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Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, listen to Toss Show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck's here, too. And Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, part of our ongoing, indefinitely continuous true crime edition.

That's right. And weirdly, our second Paul F. Tompkins reference is coming on this.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah. Because Paul's wonderful, hysterical wife, Janie looks like Natalie Wood.

Okay. Is she known for that?

I mean, I don't know if she's internationally known, but I think Janie knows it and her friends know it, and it has been said out loud.

I got you. That's what I'm after. I don't know if this is just.

Your observation or it's been it's been said before. It's on record.

So if you don't know who Natalie Wood is first, go look up Janie Tompkins. You get a pretty good idea. You could also look up Natalie Wood herself.

Sure.

But you probably are familiar with her one way or another. First of all, she probably captured your heart as the little girl who doubted the existence of Santa Claus a Miracle on 34th street, the original one. She might have also captured your heart as the kind of good girl gone bad in Rebel Without a Cause. She also may have been like, I like that girl in West Side Story, or I like that girl in Splendor in the Grass, or I like that girl in the 1976 made for TV remake of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Well, then you like Natalie Wood. Guys.

Yeah. Or if you grew up like we did in the 80s, you might like her from the Sci-Fi classic not classic 80s, early eighty s sci fi classic Brainstorm.

I never saw it.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You should check it out. It was sort of one of those it was in the early 80s. Like, there were a few of those movies that were kind of in the same vein of do you remember the movie? Looker?

Yes.

Like with Albert Finney. And then there was the Tom Seliquin about the little rope with Gene Simmons, with the little robot.

Runaway.

Runaway. It was in that in that vein, sort of.

That sounds like a great triple feature if you ask me.

It's kind of right up your alley. I bet you'd like it.

Okay, I'll check that one out. I have not seen that. I was familiar with her from Rebel Without a Cause because I went through a real big James Dean phase in high school.

Oh, yeah.

You might also be familiar yeah. You might also be familiar with her sister, Lana Wood. Yeah, she was plenty O'Toole in diamonds are forever. She was very well known for that. And both of these sisters were originally named Zacharenko. They were the daughters of Russian immigrants, Maria and Nick Zakarenko, who moved to San Francisco and had these two kids. And their mom said, you're both going to be stars. Especially you, Natalie. Born Natalia.

That's right. And Lana was born what, svetlana. So they kind of Americanized their names, kind of. And we're going to be reading through a few different livia helped us with this, but she got a lot of this stuff from a few different biographies. So if we reference, like, Suzanne Finstead's biography or maybe Robert Wagner's biography or autobiography, that's what we're talking about.

Yeah, or Sam Cashner wrote a very great Vanity Fair article on it.

Oh, that's right. Very good one. But Suzanne Finstad's biography recounts the childhood that wasn't as great as it seemed from the outside, that her father was an alcoholic. Her mother was a very controlling sort of manager of her career and would organize meetings with the very experienced men and actors trying to get her foot in the door, including one incident where she did so with Kirk. Douglas where she was. Well, she says she was raped by Kirk Douglas when she was 16 at one of these meetings at the Chateau Marmont. And it was kept secret for many, many years until Kirk Douglas died. And then Lana came out and said, well, I feel like I should reveal who this person was now. And I think this was in her book that she wrote about her sister. So there was also that account of her life.

Yeah. So that's just Kirk Douglas. Apparently, her mom arranged a sexual liaison when she was 15 with Frank Sinatra to get this part in Rebel Without a Cause, she apparently had to prove she was capable of being a bad girl by sleeping with the director, who was 44 at the time. I think she was 16 then, too. And her mom was, like, complicit in all of this. She's just like, this is the price for entry into Hollywood. Sorry, kid. Just keep your mouth shut and your chin up, which is I just can't imagine the damage of just these instances. But then of being that dismissed and unsupported by your mom. It's just awful. But what's amazing is that she managed to stay alive and actually thrive over the years because she did develop a really amazing career, especially early on in the 60s.

Yeah. You mentioned all those classic movies she was in. In 1957, she married for the first time robert Wagner, who you and I, Josh, would go on to know as the lead actor in the 80s TV.

Show Heart to Heart costarring Stephanie Powers.

Stephanie Powers. But in the 1950s, he was an actor kind of wasn't super famous, but he acted a lot. And then his star Rose, as hers was kind of fading. But they divorced in 1961 on their first marriage. Some people say magazines, especially back then, said that Natalie Wood, they broke up because she had an affair with Warren Beatty. Her Splendor in the Grass co star Sam Cashner, in his article says, yeah, this basically is what happened. But in the Finstad biography, she's no, no, that is not true at all. And including Lana will back this. You know, Natalie stumbled upon RJ, her husband having relations with a man and had a suicide attempt, which is one of several, apparently. And that's what happened to their first marriage.

Yeah, but she allowed the press to say that she had had an affair with Warren Beatty. The reason that that held water, even if it wasn't true, is because they were very close on the set of Splendor in the Just. Their characters had just this crazy, sizzling love affair. And as actors, it's tough to separate those things, I believe.

And Warren Beatty had a certain reputation.

Yes. So apparently that is what Robert Wagner thought. He thought that they were having an affair and he was very jealous and very protective and just felt cuckolded, I guess, by this. Even though supposedly it didn't even happen. But that's a really important point. That was one of the reasons they broke up, was he was very jealous and very overprotective of his relationship with her.

That's right. She got married to a gentleman named Richard Gregson after that in 1969. He is a British writer and actor just sort of producer film industry guy. They had their daughter Natasha, who goes by Natasha Gregson Wagner. Although she's married now. She may have added another name to the end of her name. I'm not sure. McGillicuddy but she is an actor too. I haven't seen anything in a little while. I'm not sure if she's still doing that because I know she made a documentary recently about her mom. But I remember seeing her in a few movies back in the day that she did a really good one with Robert Downey Jr. And I can't think of the name of it.

Oh, I know who it is. The last days of disco.

No.

Pickup Artist?

No, he wasn't. In the last days of disco.

I can't remember less than zero.

No.

Weekend at Bernie's.

I think it was just like three people in the movie. It was a very small oh, no, you know what? It was weekend at Bernie's there. So she married Gregson, and during that same period, wagner married a woman named Marion Marshall. They had a daughter named Katie in 64, and then they eventually remarried in 72 and had a daughter named Courtney. So now there are three daughters, one that Wood and Wagner had together and one of each from previous marriages. For her part, Lana Wood was like, why are you getting back together with this guy? And as recounted in her book, Natalie said, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

Yeah. And the reason why Lana Wood was even questioning her was because they had a tumultuous relationship while they were married the first time. But apparently they never fell out of love or they never stopped loving each other, is how I saw it put, I think, in an investigation discovery documentary. And so they remarried in 1972, they had Courtney in 1974 and basically just went back to married life. But now with a family with three daughters, that was a big difference between their first go round. They were trying to make the family work, and apparently it was going fairly well.

Yeah, he was a little older when he like seven or eight years older.

Eight, I think.

Eight years older. And, yeah, he got that role on Heart to Heart, and so he started doing pretty well in the industry. While the same is true today, an actress in her 40s, they start looking elsewhere. Generally speaking, unless you're like a Meryl Streep or somebody, you're not going to get the calls that you used to get. And that's what happened, certainly with Natalie Wood, after great, great fame in the 1960s, 50s into the then it started to sort of tail off into the 70s.

Yes. But if you're a man in Hollywood, and as you start to age, you become distinguished, it's a different part of your career. And that's certainly what happened with Robert Wagner.

No, he wasn't washed up at 43. I guess he would have been almost 50.

Yeah. His star started to rise again. So they had oppositional careers as far as time went.

And that figures in, by the way, that's the reason we're talking about this, right?

So it's November 1981. They've been married again for nine years, and Natalie Woods, 43, robert Wagner's, 51. And I say we take our first break and come back and start talking about the problem.

We'll be right back.

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Juck. So in Thanksgiving 1981, the weekend after Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood took their yacht out, the splendor 60 foot yacht. Pretty nice, apparently. It had five staterooms the whole deal. It was like a legit yacht. Robert Wagner was a boat guy. A yacht guy, really? I think they took it to Santa Catalina island, better known as Catalina island, I think like 20 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. And I've never been there, but I get the impression that it is very yacht friendly, almost like the south coast of France is how I kind of take it, where very rich people put their yachts in and then go and party in town and then go party from yacht to yacht. And so they showed up Thanksgiving weekend at Catalina Island looking to have a good time.

Yeah, they originally were going to have a lot more friends on board, but apparently the forecast was a little dodgy. And so the only person that came along was Christopher Walken, who said, it takes more than a few raindrops to frighten me.

It's not bad. Didn't you interview Christopher Walken on Movie Crush once?

Yeah, sure I did.

Pretty cool.

Listen to that episode. It's great. And also listen to the Kevin Pollock episode.

So the reason that Christopher Walken was there, because you're just like, well, that's a little random. Natalie Wood, robert Wagner, christopher Walken. He was an up and coming actor at the time. I'm not even sure did he have the Dead Zone under his belt yet.

I mean, he had done he did The Deer Hunter by then, annie hall and The Deer Hunter and I don't know if Dead Zone, it was right around there, but he was doing his thing a little bit.

He was like Hollywood's it guy actor at the time. He was in demand, and he was co starring in this movie brainstorm with Natalie Woods. So she invited her co star friend to the yacht, and he was the only one that came out of this whole group. And then very noteworthy is the fourth person, dennis Davern. He was the captain of the yacht. And so the four of them were on this yachting weekend after Thanksgiving.

That's right. Actually, dead Zone came out that very year. So this is kind of early peak walking. Okay, so on Saturday, the 20 eigth of Thanksgiving weekend, they ate dinner at Doug's Harbor Reef on Catalina. They got very drunk. The manager there said that he was even worried that they couldn't get back. They had a little inflatable motorized know that's what you do when you have a yacht to go to shore. I was called the Prince Valiant, which is also the name of an early Robert Wagner movie. And obviously Splendor was named after Splendor in the grass. So they had their little boats. Hers was the yacht name. His was the dinghy name, which is interesting.

And he hated his role in Prince Valiant. He felt it was his worst role. He was apparently mocked for it widely. So it was kind of like tongue in cheek that he named small Boat Valiant.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense then. But the night manager there at Doug's Harbor Reef was like, I don't even know if these guys are so drunk. I fear for their safety of just getting back onto the Splendor. So he said, hey, harbor patrol person, can you make sure they get back safely? They left about 1030 at night. And then at 130 in the morning, robert Wagner and Captain Davern made a call to the shore saying, natalie Wood has gone missing. We need your help. It was 01:30 a.m. 2 hours later at 330, they called the Coast Guard to get a formal search going. And then, very tragically, at 745 in the morning, davern identified the body of Natalie Wood about a mile south of where the yacht was anchored in a flannel nightgown, socks and a red down jacket.

Yes, the dinghy they found washed up on the shore. And very importantly, the oars were locked, so they had not been used to row. The ignition was off, so it had not been turned on, and yet it was just kind of washed away from the boat. This is an enormous deal. I mean, like, Natalie Wood was already like, Hollywood legend. And what's was one of the reasons she was having trouble getting parts was not just her age, but she was old Hollywood. And Hollywood had started to transition in the 70s into like, a newer version of itself and kind of resented the old studios and stuff. So she was like Hollywood royalty at this time already. And the idea that she died from unnatural causes was just I mean, it was just a sensation right out of the gate.

Yeah. I mean, I remember this. I was a kid, but I was a kid who devoured Entertainment Tonight, the TV show, when that first came out, which was somewhere around here. I remember being about that age when that TV show premiered, and I would watch it every night and keep up with that stuff. And I remember very distinctly Natalie Wood dying and drowning and her husband. I was like the heart to heart guy and kind of out of the gate. It was portrayed as an accident. And that's sort of what this podcast is going to detail, is the way the story has changed over the years, the suspicions that it wasn't just a simple accident. And it kind of started off with the autopsy. There was a medical examiner named Joseph Choi who said that Natalie Wood's blood alcohol content level was zero point 14, just very high.

Yeah, I looked that up because I'm like, okay, what does that actually mean in physical behavioral terms?

Yeah.

According to the South Australia government, zero eight to 00:15. So just above what Natalie Wood had in her bloodstream. You can expect slurred speech, impaired balance, unstable emotions, possible nausea and vomiting. Just above 00:15. You can't control your bladder, and you probably will need help walking around. So she was very drunk at the time she died.

Yeah. And if you want to be very technically bored, you should go listen to our episode on Breathalyzers.

Yeah. They were really difficult to explain.

That was a beast. And I'm surprised we don't remember that more often. When we're asked what episodes have been the hardest or worst?

Definitely the hardest, because there's, like, a crystal involved that somehow tells your fortune, and then they translate that into ones and zeros.

A very tough episode, but it's out there. So Troy said zero point 14%. And also the medical examiner, right? Yeah. And also said that there were bruises on her arms and legs and face and basically said, it looks like she probably fell overboard. She was trying to get into the dinghy. She was very drunk, and these bruises and things is evidence of her kind of doggedly trying to get back on board unsuccessfully. There was a chief medical examiner named Thomas Noguchi for the county who said, yeah, and if you look at the dinghy here, there's scratches on the side of it. Clearly, she was trying to pull herself back up on this thing, but she was in that down jacket, and it became very, very heavy, and she probably just held onto that dinghy and got hypothermia and exhausted, and she drowned, and it's an accident.

Yeah. So that was the official line for a very long time. For some reason, Natalie Wood decides, yeah, tried to get into the Valiant, the dinghy, late at night. She was very drunk, and as she was trying to get into the dinghy, she slipped and fell and drowned. She was well known as a strong swimmer or not a strong swimmer, not very good at swimming at all. The opposite of a strong swimmer. The thing is, that doesn't explain why she tried to get into the dinghy at night. It's always been an outstanding question. And so Thomas Noguchi, the chief medical examiner for the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, commissioned a psychological autopsy, which is a thing, but from what I can tell, it's a thing that you commission when you're trying to show that a suspicious death that seems accidental was actually suicide. Like, they take into account, like, the person's life history, their family history, social interactions, what they were doing right before they died. So it's kind of OD that he had this commissioned. It was even odder that when he got it back, he's like, I'm not releasing to the public. And he said that he was afraid that he would be accused of sensationalism that ship had already sailed.

He was very much despised by Natalie Wood's friends and just Hollywood in general, because he made the grave mistake of mentioning that she was drunk when she died accidentally at the press conference about her death and their findings. And he received the ire of Frank Sinatra, screen Actors Guild, and generally all of Hollywood, and ended up being demoted from his position at the top of the coroner's office to not chief. They actually assigned him the title not Chief examiner anymore.

Yeah. I think it was definitely one of those cases where she was Hollywood royalty, like you said, and no one in the world wants to hear that. Natalie Wood got so drunk that she slipped and fell into the water and drowned.

No, it's tawdry.

Yeah. And so they tried to keep that know, when he mentioned at the press conference, it was a big deal. And now we get into sort of what happened after three decades and how this story has changed over the years.

Yeah. Because just one thing, Chuck, if that were it and the story stayed straight all these years and nothing ever changed, it would be fishy, but not a big deal. The reason that it's a big deal and we're talking about it today is that over the years, the people who were there changed their stories. And that's why it goes from kind of fishy to an all out mystery.

Yeah, an all out mystery and scandal, really, that how many years later is this? People are still sort of talking about it. Some people are still obsessed with it and writing books about it. For Wagner's part, he has done, like I mentioned earlier, there was an 86 authorized biography, heart to Heart, spelled with an E this time. Not like the TV show, because on the TV show, they were the hearts, the H-A-R-T-S.

But he couldn't get the use out.

Of the studio fun to pay for that. So heart to heart with Robert Wagner. And he said in 1986 that me and Chris Walken got in an argument about politics. There was another biography in 2008 called Pieces of My Heart. I'm sorry. This is the autobiography that he himself wrote, obviously, probably with some help, where he said, actually, the fight was about my wife. We were having an argument about her know, forget about this know, you had your day. You should just be mom. Now we got these three girls. I've got this great acting career going, so let me do that. And Christopher Walken was like, no, she's wait, wait.

You got to do it as Walken.

Korea matters. Robert.

God, that's great. RJ tied for first with Sammy Davis.

Jr. Well, but it's also, like, probably one of the worst walk ins, because everyone does walking, and most of them are pretty great.

I don't do walking. I admire your walking. I'm just going to put it give it a shot.

Nothing.

No. You know what happens when I actually try to do a voice? It goes south.

Same here. So no matter how it shakes out, wagner basically know, as far as what the fight was about, was that even though that is key, that he changed the story, because first it was about politics and it was personal.

Yeah, that's a big change.

It's a big change. But either way, he said Natalie was annoyed she was put off by all this, or she just got bored. She went to the master cabin, and the last thing I saw of her was when I went to check on her and she was doing her hair, the vanity and basically shut the door on me.

Right. And Christopher Walken supported this. They were in an argument. Natalie Wood left. And then apparently, according to Robert Wagner's autobiography, after Natalie Wood left, they continued their argument, and it got so heated that Robert Wagner smashed a wine bottle on the table. If you're younger and you're like, this is bizarre behavior, you need to take into account these people were ruinously drunk this night. They were as drunk as you can be and still be standing up and talking that drunk. So that's why they were doing things like yelling about careers and smashing wine bottles on the table and all sorts of other things that will come up. But the line throughout was that Natalie Wood went to bed. Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner eventually parted ways. Robert Wagner, I think, went out to the bridge or outside. Christopher Walken went to bed. And it wasn't for another hour or so that they noticed that Natalie Wood was gone and so is the dinghy.

That's right. Natalie Wood's lawyer said after her death that she often took the dinghy out alone. Robert Wagner, apparently, as far as this initial story goes, wasn't super worried because this is something that they say she was known to do. But like you said, she was not a strong swimmer. And there's an interview that has been played time and time again throughout all of this, sort of trying to piece together what happened where not too long before her death, where she said, I'm frightened to death of the water. I can swim a little bit, but I'm afraid of the water in the dark, of water that is dark. So immediately there's a suspicion of, like, why in the world would she have gone out there in this dinghy? Like, sure, she had had some drinks and was maybe drunk. Robert Wagner, in that autobiography, said, well, that's exactly the point. She went out there and realized that, oh, wait. I am too drunk. I'm not a great swimmer. I'm scared of the water at night. And they didn't hear the engine start up. So again, it was just an accident that happened. Or maybe she even couldn't get to sleep because this dinghy wasn't secured and it was banging against the stateroom, near the stateroom.

So she got out to do that to tie it up better and then slipped in.

Right? Yeah, because when people are like, why would she go out into the dinghy if she was afraid of water? She didn't know how to drive the dinghy, and she was wearing a nightgown. He's like, well, probably it was banging and making noise. She was just trying to retie it. Those were the two that was his first one. People questioned it. That was his second one. The thing is, throughout this, all the other witnesses supported what he was saying, including Christopher Walken. Apparently, the last time he talked about it was in 1997 in a. Playboy magazine interview where he said that she slipped and fell in the water. And then one of the things that has never changed over the entire life of this story is that Christopher Walken was in bed when all of this happened, asleep. No one's ever changed that little nugget.

Yeah. He has not talked about it much over the years.

No, but when he has, he supported Robert Wagner's version.

Yeah, but he didn't write biographies and go into detail or anything like he's there are a couple of random interviews where he talks about it, but otherwise he is, like, to basically stay mom.

Exactly. I mean, talk about, like, a terrible weekend on the boat as a guest.

Yeah, absolutely. So right off the bat, there are people that are like, this sounds pretty fishy. In 1992, it was like, nine years later, entertainment Weekly had a story journalists kept following up over the years. Basically, it's like, what's up with this story? It's not adding up. There are certain things that just don't make any sense. Different people came out over the years that supposedly heard things. That was in the Entertainment Weekly story. There was a boat nearby the Capricorn with John Payne and Marilyn Wayne on board, and they supposedly heard a woman yelling for help in the direction of.

The splendor for 15 minutes.

Yeah. In that Cashner Vanity Fair article, they said that they thought it could have just been people goofing off, like everyone's out there getting drunk and being loud, probably. And it was hard to tell if it was real worried, in panic, screaming, or people just having a good time. But the last thing they said was they claim that they heard a man's slurred voice saying, okay, honey, we'll get you.

Yeah. The thing is, the cops never interviewed Wayne and Payne. They just were disencluded, I guess. And as you'll see, this first investigation wrapped up pretty quick. So it's not surprising that they weren't interviewed, but it is egregious they weren't. There's one other thing that Marilyn Wayne said. She said three days after Natalie Wood's death, she received a little message in Scribbled handwriting saying, if you value your life, keep quiet about what you know, which is not just a threat. It also is a very desperate act from a guilty conscience. If you do something like that, you are really worried about things, because that's a really overextension of yourself. In that case, just FYI, I guess.

Yeah. And if you picture Christopher walking saying it, it's bone chilling.

Let's hear it.

No, there's no way. That's too far.

How about Sammy Davis Jr. Doing it?

That'd be kind of fun, actually. If you value your life, babe, keep quiet about what you know. Man very nice.

That's bombshell stuff. But because it wasn't included in the police investigation, it's treated as conjecture, rumor. Maybe. Marilyn Wayne is trying to get her 15 minutes of fame. From what I could tell, she was not like that at all. She didn't seem to be prone to confabulation. She seemed like a reliable witness. She wasn't included in the original investigation, but she was included in subsequent journalism and books on the subject.

That's right. From the beginning, Lana Wood was someone who has sort of beat the drum of, hey, let's get this investigation going again. I'm not buying all this stuff. One of the biggest reasons why is because Denis Davern, that ship captain, that yacht captain, his story really changed at first. He went along with that official narrative, like you were saying, like all three men did. But later on and some of these were paid appearances, we should point out he said, I was lying about some stuff in 1981 in that Cashner book in 2000, he said this whole trip was not great. In fact, she didn't even spend the night on the boat the day before. She stayed on shore because there was so much kind of unpleasantness and fighting going on and it stemmed from jealousy. This was her costar in her new movie that she was in, and he thought that they were flirting too much and that there might be something going on and he was getting too much attention. Christopher Walken and I didn't say this stuff back then.

Yeah, he said that. I think on the Today Show, they said, what did you tell the police? And he said, I told them the story that RJ came up with.

Yeah.

So there's another thing, too. Dennis Davron has, over the years, been very much accused of being like a publicity hound. He's after the money or he wrote a book, whatever. He did write a book. But if you start to dig into him, too, and you watch some interviews with him, he genuinely seems uncomfortable. He doesn't seem like he's seeking the limelight. He does seem, at least at first glance, a person with a guilty conscience that's trying to come clean. And then most importantly, I think he doesn't paint himself in this angelic light like he lied to police. He went along with a conspiracy to cover up a murder. Potentially, he's admitting his own culpability while he's revealing the truth. He's not trying to keep himself out of it.

That's a good point. That's a very good point. He also said in this Cashner book, the yacht captain said after we got back from dinner on the 20 Eigth, they were drunk. They kept drinking. And Wagner was again still upset because they were sort of giggling together. Natalie Wood and Chris Walken were that's when the wine bottle got smashed. And he yelled, what are you trying to do f my wife? That's when supposedly, according to Daburn, wood went to her room and Walk in. Went to his room because that's a.

Party foul to smash your wine bottle on the table and say that to your guest.

Yeah, it's a big party foul. Like the party's over at that point.

Exactly.

They went to their separate rooms. After a little while, according to Daburn, robert Wagner went to, you know, to their room and he heard them, quote, fighting like crazy things being thrown around. Then he said he heard the dinghy being untied. And in the Finstad book that just came out a few years ago, apparently the last words that Dennis Dabron heard Wagner say were get off my Effing boat.

A lot of F words from that guy that night.

Yeah, that's not in heart to heart.

So one other account that he gave of it was that there was this scuffle, a lot of physical sounds of fighting, not just from the stateroom, but now outside on the deck of the boat, in earshot, but out of eyesight. And he hears get off my Effing boat. A little more of a scuffle and then silence. That's eerie. But it doesn't jibe with Marilyn Wayne's ear witness account, which was that she heard somebody calling for help for 15 minutes. It's possible that Daven's telling what, he's portraying the story accurately and that Marilyn Wayne really did hear somebody else goofing around, who knows? But it's important that those two accounts, ear witness accounts, don't line up necessarily.

So around 1130, according to Daburn, wagner came back to the bridge, was disheveled looking, apparently, and they got drunk together, apparently on more than wine, right?

Yeah, I think they moved to Scotch.

So at 130 in the morning, Dabron says that Wagner said he was going to go check on her and her room, came back and said she was gone. That's when they noticed the dinghy was gone. And he was like, I got to turn on these lights and start looking. According to Dabron, Wagner said, don't do that, don't turn on the engine, don't do anything because we don't want to alert all these people.

It's a very weird thing to say if your wife is missing off of a boat.

Very weird.

Even if you're ruinously drunk. That is a weird thing to say because also take into account dennis Davron is ruinously drunk at this time too, and his first instinct is to turn on the floodlights and start looking around the boat.

Yeah.

So Davron said that this is all new. He's admitting that he lied to the police at the time. He was interviewed twice by the police on the morning of at the boat and then a few days later in the presence of two of Robert Wagner's lawyers. And this is not what he told the police. This is all very new and scandalous stuff that he's basically pointing the finger at Robert Wagner without coming out and saying it overtly. And he's saying that he lied to the police because he had a really unusual experience at the time. He was fairly young. I think he was in his twenty s at the time. He was just some boat dude who they'd hired to be their captain and had become friends. As close of friends as you can be with somebody you employ or who employs you. Right. But he kind of took them to be friends. And so right after Natalie Wood died, he essentially moved in with Robert Wagner. Robert Wagner moved him into his house in Beverly Hills for a few weeks, and later on, Dennis Dabron said it was akin to a hostage.

Yeah, like, according to Davron, it was like, let me get this guy in here, and just let's keep him drunk and get drunk. And they're also drowning their sorrows and I imagine deeply upset. But, yeah, like you said, he felt like he was not allowed to leave, almost.

Yeah. Well, supposedly one of his girlfriends showed up to speak to him and was turned away at the door. There wasn't a phone in the bedroom that he had. And at night, when they turned on the security system, he couldn't leave the bedroom or else it would set the security system off. So it's not like anybody was like, you stay here. But like you said, he didn't feel like he could leave. It's a very weird thing to say, but that is his explanation for why he didn't say this and why he lied to police at first.

That's right. I think now a break.

Yes. Yeah. Let's do it, man.

All right. We'll take a break, and we'll be right back to talk about what's happened since then.

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All right. We mentioned earlier that Daven wrote a book. It is called the goodbye, Natalie, goodbye Splendor. That was in 2009. In November of 220 eleven, the La sheriff's department reopened the investigation. And I remember this is very big news, saying we have some new information from some unnamed sources. Lana, like I mentioned, Lana had been beating the drum to kind of get this thing reopened for years. A publicist for the Wagner family said, these are people trying to get their 15 minutes. They're trying to profit on the 30 year anniversary of the death. They didn't specifically mention Daven's book, but Daven, for his part, was like, man, my book's out of print at this point, and no one's trying to sell a book here.

Well, he also supposedly turned on a $50,000 offer from a tabloid to tell the story. Again, he didn't do it. So, yeah, he was apparently not out for the money.

Exactly. Well, these are all accounts of people, so we can just report, right?

Yes. Yes. I'm glad you said that, because I don't want to give the impression that I'm, like, in Dennis Daven's corner. I'm just trying to give the full picture. I'm not trying to push him on anybody as a reliable person. That's not what I mean to be doing. So I'm glad you said that.

Yeah. So officials said that Wagner and Walken like they're not suspects right now. In 2011, Walken lawyered up immediately, though, which is interesting. And here's the rub. At this point, the statute of limitations had run out for anything but murder, so they couldn't go after him for assault or anything like that. Unless it was assault with intent to murder her. And they were like, we don't have a case for that. We don't have new physical evidence. This story has changed. Davern has admitted to. So, like, unless we have some ironclad, sort know, figurative smoking gun, we can't go after, you know, for murdering Natalie Wood.

Right. But at the same time, Robert Wagner doesn't want this talked about any longer, because whether he did it or not, his name invariably is dragged through the mud. Now anytime this story comes up in the press, especially now that the sheriff's department has reopened the case. So it couldn't have been very comfortable for him. Dennis Daven did the rounds. He was on today's show. He was asked directly about lying to the police and admitted that he had. And apparently other people came forward, too. Something like a hundred different people contacted the sheriff's department in Los Angeles. And one of the people that the detectives talked to, one of the lead investigators, was named Ralph Fernandez. He was put together with a confidential source of finstad, the biographer who had done years of research on this. And apparently Hernandez found the person credible enough that this kind of became an extra part of the case, which was that this person had heard Walken say that Wagner and Wood had been fighting and that Wagner pushed wood didn't say pushed her overboard, killed her, nothing like that. But it's enough that it veers away from, like, solid line throughout the whole time, which is that he was in bed.

It was an accident.

Yeah. And other people came forward just sort of verifying that there was, like, yelling, crashing around, people on the boat, arguing. I think it's basically agreed on at this point that everyone it was loud and there was arguing and there was fighting. I don't think anyone I mean, even from the beginning, it was just like, yeah, we're arguing about politics. But that changed pretty quickly, too, because there were so many ear witnesses, basically.

Yeah. But it's important to point out, though, Chuck, is wagner has never acknowledged that he fought with Wood. It was always an argument, really, between him and Walken, maybe as far as it was about Wood's career. But he's never said he was in an argument directly with Wood, and especially that he didn't have any throwing stuff around the room fight with Natalie Wood. So that's important to remember, too. His explanation is way back in the rear view now as far as we've gone with all of these different explanations.

Yeah, absolutely. So, summer of 2012, the cause of death was formally changed to undetermined and drowning and other undetermined factors was the description of the accidental drowning. The La. County coroner know, we have to explain this to the family. There's been a new analysis of these bruises. Some of them indicate that they were before she drowned, like they were from a fight. There were bruises on her wrist that suggest assault happened, and they had to tell their family this.

Yeah. Also, there was another person named Vidal Herrera who took photos of Natalie Wood's body for the coroner's office. And he said that he saw significant wounds on her head that were bad enough that she might have been unconscious before she even hit the water from the head wounds.

Right.

That's a new piece of information. There was another new piece of information that came forward in 2020 who was someone else that worked at the coroner's office named Michael Franco. Right.

Yeah. And then again, this is from Finstad's book. Franco said that these friction burns and striations from the wrist and on her body were in the opposite direction, or what you would think you would get as she's trying to climb onto a boat. And there was bruising on her thighs, bruising on her shins. And to me not Chuck to franco said to me, it looked like it was someone who had been pushed and was in a physical altercation with another human.

Yeah. And back in the day, in 1982, when he was an intern at the coroner's office, he went to Chief Examiner Thomas Noguchi and said all this stuff to him. And Noguchi apparently told Michael Franco that some things are better left unsaid, and that however it was written up, that's all you need to know. Which is a very weird thing for a chief medical examiner to say, because they're the ones who are responsible for determining cause of death.

Yeah, absolutely. Where we stand today, as of about a year and a half ago, in May 2022, the sheriff's department has ended the investigation, but it remains a, quote, open, unsolved case. It's become a thing that has divided this family, because on one side, you have Lana sort of beating the drum to keep this thing going and very suspicious of Robert Wagner. And then you have all the daughters have remained steadfast behind their dad, and they were like, he loved her very much. Things may have been volatile, but he did not kill her. Although Lana also says, like, I don't think he had some murderous intent. I think they were drunk, and things got out of hand.

Right.

And he flew into a moment of rage that ended in her death, which is a different accusation than he was some abusive husband, and this was bound to happen or something.

Right, exactly. So she said this in a 2021 memoir that you mentioned before. It's called Little Sister Colon my Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood. And she says that Robert Wagner told her that after the funeral, she's like, what happened? And Robert Wagner told her, Natalie Wood'sister, that Natalie had probably taken the dinghy out to party hop. And again, she didn't know how to use the dinghy. She was afraid of the water, especially in the dark, and she was wearing a nightgown and socks and a coat and that was it. So that didn't hold water. I think that really kind of triggered Lana Wood's decades long suspicion of this whole thing. So, yeah, like you said, the family's been divided basically ever since and the whole thing is still it's an open case. It's unsolved. But they've exhausted all the leads that came out of the 2011 reexamination of it. So it's essentially back on the shelf for now.

Yeah.

Pretty nuts, man.

It is. It's a story that I think we will never know truly what happened. Wagnerson is 90s. Unless there's some sort of deathbed confession from he or Chris Walken. Like it's going to go to their graves, I would imagine.

I don't know, man, because think about it, after Kirk Douglas died, lana Wood named him as her sister's rapist when she was 16. So I'm wondering if one of these people are going to say, here finally is the evidence. Yes, Robert Wagner totally killed Natalie Wood. And now that he's dead, I feel comfortable explaining how. Who knows? I think it's a possibility, but it.

Would have to be a recording of him saying that. Otherwise it would just be another person saying, well, he told sure, sure. You know what I mean? Like the only three people that know what happened are Dabron, Walken and Wagner.

Right. And all Walken wants to do is focus on cowbell and dance. I would say probably the most important clue out of this whole thing, though, Chuck, is that Robert Wagner and Dennis Davron switched to Scotch on the Bridge.

Is that the one?

Yeah.

That's a power drinking move late at night, for sure. I've seen it happen.

Do you have anything else?

I got nothing else. It's just tragic story.

Yeah, that's a thing to remember.

Yeah. It's easy to get caught up in this Hollywood mystery, but there was a real human with a family that died and I hope people don't forget that. And I hope we were respectful.

Yeah, I think we were. That's a rule of thumb for all true crime know?

Absolutely.

Well, since Chuck said absolutely, I'm going to end on a high note for me. And we'll go to listener mail.

Hey, guys. This is one from a long time ago, actually, that I forgot to read from Gareth. I was listening to the Diaries episode and thought you guys might like to hear about ingratitude lists because we were talking about gratitude lists when I was working in mental health support. We learned about them and the basic premise is sometimes your life is full of problems and you feel terrible. It's not always that helpful to be told to write down what you feel grateful for. And some people find it a bit like their problems aren't being taken seriously or being brushed under the rug. So sometimes it can actually be helpful to write down everything that's wrong, everything that's hurting you, or generally just ticking you off as a way to vent and hopefully understand why you feel how you feel and possibly being able to process it and make a plan on how to change it.

Nice.

Yeah. Anyway, I thought it could be of interest to you and potentially helpful to some listeners who have a lot going on to feel vindicated in their distress. And just to be clear, it's not about dwelling on the bad. It's mostly about just being able to say, yeah, fair play me, I'm dealing with a lot.

Nice. That's really awesome.

And that is from, again, Gareth.

Thanks a lot, Gareth. I would say Gareth is sitting in the Best Recent Email chair for huh?

Yeah, that's a good one.

Yeah, that was a very good one. Thanks for letting everybody know about that, because I'm sure there are some people out there that listened to that Diaries episode and thought the very same thing, and now they're vindicated rather than dismissed. If you want to be like Gareth and try your shot at being in the Best Recent email chair, you can do that. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com.

Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hello, I'm Chelsea Peretti. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me. My podcast is relaunching. Do you fear wild, dangerous animals to the point where you're constantly watching attack videos and reading articles about wild animal attack survivors or those who succumb to attack? Call in. We can also discuss reality shows and emergency room footage. Listen to call Chelsea Peretti on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players network on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi.

I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, listen to toss show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready. Will Lucas from Black Tech Green Money, the podcast for black techies with a passion for capital, is hosting a special event happening at State Farm Park in Iheartland. Will's gonna chat about the top ten things you should be doing to build your wealth. Don't miss a special event starting Thursday, November 16, at 07:00 p.m.. Eastern at State Farm Park in Iheartland in Fortnite, available all weekend long. Be sure to say hi to Jake from State Farm on the Big Screen Vita's High School in Parkour and snap a selfie at the selfie booth. Visit iHeartRadio.com. Iheartland to start playing today.