Unsolved Case : Natalie Wood pt. 1

On November 29, 1981, at about 7:30 a.m. Natalie Wood’s body was found floating face down in the Pacific Ocean around 200 yards off Catalina’s Islands Blue Cavern Point. She was wearing only a flannel nightgown, blue wool socks and a red down jacket. Before getting into the details of the scene, let’s establish what led up to that point. Natalie Wood was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood until her sudden death. Eerily, from her early childhood, Wood’s mother was said to have filled her with a fear of dark water, as a fortune teller had once prophesized that she would die of drowning. In a chilling incident from when Wood was 10 years old and filming “The Green Promise”, a bridge rigged to collapse throwing her into the water, despite her mother assured her that it would be safe. Natalie broke her wrist and left the incident even more terrified of water than when she began. As a child she had such a phobia of water that it is said she was afraid to wash her hair, and had recurring nightmares about drowning. On Wood’s 18th birthday, she went on a date with actor Robert Wagner when he was 26 years old.

Wagner and Wood

They got married in 1957, but divorced a few years later. Natalie later married and divorced another man only to marry Robert Wagner for the second time in July 1972. Wood, herself, had said that she believed her feelings of torment were rooted in a feeling that she did not truly know herself as people had told her what to do her whole life, including her mother. Pushing forward to more recent history of the incident, it was the weekend just after Thanksgiving of 1981. She had been working on a science fiction film with Christopher Walken at the time, and he was invited to join her and Wagner on their yacht that weekend. According to the captain of the boat, Dennis Davern, who had worked with the couple for several years and was practically a family friend by then, Natalie developed what we may call “a crush” on Walken while filming and Wagner has even flown out to where the they were filming to wake sure he was not going to “make a fool of himself over this”.

Walken and Wood

Though Wagner was not the only one who struggles controlling his jealousy, as around the same time, reports say Natalie was suffering from jealousy over Wagner’s on-screen romance with his co-star Stephanie Powers. The group left on the yacht “The Splendour” around noon on Friday November 27, about two days before Wood would be found dead. Everyone on the boat, including the ship’s Captain Davern, had been drinking way too much for the weekend. On that Friday night, Wagner and Wood argued, to the point that Davern was concerned and asked Walken to get involved. Walken is known to have refused to intervene saying “Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife”. Davern ended up taking Wood ashore that night in the yacht’s 13 foot inflatable dinghy named the Prince Valiant, and they slept at the Pavillon Lodge Hotel in Avalon. The first time Davern was questioned about this night, he lied saying that all four of them had stayed on the yacht. The police, however, already had evidence that they had not been on the boat the first night, so Davern was prompted to tell the truth. He went on to say that he and Wood spent the night in the same room, but they just drank wine and went to sleep. Davern also claims that in their relationship he felt very protective of her and that she felt completely comfortable with him.