Excerpts

“Natalie Wood’s Drowning Was Not an Accident”: A New Book’s Shocking Findings

An exclusive excerpt from Natalie Wood, Suzanne Finstad’s definitive biography—which contains new details about Wood’s mysterious death.

By Suzanne Finstad

March 11, 2020

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In 1981, big screen legend Natalie Wood went missing from the yacht she shared with her husband, Robert Wagner—only to be found approximately six hours later, floating facedown in the Pacific Ocean. In 2000, Sam Kashner revisited the tragedy for Vanity Fair, detailing the ambiguities that have prompted decades of speculation about whether Wood’s drowning was really an accident. The next year Suzanne Finstad released Natasha, the definitive biography of Wood, which shed even more light on the night Wood died. In 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officially reopened its investigation into Wood’s death.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Finstad is rereleasing her book as Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography, an even more comprehensive volume that includes new details Finstad has learned about Wood’s death since her book’s first edition—details that, according to the author, show even more conclusively that Wood didn’t drown by chance. Below, the author reveals her most explosive findings—and explains why now, more than ever, she believes Wagner played a role in the fall that killed Natalie Wood.

As I was writing the last chapters of Natasha (the title of the first edition of this book), 20 years after Natalie Wood’s death, I felt a sense of urgency to get the pages into print. For more than four years, I had been the keeper of Natalie Wood’s deepest, darkest secrets—her crippling fears, harrowing superstitions, terrible incidents from her past that few knew of. Natalie never disclosed her history of trauma, except through her fragile vulnerability and in her tender, old- soul eyes.

As I plumbed her past, Natalie’s demons and their origins revealed themselves to me as if released from a genie’s lamp. Family violence. An alcoholic father. A pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother. Psychological abuse as a child star. Paranoias. Phobias. A bedroom of storybook dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her. Pimped at 15 to Frank Sinatra. Forced to return an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried to kill himself afterward. Exploited into a sexual liaison as a teenager with 42-year-old director Nicholas Ray to prove that she could play a “bad” girl in Rebel Without a Cause.

The secret that was buried deepest in Natalie’s closet of skeletons was the shocking end of her fairy tale first marriage to bobby socks idol Robert Wagner, known to his friends as R.J. To protect Wagner’s image, Natalie publicly took the fall for their sudden divorce in 1961. She never refuted fan-magazine gossip that her marriage to Wagner imploded over an alleged affair she had with her costar Warren Beatty while filming Splendor in the Grass. In time, the gossip, patently false, was reported as fact.

Only a trusted few knew Natalie’s account. I was told by three of Natalie’s close friends, by her mother’s best friend, and her sister, Lana, that Natalie came upon R.J. in their Beverly Hills mansion in flagrante with a man. Lana recalled Natalie’s arriving in hysterics at their parents’ house, her hand bleeding, and shutting herself in her old bedroom. Natalie woke up in a hospital, dazed and in shock, after taking an overdose of sleeping pills and going into a coma.

That was as much as I wrote. But there is more to that story too.

The fallout from a lifetime of psychological damage and abuse led Natalie to multiple suicide attempts, daily psychoanalysis, and a fear of being alone at night so primal and deep-seated that she regressed to her child self. Her greatest fear, I discovered, derived from a prophecy told to her superstitious Russian mother by a Gypsy—namely, that she would die in dark water.

I also discovered that Natalie Wood’s drowning was not an accident. Homicide detectives in the L.A. Sheriff’s Department keep what they call a “murder book,” the official record of a homicide investigation. I was given access to Natalie Wood’s murder book. There I found the buried clues to what really happened on the last weekend of her life. As the evidence slowly, painstakingly mounted, it became disturbingly clear to me that not only was Natalie’s death not an accident, but the ensuing investigation was almost nonexistent.

As a self-described dutiful child, Natalie was trained by her mother to keep silent, to not rock the boat. As she got older, she kept her silence, often to protect others, as was Natalie’s way. During her life, in death, even after her death, no one, that I could see, had ever protected her. Certainly not her mother, the directors who exploited her, the studio executives who looked the other way, the men who abused her, or the sheriff’s detectives and coroner’s examiners investigating her drowning in 1981.

In the archive of forgotten facts, hidden truths, and concealed evidence about Natalie Wood, what is most shocking is Robert Wagner’s role in her drowning. The man that Natalie Wood married not once but twice, who would often say, with glass raised, “She takes my breath away,” refused to search for two and a half hours when Natalie went missing from their boat in the waters off Catalina Island.

Of all Natalie Wood’s secrets that I held in 2001, that secret was the reason for my urgency: I had come to realize the unimaginably horrible reason that she had drowned, and I needed to make public the dark and twisted facts of her drowning and its aftermath. I had uncovered the facts using the sheriff’s murder book, put them together, and strung them in a row like lights on a Christmas tree, revealing the full horror of that strange, doomed night. It would not change the outcome of Natalie Wood’s drowning, but it would be evident, after Natasha, that she did not cause her own death because she was drunk from wine and Champagne, as the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, stated. People would come to see, as I had, that Natalie Wood’s drowning was not an accident.

Recently, I’ve found three new witnesses. One is a confidential source that I put in touch with Ralph Hernandez, one of the investigators put in charge of the case when the L.A. Sheriff’s Department officially reopened its investigation into Wood’s drowning in November 2011. The source had information that Christopher Walken said he heard the fight between R.J. and Natalie, and that he told a friend not long after Natalie drowned that Wagner pushed her. Lana once asked Hernandez and Kevin Lowe, the two lead investigators, about Walken’s new statement. “Ralph said the only way Chris’d talk to them is if it was never disclosed. After they spoke with him, they told me they had enough to charge R.J. So…”

The other two new witnesses were present at Natalie Wood’s autopsy. Vidal Herrera, whom I learned about from a documentary producer, took photographs of Natalie’s body for the coroner’s office. Herrera told us he observed significant wounds to Natalie’s head. Ralph Hernandez, who took his sworn statement, has seen the original photos and concurs that Natalie’s head wounds are “troubling.” Head wounds that may indicate that she was in a violent fight, and was pushed, or tossed, in the water while unconscious.

Because the Wagners’ deckhand, Dennis Davern, omitted from his statement to police the “push” by Wagner that he acknowledged when he thought he was off-camera, Hernandez still lacks a witness to establish how Natalie got in the water or, in effect, who put her there. With that witness, the district attorney’s office might agree to take the case against Wagner to a grand jury. According to Lana, the district attorney told her that she wants a “smoking gun.”

Dr. Michael Franco may be able to provide a missing link. Franco, a family medicine specialist in Los Angeles, was an intern at the L.A. Coroner’s Office when Natalie Wood’s body was flown to Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center from Catalina. As a volunteer intern in 1981, he wasn’t listed as a coroner’s employee and therefore would not have been questioned. Franco observed what he is certain is critical physical evidence on Natalie’s body that establishes her death was a homicide.

For 40 years, Franco has kept silent, not wanting to be pulled into a media circus. After decades of reflection, and my persuasion, he decided that coming forward was “the right thing to do.”

What Franco observed, and found suspicious, were the bruises on Natalie’s anterior thighs and shins, bruises he described as “friction burns.” He told me what struck him as wrong: “I remember the striations were in the opposite direction of somebody trying to get onto a boat. It was almost like somebody being pushed off. And because of the significant amount of the bruising in the lower anterior thighs and shins, that’s what caught my attention. She would have had to have been pushed forcefully off, or there was a force that was pulling her off, or something. The amount of noticeable bruising to the thigh shouldn’t have been there.”

Franco took it up with Dr. Noguchi. “I mentioned to him the abrasions on Natalie. I told him I was having trouble understanding them. I said that they seemed to be in the opposite direction of what one would expect as to her cause of death. I remember when I told him who I was, he hesitantly stopped doing what he was doing, looked up at me, nodded his head, didn’t say anything, and then he continued doing what he’d been doing.

“What he said was, ‘Some things are best left unsaid.’”

Noguchi’s admission momentarily confused Franco: “I wasn’t sure what that meant initially, so, I stood there.” Noguchi, he came to believe, was acknowledging a cover-up in the coroner’s office. “However it was written up, that’s all you need to know,” Noguchi went on to say, according to Franco. Franco stood there, staring at him. “Again, he had his head down and wasn’t looking at me and he wasn’t saying anything. And I thought, This is my cue to step back. So I played with that for the rest of my life.”

Now Franco is ready to share what he saw with Hernandez. “Natalie Wood’s death wasn’t an accident. Somebody pushed her. I wasn’t following the case, so I didn’t know who all the players were. I wasn’t playing detective. I wasn’t interested in all that information. All I knew was what I saw. I knew this wasn’t a simple drowning. She had some abrasions that I could come to the conclusion that she was pushed off of whatever it was she was holding on to. There’s no reason to have those unless you’re being pushed off a surface. And they were deeper than just a simple slip-off because there is some back-and-forth.”

There’s another possibility. What if Wagner dropped the dinghy to make it look like Natalie had gone ashore, which was the story he gave to police? Davern said he heard the dinghy being dropped into the water after the horrible fight he’d overheard on the rear deck, and that he saw R.J. somewhere near the dinghy. The next time Davern saw him, he was sweating, looked like he’d been in a struggle, and said the dinghy was gone.

The last words that Davern heard him say to Natalie were, “Get off my fucking boat!” In his revised police statement, Davern said that R.J. refused to let him turn on searchlights to look for Natalie.

The striations that Franco saw on her body at the autopsy are consistent with the possibility that Natalie tried to hoist herself onto the dinghy from the water. “Someone,” Franco said, “was pushing her down and wouldn’t let her stay on.”

Franco believes that the L.A. Coroner’s Office covered up the true cause of Natalie Wood’s death. “Whatever they decided wasn’t going to be questioned.”

Allan Abbott, of Abbott & Hast Mortuary, handled transportation for Westwood Mortuary, the morticians who embalmed Natalie Wood’s body. He bore witness, literally, to a cover-up, reported in his 2016 book. “Natalie,” Abbott wrote, “was dressed in a huge fur coat, and was covered in bruises from where she had ‘hit the rocks’…they chose the coat so the bruising wouldn’t be visible with an open casket.”

Lana Wood now refers to Natalie’s death as “a murder.” She seethes thinking about Guy McIlwaine, the powerful Hollywood agent who represented her sister. A few days after Natalie drowned, McIlwaine dropped by to see Lana. He’d just been to R.J.’s house, and he said that R.J. told him what happened that night on the boat. “I would tell you, but I don’t trust you,” McIlwaine told Lana. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Well,” replied McIlwaine, “someday you’re gonna say something, and I don’t want R.J. hurt. Nobody needs to be hurt anymore.”

What about Natalie? In the memoir she began but ultimately deemed too revealing to publish, Natalie wrote, “Daisy Clover faced every major crisis alone. There was nobody to pull her out of trouble. I felt there was a lot of me in Daisy.”

Natalie had no one to protect her, in life or in death. She struggled alone in the dark sea, like the tiny, brave sailboat in her favorite painting, a Courbet she kept near to her; living out her worst nightmare, with no one responding to her calls for help.

All three men on the boat with Natalie Wood that night should be held accountable for her drowning. She went off the Splendour after a fight with R.J. so heated that it could be heard on other boats, yet hours passed before anyone with Natalie called for help. That chilling fact—and their silence afterward—twines Wagner, Davern, and Walken in a Chekhovian tragedy with no resolution short of a confession.

NATALIE WOOD: The Complete Biography by Suzanne Finstad. Copyright © 2001, 2020 by Suzanne Finstad. Used by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.