incredible performance in Splendor in the Grass. She was in West Side Story and Gypsy.

“I am Gypsy Rose Lee,” she declared. She was in some of these great iconic films of the early 60s.

By the time she was 18, Natalie had her first of three Academy Award nominations. She was so gifted.

In 2008, Robert Wagner, also known as R.J., talked about Natalie on the CBS News broadcast Sunday Morning. “She was a very, very fine actress, and people loved her. You know, they adored her.”

He recalled their first date when Natalie was just 18 and R.J. was 26. “I started taking her out after that, and one thing led to another, and a year later we were married.”

Was Natalie in love with R.J. when they first got married? Yes, she was madly in love with him. He was the perfect golden boy.

The pressures of living under Hollywood’s relentless scrutiny weighed heavily on the marriage, says close family friend Mark Crowley. They were hounded by the press; they were presented as the ideal couple far beyond what any normal human being could live up to.

Now these investigators say they’ve tracked down stunning new evidence that Wood and Wagner may have been more human than anyone knew. There are allegations that Natalie fled the couple’s house one night in fear for her life.

A new witness, a former neighbor who says he was 12 years old at the time, remembers late one night being awakened by somebody banging on the door. It was Natalie Wood.

She was so afraid of him she ran to a neighbor’s house yelling that day, “He’s going to kill me,” and looking for help and looking for safety. A neighbor took her in.

According to the witness, Natalie stayed the night and returned home the next morning. So far, that’s the only episode of alleged violence investigators have found.

After just four years, the couple’s first marriage came to a bitter end. Natalie began dating Hollywood heartthrob Warren Beatty.

“His career was on fire and our relationship was gone,” R.J. said. And why not? He was in love with her.

Wagner admitted that Natalie’s stardom and his own insecurities probably tore them apart. “It was basically my inadequacy that didn’t make it work.”

It made him feel very sad and very brokenhearted. He felt that he had failed in the relationship and never thought that he’d ever get it back again.

Both of them were besotted with each other. After they got divorced, they went on to other partners and had children, but those marriages didn’t work out.

Eventually, they found each other again and got back together and got married a second time. “How did you find out she was going back with R.J.?” Lana Wood was asked.

It was a dinner party, family only. R.J. was there in the living room, and she announced that, “You know, R.J. and I are going to be remarried.”

All she did was she looked down and she said, “Sometimes it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Wagner sees it differently.

“We felt that we had found something that was so precious to us,” Wagner said. “And it was that we did everything in the world we could to protect it.”

They remarried, had a daughter named Courtney, and were together for nine years until that final, fatal voyage to Catalina Island. Lana talks about Natalie Wood’s childhood on Facebook at 48 Hours.

On a miserable, cold, and rainy Friday in November, the Splendor departed Marina del Rey. It carried Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Captain Dennis Davern, and one of Hollywood’s hottest young actors, Christopher Walken.

As soon as Chris Walken walked up the gangplank to the Splendor in his pea coat with the collar turned up, Robert Wagner took an instant dislike to him. Chris was fresh off winning the Academy Award for The Deer Hunter.

“What is it?” a character in a clip asked. “It’s me.”

There were rumors of an affair. You could see a little bit of jealousy from Robert Wagner.

It just kept getting more tense every minute of the day. He felt that now she was paying way more attention to Christopher Walken than she was paying attention to him.

When the Splendor docked at Catalina Island, Wood, Wagner, and Walken went ashore to the town of Avalon and began drinking heavily. We spoke to Dennis Davern in 2011.

“The jealousy was under the surface until there was so much drinking that it started to come out,” Davern said. “And it was obvious.”

Once back on the Splendor, Davern says the tension escalated. Now, for the first time, investigators say they have a new witness corroborating Davern’s accounts.

That Friday, someone on a nearby boat claims to have been close enough to see and hear a fight between the couple. Natalie, to this witness, appeared to be the aggressor in the argument and appeared to be intoxicated.

Robert Wagner appeared to try and walk away from the argument. At the point that he’s walking away, she actually fell down to one knee.

Davern says the couple was fighting over whether to move the Splendor to the other side of Catalina Island. He wanted to move the boat at night, but she didn’t want him driving the boat at night.

“It’s kind of dangerous to do that, especially when it’s so rough out there and rainy,” Davern noted. Natalie said she wasn’t going to stand for this and asked if I would take her to shore.

Natalie had Davern take her on the dinghy to Avalon where she desperately tried to get off the island. She did indeed call me on Friday night.

“Can you come and get me?” she asked. I said, “What?”

She couldn’t get a boat or a flight out of there because of the weather and the time of night, so she had to spend the night there. Unwilling to return to the Splendor that night, Natalie got two hotel rooms, one for her and one for Davern.

She reportedly spent the night crying on Davern’s shoulder. She poured her heart out to him about how she was feeling and, according to Dennis, about some of the difficulties in their marriage.

It was becoming increasingly harder for her to deal with his professional jealousy. What did Dennis tell you about that?

She was furious. She was talking about leaving him—not just leaving for the weekend, but leaving him, divorcing, leaving.

He felt that if she had gone back to the mainland that night, she was so angry she would have divorced Wagner the next day. The next morning, Saturday, Natalie had a change of heart.

She decided, “Hey, let’s go back to the boat. Let’s see if we can smooth everything over here, and I’ll make a nice breakfast.”

Davern says things did get better at first. Natalie even agreed to let Wagner move the yacht to the other, far more desolate side of the island.

By that evening, things were once again tense, says Davern. He and Wagner joined Walken and Natalie, who had already gone ashore and were drinking at the bar.

“When R.J. and I walked into the restaurant and he saw Natalie and Christopher sitting at the bar laughing and having a wonderful time, he started to really, really heat up,” Davern said. According to the people who were there at the bar and restaurant, they described him as irritated.

He was tense, and according to Davern, Natalie and Walken were kind of ignoring him. They didn’t really acknowledge him the whole time, and they were just kind of having a good time by themselves, partying and drinking.

Witnesses say all four were so drunk that when they left, the restaurant manager alerted the harbor master. He calls the harbor master and says, “Hey, you know Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood are coming your way. They’re really intoxicated. Make sure they get back to their boat okay.”

They got back safely, but things were about to turn ugly. “Everything that I’ve heard from Dennis, Natalie’s temper was surfacing,” an investigator said. “R.J. certainly was. It got out of hand in the worst way possible.”

For more than 38 years, the sea has kept her secrets about the night Natalie Wood died. These are secrets investigators believe can be uncovered.

With all the shifting stories, witnesses with failing memories, or long-dead detectives, Hernandez knows time is running out. Why does a case that is now really more than 36 years old matter?

“Because somebody died,” Hernandez said. “And no matter what, ultimately, that’s our job: to find the truth.”

Detective Hernandez and his partner Kevin Lowe, now retired, brought their key witness Dennis Davern all the way to Hawaii where the boat was docked. There, he reenacted his version of events.

They spent a full day photographing, measuring, and researching. We wanted to take Dennis Davern there just to see what kind of jogged his memory and see what details and get his perspective.

Davern is a crucial but problematic witness. After initially telling police one thing, he changed his story, sold it to tabloid magazines, and collaborated on a tell-all book.

Davern claims he was motivated by his conscience, not greed. “I really don’t just want money. What I really want is to give Natalie a voice.”

You find him incredible? “I find his story and his version of events, when you talk to us, everything fit,” the detective said. “It makes more sense of what happened and is corroborated by other people.”

Davern told investigators that problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, building for two days, exploded when they returned to the Splendor after dinner. Natalie, by then in her flannel nightgown and warm socks, joined Walken, Davern, and Wagner in the salon, the living area of the boat.

“Natalie puts on the kettle to have a cup of tea. I light a couple candles. I opened a bottle of wine,” Davern recalled. Natalie and Christopher continued to giggle, just having fun.

Then Robert Wagner, out of the clear blue, picked up the bottle of wine and smashed it. It breaks and goes everywhere, and he yells at Walken, “What are you trying to do, my wife?”

Everything just kind of stops. Natalie said, “I cannot take this,” and she went into her room.

According to Davern, Christopher Walken also went to his room. Then R.J. went into the room—Natalie and R.J.’s room—and started arguing, yelling, and things were being thrown about.

At that point, Davern also leaves and goes up to the bridge at the top of the boat. Lieutenant Corina says he hears them arguing.

The argument is getting louder, and he hears a lot of thumping. It sounds to him like there’s a physical fight going on inside there.

He’s so concerned he walks back down and he knocks on the door. Robert Wagner opens the door and he has this look—a crazy look on his face.

“Is everything okay, Boston?” Davern asked. Wagner was like, “Go away.”

He looks so angry. “I was worried about my own safety that I just left,” Davern said. “I went back up to the bridge.”

Davern told investigators that his line of sight was blocked by the boat’s rain shield, but he heard everything. Fighting continued, and then moved to the back of the boat.

“I was concerned that something really bad was going down because the fighting and arguing was so intense,” Davern stated. Until 2017, Davern was the only person to put both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood outside on the back of the boat arguing on the Saturday night before she died.

“We have received information which we felt was substantial,” the investigator said. After the press conference reopening the case, investigators got a huge break.

Two new witnesses told detectives they not only heard the fight; one of them says she saw it. She saw figures on the back of the Splendor, a male and a female whose voices they recognized as being Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, arguing in the back of the boat.

And how credible are these new witnesses? “Oh, they’re very credible,” the investigator said. “They have no reason to lie, and their story matches what Dennis Davern says.”

Like Davern, both witnesses say the argument stopped suddenly. Then, all of a sudden, there was nothing: complete silence.

There was nothing but the sounds of a rough sea on a cold, dark November night. Lieutenant Corina said no one saw anybody go in the water.

Nobody heard a splash; nobody heard anything. They just heard the argument and then silence.

There was one woman in the months following Natalie’s death who said publicly that she heard a woman calling for help, but Lieutenant Corina now thinks she was mistaken. Davern says ten minutes after the fight ended, he finally went back downstairs.

Robert Wagner is now in the stateroom, and Davern says Robert Wagner is crying. He says, “Natalie’s gone. She’s missing.”

Lieutenant Corina says Robert Wagner then tells Davern to go search the boat for her. He can’t find her anywhere.

He comes back out and tells him, “I can’t find her.” Robert Wagner tells him the dinghy is now missing as well.

Corina and Hernandez think it’s possible that someone could have untied the dinghy while Davern searched the boat. “I didn’t untie it. Christopher didn’t untie it. I don’t think Natalie would have untied it,” Davern said.

Davern says Wagner refused to call for help. Robert Wagner tells him, “Maybe she just went into town. I think to go to a bar or something.”

“Robert Wagner, maybe I should turn on the searchlight,” Davern suggested. He said, “Don’t do that.”

Davern asked if they should get on the radio and call somebody. Robert Wagner says, “No, we don’t want to call anybody. Let’s just wait, see if she comes back.”

According to the story Davern told investigators, Wagner then breaks out a bottle of scotch and the two men sit drinking while more than an hour passes. “Before you know it, we’re oblivious,” Davern said.

Then it’s time: they have to call somebody. She’s gone.

By Robert Wagner’s own statement, he knew she was missing by around midnight. But no call for help is made until 1:30 a.m.

When that call for help finally happened, it wasn’t a request to search the water for her. He asked people in town to search for her in town.

Whenever they finally convinced Robert Wagner he needed to call the Coast Guard, he almost reluctantly said, “Okay, yeah, well, I guess we better call them.” What do you make of that?

Well, if your wife is missing and the dinghy’s missing, I’m going to go look for her. I want to find her right away; I’m going to be worried about her, especially in seas like that.

It’s dark out; she doesn’t like the water, and she doesn’t like to swim. There’s no reason for her to get in that dinghy to go anywhere.

If she wanted to go somewhere, she would ask Dennis Davern to take her somewhere, like she did the night before when she wanted to go into town. He did it; that’s his job.

It didn’t make any sense, the story Robert Wagner was telling, and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. To say that she would get into the dinghy by herself and just take off?

She didn’t even know how to start it. She wouldn’t do it in a nightgown; she didn’t even get the mail in a nightgown.

After the Coast Guard was finally called about 3:30 a.m., over three hours after Natalie was reportedly last seen alive, the search went into high gear. Wagner’s friend, islander Doug Bombard, jumped in his boat and joined in the hunt.

At 7:44 a.m., he says he saw something red bobbing on top of the water. It was about this far from shore where he found the body.

The body was just basically hanging in that jacket. That jacket was buoying her up.

She had a cotton nightgown on, and her hair was floating, as you can imagine. When authorities arrived, Bombard headed to the Splendor to break the news to his friend.

It was a moment Robert Wagner later recalled in this audio recording of his 2008 memoir, Pieces of My Heart. Doug pulled up and got out of his boat.

“Where is she?” I asked him. Doug looked at me and said, “She’s dead, R.J.”

My knees went out. Everything went away from me.

I remember people coming on the boat saying that they had found Natalie Wood floating and that she had drowned. I just couldn’t believe it.

News of Natalie Wood’s sudden death at the age of 43 quickly spread across the globe. Family friend Mark Crowley will never forget getting the call.

When I picked up the phone, it was R.J., and he just screamed into the phone, “She’s gone!” I just couldn’t believe it.

Things like that don’t happen. And they don’t happen to my sister, my family, and they don’t happen to Natalie Wood. It’s not real.

But it was all too real for Dennis Davern. Soon after the movie star was found floating face-down in the waters off Blue Cavern Point, Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken left the island in a police helicopter.

This left Davern with the grim task of identifying Natalie Wood’s body. Robert Wagner asked me if I would identify her body because he didn’t want to.

It was the eeriest feeling I’ve ever had in my life to look at her laying there lifeless. It was so disturbing.

You would think he’d want to stick around and identify his wife and make sure her body was taken care of. That would be what I would do; maybe he’s different.

Corina understands that grief can do strange things to people. But that doesn’t explain why, according to Davern, Wagner immediately came up with a story and told the men on the boat to stick to it.

Robert Wagner was very serious about having the stories being the same. It was kind of like, “Here we are. Okay, Dennis, Christopher, me—this is what it is. Do you got it?”

That’s what it is. If all the stories are the same, there’s really not too much to investigate.

Davern says he now regrets going along with it. But Lieutenant Corina says he understands how it could have happened.

Back then, people mischaracterized Davern as the captain of the boat. He’s not the captain of the boat; he’s a caretaker of the boat.

Robert Wagner’s the guy who pays him, and that’s his meal ticket. If you look at Robert Wagner’s statement at the time, they almost paired each other.

All three men initially told Duane Rasure, the original detective, that they thought Natalie had taken the dinghy ashore. The detective told 48 Hours in 2011 that he believed them.

“I didn’t doubt anything Robert Wagner told me at that time,” Rasure said. “Christopher Walken basically told me the same story.”

It was pretty well confirmed; they assumed that she went ashore. There was no mention of a fight.

“I saw the shattered glass in disarray, and I questioned Robert Wagner about that,” Rasure continued. Wagner said it happened sometime during their travels just due to the rough seas.

“I had no reason to question them any further,” Rasure said. Detective Rasure, who has since died, only interviewed Wagner one more time.

It was the day after Natalie’s funeral, at the actor’s bedside with his attorney present. When I interviewed Robert Wagner, there was no indication of any jealousy or problems.

There was no sign of foul play in my mind. It was a tragic accidental drowning.

Coroner Thomas Noguchi agreed. Two weeks after the actress’s death, the case was officially closed.

But Dennis Davern says his nightmare was just beginning. “I felt like I was a prisoner,” Davern said.

Davern says Wagner insisted he move into his guest house in Beverly Hills. I was to stay indoors at all times and not communicate with anybody.

“I wasn’t sure for my life because you never really knew what could happen,” Davern said. Eventually, Davern left California for the East Coast but was never able to escape the past.

I think he was, in a way, hunted down by his own conscience. He really seemed like a hunted man.

In the early 90s, Lana Wood says a tormented, seemingly inebriated Dennis Davern started calling her. What specifically did he tell you?

He said it wasn’t an accident. He said it was ugly.

Lana says she didn’t want to believe it at first. “I don’t want to think that, but there are so many things that are just facts.”

She has since become one of R.J. Wagner’s harshest critics, going so far as to publicly accuse him of foul play. Do you think she was pushed in the water?

“Yes.” You believe it was her husband, R.J. Wagner? “Absolutely, yes.”

Like Davern, Lana, who has a long, bitter history with Wagner, has been accused of exploiting Natalie’s death for money and attention—something she denies. “It’s just time for the truth,” she said.

It’s time to stop the lies and the deception and the finger-pointing. It’s just not right.

Do you think Robert Wagner’s ever told the truth of exactly what happened? “I haven’t seen it,” the investigator said.

“I haven’t seen him tell the details that match all the other witnesses in this case,” the investigator continued. He’s changed his story a little bit, and his version of events just don’t add up to the evidence and the witnesses we found.

Robert Wagner has never conceded that he had a fight with Natalie on the boat that night. But in his memoir, he did come clean about smashing that wine bottle—the one he originally told the police broke in rough seas.

“Walken and I got into an argument at one point. I picked up a wine bottle, slammed it on the table, and broke it into pieces,” Wagner wrote. Natalie was already below decks at that point.

In Wagner’s version of the story, he didn’t smash that bottle in a jealous rage as Davern claims, but in an argument with Walken over Natalie’s career. In fact, he says she wasn’t even in the room.

“I looked below. I saw Natalie was doing something with her hair. She was going to go to bed, and she shut the door,” Wagner recalled. Chris and I were still talking.

When he went down below, she wasn’t there. The dinghy was gone, and he looked around for her.

“I couldn’t. I didn’t know where she was,” he said. Originally, he told the detective he thought Natalie had taken the dinghy and gone ashore.

But that, like so many other details, has changed to what is now called the “banging dinghy theory.” Natalie was in the master cabin and heard the dinghy banging against the side.

She got up to retie it. She slipped on the swim step on the stern and was either stunned or knocked unconscious and rolled into the water.

“The loose dinghy floated away,” Wagner said. “My theory fits the few facts we have.”

That story is 100 percent false. The dinghy really wasn’t banging because it was tied off with two lines securely to the boat.

What does the evidence show? She wouldn’t go back there.

That’s not her; that’s not her job. She would never go worry about the dinghy.

She would tell Dennis Davern, “Hey, can you go tie that dinghy down? It’s making noise.” That’s his job.

Six years of investigation, four new key witnesses, and two determined investigators with a lot of questions for Robert Wagner. As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s more of a person of interest now.

We know now that he was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared. Investigators talk about working this high-profile Hollywood mystery online at 48hours.com.

For the first time in more than 36 years since Natalie Wood drowned off Catalina Island, investigators called her husband a person of interest. But they stopped short of calling him a suspect.

We have not been able to prove that 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.

The statutes of limitations have run out on all crimes except one: murder. To prove murder, there has to be evidence that someone intentionally put Natalie in the water.

Falling in by accident wouldn’t count. If people knew that Natalie Wood was in the water and they didn’t save her—if they could have saved her and didn’t—would that be enough to bring charges?

“No, that’s not,” the investigator said. Believe it or not, there’s no duty to act.

Believe me, if she had called out or she had made any noises, or if we’d have heard anything, there were three of us there. We would have done something.

“Nobody heard anything,” one of the men on the boat said. Still, investigators remain troubled by the evidence they do have.

There are witnesses who talk about a fight on the back of the boat and the number and locations of fresh bruises on Natalie’s body. “I think I’ve been a cop long enough to see those appear to be assaultive in nature,” Hernandez said.

Could the bruises have instead come from a drunken fall? Perhaps.

But investigators think the circumstantial evidence—the fight, the alcohol, the jealousy—may suggest another scenario. Someone can get so enraged they can’t control their anger, like a crime of passion.

It just happens, and they didn’t mean for it to happen, and then later on they’re sorry about it. But it’s too late.

For his part, Christopher Walken has remained largely silent through the years. “We have to ask you about Natalie Wood because, as you know, they’ve reopened the case,” he was asked.

“You were there that night. What do you think happened, Christopher?”

“Well, you know, I stopped talking about that 30 years ago,” Walken said. “And there’s so much information—books and the internet. Anything you want to know, just go look.”

He did, however, interview with the new investigation. “I’m not going into what Christopher Walken said,” the detective said. “What he told us was in confidence.”

At least for now, investigators did tell us that Walken is not a person of interest. Despite several attempts to re-interview Robert Wagner, including a trip to Aspen where Wagner lives with his wife, actress Jill St. John, the investigators say the actor has refused to speak with them.

“Robert Wagner, of course, we want to talk to him and get his side of the story and try to clarify things,” the detective said. He’s refused time and time again to talk to us.

One part of Robert Wagner’s story has never changed. He continues to insist Natalie Wood’s death was an accident, but there is a part of him that blames himself.

“When you’re in love, you’re responsible for the other one,” Wagner said. “She’s responsible for me, and I was responsible for her.”

“And you know, this accident that occurred, I wasn’t there,” he continued. “I wasn’t there for her, and that’s always within me.”

In February 2021, Robert Wagner turned 91. This past July, Natalie would have been 83.

It’s a sad milestone for those who loved her. “It really does pain me to this day to know that she is gone and she really had a whole life in front of her,” her sister said.

“I was 35 when Natalie died, and I am now 71,” Lana Wood said. “Before my life is over, I would like to put Natalie to rest by knowing the truth.”

By speaking out, Lieutenant Corina and Detective Hernandez are hoping new witnesses will come forward. They seek someone who saw something, heard something, or was told something.

They want someone who will help answer the question once and for all: how did Natalie Wood end up in the water? Like any cold case, they intend to work it until it’s solved.

“We’re not ever going to close it until we get to the truth,” the investigator said. A modern-day Indiana Jones hit a treasure chest and left clues.

“If you’ve been brave, I give you title to the gold.” But was the cost of the quest too high?

This treasure hunt did claim at least five lives. He could have stopped this madness; it wasn’t worth it.

48 Hours is next on CBS.