An old Hollywood mystery and tragedy is being thrust back into the headlines. 48 Hours will report on Saturday that actor Robert Wagner is a “Person of Interest” in the 1981 death of his wife and actress, Natalie Wood. Her drowning death has been the subject of much speculation and debate since it occurred and has become the stuff of Hollywood legend.
The term “person of interest” has no legal meaning, and 48 Hours‘ correspondent Erin Moriarty reiterated on CBS This Morning show that Wagner “has never been a suspect and he is not now.”
So why has this come up again? In a 48 Hours interview with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant John Corina, the investigator tells Moriarty, “As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s 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.”
In this era where true crime has become a television addiction, it’s easy to see why viewers would eat this up, even if some of these details aren’t entirely new. In his 2008 memoir, Wagner himself admitted that he argued with Wood the night of her disappearance and that a wine bottle was shattered against a table. Wagner has made no new comments after the announcement of the 48 Hours episode airing Saturday but this is what he said in his 2008 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.”
On CBS This Morning, Moriarty said that since the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department reopened its investigation into the case in 2011, new witnesses have come forward, specifically two people who also were boating off Catalina Island that night in November 1981. Both boaters say they heard Wood and Wagner arguing, and one says he saw Wood, acting as the aggressor, fall onto her knee – an account possibly backed up by bruises noted in the autopsy report. Department Detective Ralph Hernandez believes that Wood was a victim of some kind of an assault and did not enter the water on her own.
Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island in California during a night of yachting with husband Wagner, friend Christopher Walken and yacht captain Dennis Davern. Once again, Wagner has never been a suspect but an air of suspicion has always surrounded him and those on the yacht at the time of her drowning.
