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The Life _ Mysterious Death Of Natalie Wood · The conspiracy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: She was four years old the first time she appeared
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: on a movie screen. In by eight, she starred in
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: a Christmas classic three Oscar nominations. Before she turned twenty six,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: America watched Natalie Wood grow up. But on November twenty ninth,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, she would be found dead in the
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Pacific Ocean, and she would be forty three years old,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and the coroner would rule it an accident. But not
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: everyone believed that, and more than four decades later, not
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: everyone believes it still. This is Natalie Wood's story. Crime, conspiracy, guilts,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: intellectual and manded. Very today we are talking about an
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: extremely infamous case. I feel like, lesser known than say
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana, and that is the case
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: of Natalie Wood. So without further ado, let's unbucklerr seatbelts
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: go mockfied down the highways, lamb of the breaks and
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: bust of this windshield into this Natalie Wood case together.
• 1:14
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• 1:16
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• 2:43
  Speaker 1: to it. The woman in the world would come to
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: know as Natalie Wood was born Natalia Nika Lievna Zacharenko
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: on July twentieth, nineteen thirty eight, in San Francisco, and
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: her parents were Russian immigrants. Both had fled a country
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: torn apart by revolution, carrying with them the scars of
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: leaving what they knew and the stubborn hope that America
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: might give them something better. And her mother, Maria, would
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: come from Barnall, a city in southwestern Siberia. The family
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: had money once Maria's father ran soap and candle factories
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: and kept an estate on the outskirts of Barnull, but
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the Russian Civil War wiped out everything they had, so
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the family got out of the country and ended up
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: in Harbin. China living as refugees, and it was in
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Harbin that something strange allegedly happened. Maria and her sisters
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: visited a Gypsy fortune teller that made two predictions about
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Maria's future. The first was her second child would be
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: a great beauty known throughout the world, and the second
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: was quote unquote beware of dark water loon. And Maria
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: never let go of either prophecy, but she would eventually
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: leave China and marry an American mechanic named Alexander Tuteloff
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty five. And Olga, Natalie's older half sister,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: was born in nineteen twenty eight, and two years later
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  Speaker 1: the family sailed to America and the marriage ended six
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: years later. And Natalie's father, Nicholas Zacharenko, came from Usurisk
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  Speaker 1: in Russia's Far East, and Nicholas's father had been employed
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: at the Primorski Conditor chocolate factory, but when the Civil
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: War broke out, he took up with the anti Bolshevik
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  Speaker 1: civilian forces, and he would be killed in a street
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  Speaker 1: fight between Red Army and White Russian soldiers in Vladisvstok
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  Speaker 1: that after his death, the family then fled to Shanghai,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: then to Vancouver, had eventually settled in the United States
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  Speaker 1: by nineteen thirty three, just like Nicholas's future wife, and
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Nicholas found work as a carpenter and a day laborer
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: in San Francisco, but he was also an alcoholic. Now
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Maria was still Tatulov's wife when she and Nicholas began
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  Speaker 1: seeing each other, you know, but their eventual wedding took
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: place in February nineteen thirty Eightnatalie arrived months later, and
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Nicholas would rename the family Gurdon when Natalie was about
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  Speaker 1: a year old, and the name Wood would come a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: bit later when studio executives picked it for her at
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: the age of six, and they named her that as
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: a nod to director Sam Wood and to swap out
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  Speaker 1: the family name for something American audiences could pronounce. So
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: when they obtained US citizenship, Maria finally settled on one
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: first name after cycling through several including Mary, Marie, and Mucia,
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: and then a second daughter from this relationship. The third overall,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: third daughter overall keep Up, came along in nineteen forty
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  Speaker 1: six and they named her sit Lana, and she was
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: born in Santa Monica, and she'd later become known as
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the actress Lana Wood. But it was the second child,
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  Speaker 1: the one the gypsy had supposedly prophesied, who consumed Maria's
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: attention entirely because Maria used to lean close and whisper
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: to Natalie. One ear got the fairy tale fame, beauty,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: the whole world watching, and the other ear got the
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: warning stay away from dark water. The prophecy left Natalie
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: shaken from a very young age, and she carried it
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  Speaker 1: with her for the rest of her life, never once
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: even learning to swim. Every ambition Maria had never been
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: able to fulfill herself. She just poured into Natalie specifically,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: and she would stop at nothing to make those dreams real. So,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: while the family lived in Santa Rosa, a production company
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: happened to be filming in the area, where someone on
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  Speaker 1: the crew noticed the four year old Natalie, and her
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: first movie was then The Moon Is Dawn, a John
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  Speaker 1: Steinbick adaptation that hit theaters in spring of nineteen forty three,
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: and she popped up again that same year in Happy Land,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: receiving fifteen seconds of screen time, and both were directed
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  Speaker 1: by Irving Pichelle, and he took a liking to the
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: girl immediately, and for the next two years, Michelle kept
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: up a relationship with the Girdens, Natalie's family, and eventually
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: a part opened up and Michelle reached out and he
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: wanted Natalie in Los Angeles to test for it, and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: Maria didn't just bring Natalie, Maria uprooted their entire family.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: The whole family moved to Los Angeles for good, and
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Nicholas didn't really want to go, and he made that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: pretty clear, but Maria didn't care. Her mind was made
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: up and nothing he said was going to change it.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: So biographer Suzanne Finstead wrote that Maria had been desperately
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: pushing her daughter into the business from the very start,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: classic show mom living vicariously through her daughter, even if
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: it means putting her into situations she shouldn't be in,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: you know. But in nineteen forty six, Michelle got her
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: in The Door for Tomorrow Is Forever, a romance film,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: and she tested for the part of a European war
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  Speaker 1: orphan opposite Orson Wells and won it, and allegedly on
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  Speaker 1: set she couldn't cry on cue, so Maria grabbed a
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  Speaker 1: live butterfly and ripped its wings off right in front
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  Speaker 1: of her, and the tears came instantly. It worked, obviously,
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  Speaker 1: you know if she has a shred of empathy in her.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: My god, can you imagine just your mom mutilating a
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  Speaker 1: beautiful butterfly in front of you to make you cry.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: That's gonna do something to you. That's something you're going
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: to talk about therapy later in life. I'll tell you what.
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  Speaker 1: Wells himself was stunned by the child's ability, and he
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  Speaker 1: later said she was so good, she was terrifying. And
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: that quote. Natalie doesn't act from the script, she acts
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  Speaker 1: from the heart unquote, and Maria rehearsed her over and
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  Speaker 1: over until Natalie barely ever needed a second take, and
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: which earned her the nickname quote unquote one take Natalie
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: and the following year brought Miracle on thirty fourth Street,
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  Speaker 1: and Natalie was eight years old at this point, but
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  Speaker 1: the role was perfect for her. A skeptical kid convinced
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: there's no such thing as Santa, who slowly realizes the
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  Speaker 1: man working in the department store might be the real deal.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Film starred Maureen O'Hara and John Payne, but it was
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Natalie who audiences remembered and it's been a holiday staple
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: ever since. And after it came out, Natalie was suddenly
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: one of the biggest child actors in Hollywood, and Macy's
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: even invited her to appear in the Thanksgiving Day Parade,
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  Speaker 1: and Parents magazine gave her a title before she turned ten,
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  Speaker 1: quote unquote most Exciting Juvenile Motion Picture Star of the Year.
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  Speaker 1: Behind the Spotlight, there was no real childhood to speak of,
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  Speaker 1: which we hear so much with child actors. I feel
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  Speaker 1: so bad for them. It's just not right, Like I
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  Speaker 1: know there has to be child actors, but it just
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: seems like it never goes right unfortunately, especially in those
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: days where stuff just wasn't monitored or cared about at all.
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  Speaker 1: And the work that followed her big hit was mostly
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: lightweight stuff, family friendly comedies that nobody really remembers today,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: and they didn't win awards, but they earned steady money,
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  Speaker 1: and Maria made sure every dollar went through her hands
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  Speaker 1: and Natalie was tutored on set. Instead of going to school.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Maria made sure to keep her daughter away from kids
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  Speaker 1: her own age and away from anything that didn't serve
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  Speaker 1: the career. And on top of all of that not
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: having any sort of childhood, you know, any sort of
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: social life, and having a mom that mutilates bugs in
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  Speaker 1: front of you to make you cry on cue. Her
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: father's heart was also starting to fail, and Natalie was
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: still very young, and after that, Natalie was the family's
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  Speaker 1: only real source of income. So just put the pressure
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  Speaker 1: of that on this eight year old girl. My god,
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  Speaker 1: So Maria doubled down on the pressure. Work more, audition,
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  Speaker 1: Better be perfect, you can't be anything less than perfect,
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  Speaker 1: And she racked up more than twenty film credits before
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  Speaker 1: she turned sixteen, and one of them nearly killed her.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: During the production of The Green Promise in nineteen forty nine,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: there was a stunt involving a bridge collapse during a storm,
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  Speaker 1: and the scene called for a ten year old girl
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  Speaker 1: to sprint across the bridge that would fall up part
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the second she made it to safety, but the timing
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  Speaker 1: failed and gave way too early, and she was only
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: halfway across, and the fall snapped her left wrist and
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: she went straight into the water, and Maria buried the
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: whole thing, and the wrist was never taken care of,
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: and Lona described quote, mom didn't trust doctors or hospitals,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: So Natalie's broken wrist was never treated or set unquote,
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  Speaker 1: and because of this intentional avoidance, the bone healed wrong,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: showing the deformity if you looked closely, and Natalie covered
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: it with bracelets for the rest of her life. This
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: is so heartbreaking, Mom not even taking her to the
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: hospital to get her fixed, Like, I can't even imagine
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: the pain she still felt and everything. Ah, it just
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: breaks my heart. And the injury should have been the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: breaking point, but instead it became a template for them
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: just to hide it, protect the career and just say nothing.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: That was the rule Maria lived by, and it extended
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: far beyond broken bone, and Lana told Closer weekly, quote,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: my mother was very caught up in the business with Natalie,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: even when she turned eighteen, and my mom was still
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: running the show unquote, and finstead described the dynamic bluntly, saying, quote,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: she was groomed by her mom to succeed at all costs,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: to be a pleaser, to do whatever directors and producers,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: even co stars wanted her to do unquote. And at
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: one point Maria went even further quote her mother brought
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: her over to Frank Sinatra's house basically bartering Natalie's virginity
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  Speaker 1: to try to help her career. Unquote. This woman belongs
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: in the deepest hole there is. Are you kidding me?
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Pimping out your child to a disgusting old man, like
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: ahh yeah, yeah, I don't know. Like Hollywood's already so
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: corrupt and back then, like I said, like the amount
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: of stuff that was probably hidden that we have no
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: idea about is just so so upsetting, And you never
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: want to think a mother can do that to their child.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: But the world is extremely evil, and some people will
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: do anything for fame, even if it means giving up
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: their child's innocence. It's disgusting. But the relationship that developed
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: between Natalie and Sinatra became something else entirely over time
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: and somewhat paternal in nature, and Finstad explained, quote Natalie's
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: own father had a drinking problem and was very emasculated
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: by her mother, and Frank became very protective of Natalie unquote,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: and like you can you can talk about him being
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: a like Soinatra being a father figure or whatever her
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: but her mom was pimping her out when she was
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: fifteen years old. Sinatra Oh was thirty eight, he was
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: almost forty years old. Okay, so I don't know. It
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: smells really bad. I don't like it, and it just
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: makes my heart very sad for Natalie. But Natalie, who
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: earned millions for her family before she was old enough
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: to sadly, never had the chance to even be a child,
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: and she got a career instead and a mother who
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: would trade anything to keep it going. So the hardest
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: thing a child star can do is grow up on
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: screen and survive it, and most don't, honestly, and the
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: audience that adored them at eight years old doesn't quite
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: know what to do with them at sixteen. And Natalie
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: signed a contract with Warner Brothers, hoping for serious work. Instead,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: the studio kept handing her the same kind of part,
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: the pretty girl standing next to the lead, nothing with
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: any real substance, and Warner Brothers tried matching her on
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: screen with tap Hunter, the biggest teen heart throb around,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: and the idea was that putting the two of them
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: together would pack theaters, but it didn't. And one exception
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: to the supporting pretty girl typecast was Marjorie Morning Star
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight, and she played a Jewish girl
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: trying to carve out a life on her own terms
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: while her family pushes towards something more conventional, and critics
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: respond well, and the movie landed at exactly the right moment.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And at the nineteen fifties were full of films about
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: young people pushing back against the world they'd inherited. But
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: the role that actually changed everything for her came three
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: years before, in nineteen fifty five, when director Nicholas Ray
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: was casting Rebel without a Cause, and the part of
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Judy was exactly what Natalie needed, a chance to prove
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: she could do more than just be a pretty face
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: on screen. And she was sixteen at the time and
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Ray was forty three. Oh my god. The competition for
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: the role was enormous. Names like Debbie Reynolds and Jane
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Mansfield were in the mix, and multiple sources say the
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: same thing. Somewhere between her initial meeting with Ray and
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: the screen test that followed, a relationship would begin, and
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: they met at a bungalow in the Chateau Mormont, and
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Finstead describes quote when she was sixteen, the director of
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Rebel without a Cause manipulated her into having sex with
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: him by saying he wasn't convinced that she would realistically
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: play a bad girl unquote. Lord knows that Maria encouraged
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: her to do the unthinkable, to lose her innocence to
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: a disgusting pervert, but she would get the part. Dennis
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Hopper was also seeing Natalie during production, and he and
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Ray clashed because of it, and it just poisoned the
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: atmosphere on set. But still Maria was in the loop
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: on all of it. She knew everything. She knew her
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: daughter was being taken advantage of just to get a role,
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: but she only complained about Hopper. The director, after all,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: controlled the movie, and Natalie earned an Academy Award nomination
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: for Best Supporting Actress with Rebel Without a Cause, a
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: career defining performance born from exploitation that no one around
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: her had the courage or decency to stop. And that
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: same year something far worse, a lie legly happened, and
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen fifty five, while The Searchers
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: was in production, Maria arranged a meeting between Natalie and
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: one of the most powerful actors in Hollywood, and Maria
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: was convinced that one word of approval from a star
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: at his level would change everything for Natalie, and Lona
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Wood was nine years old at this time, and in
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: her twenty twenty one memoir Little Sister, she identified the
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: man as Kirk Douglas, and Natalie was still a teenager
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: at this point, sixteen maybe seventeen, the ages aren't fully known,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: but a teenager nonetheless, and Douglas was nearly forty. And
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: in July twenty eighteen, Lanna went into detail on a
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: podcast about her sister's life, and she said this took
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: place at the Chateau Mormont, behind closed doors, under the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: pretense of an audition, and she said it went on
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: for hours. And Lona remembered when Natalie eventually told her
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: about that night, saying, quote, it was like an out
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: of body experience. I was terrified. I was confused, unquote,
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: and Fincedad's two thousand and one biography had described these
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: years earlier without naming the attacker. But over the years
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Natalie told a handful of people she trusted what had
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: happened to her, with Dennis Hopper being one of them,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: and she described the man as a former screen idol,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and Douglas wasn't named publicly until Lana's memoir published in
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, nearly two years after he died at
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: the age of one hundred and three. The bastard had
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: the audacity to live past one hundred. God, I hope
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: he was suffering in the end, truly, I know that's
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: you know what now, I hope he was suffering. And
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: his son, Michael Douglas responded through a publicist saying, quote unquote,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: may they both rest in peace. And the silence that
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: followed the assault was immediate and absolute, and Natalie told
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: her mother all that happened, and Marie's advice, according to Lana,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: was cold and calloused, saying, quote unquote, suck it up.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: I can't stand these mothers. I mean, this is like
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: next level hoerendous. But you know, every time I see
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: a child on screen in general, especially in content creation,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: because there are zero rules essentially for them, I just
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: think you're a disgusting human being. Let's take advantage of
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: your child and exploiting them. And this is just this
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: just triggers me in a way I cannot even explain.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: It makes me so upset, poor poor Natalie. My God,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: But for as long as she lived, Natalie never said
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: a word about it. In the public, and I feel
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: like that is just by every fault of her mother,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: because she just instilled in her that she can't say
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: anything and that her fame is the most important thing,
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: and if she can't act, then her family will be
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: in destitute. Like it's just so much manipulation and toxic
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: stuff going on, it's disgusting. But when she and Douglas
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: ended up in the same room, she acted as though
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: nothing had ever happened between them, because her mother had
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: taught her too well how Hollywood worked. You didn't go
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: after someone with that kind of power. And years later,
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: actor Scott Marlowe helped Natalie begin to see her mother's
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: manipulation for what it really was damage, though had already
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: rooted itself. Natalie allegedly saw her therapist every single day
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixty seven production of Body and Clyde
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: wanted her for the lead now, and she said no,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: as the film required weeks away from Los Angeles and
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Natalie wouldn't go that long without seeing her therapist. How
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: much does that say, Like even just a couple weeks
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: and she's like, no, I need to speak to my therapist,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Like the trauma that that involves. I can't even imagine.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Yet through all of it, she did keep working, and
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: after Rebel without a Cause, John Ford's The Searchers came
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: out in nineteen fifty six, then West Side Story and
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Splendor in the Grass both in nineteen sixty one, and
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: then Gypsy in nineteen sixty two, and The Love with
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: the Proper Stranger in nineteen sixty three. And Splendor in
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: the Grass earned her a nomine Nation for Best Actress,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: and Love with a Proper Stranger earned her another. So
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: she had three Oscar nominations before turning twenty six, one
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: of the youngest people in Hollywood history to reach that number.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: So three nominations earned while carrying a weight that would
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: have broken most people twice her age. So Natalie was
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: ten years old the first time she saw Robert Wagner,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: and he was eighteen years old walking down a corridor
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: at twentieth Century Fox, And she told People Magazine in
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six, quote, I turned to my mother and
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: said I'm going to marry him, unquote. And eight years
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: later the studio system made that meeting happen on purpose,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: and their first date was arranged as a publicity stunt
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: designed to get both their names in papers, and it
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: fell on July twentieth, nineteen fifty six, Natalie's eighteenth birthday,
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: and whatever the studio's intentions were, the connection at least
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: was actually real, and on December twenty eighth, nineteen fifty seven,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: they married in Scottsdale, area, Zona, where Wagner's parents lived,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: and she was nineteen at the time and he was
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: twenty seven. I mean, I have nothing to say, like
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: for the time, it doesn't seem that bad, I guess,
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: but given the history that her mom put her through,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: she probably like only saw significantly older people as an
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: option to marry. You know, I don't know. There's again
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: so much psychological trauma that happened to her. But word
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: would get out as to where they were getting married,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: and several hundred people showed up outside the Scottsdale Methodist Church,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: so the staff taped butcher paper across every window to
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: block the view, and the press called it the Glittering
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: Union of the twentieth century because two of the most
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: beautiful faces in Hollywood riding a corvette across America together,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: while radio stations tracked their progress and would recalled it
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: years later, saying quote radio stations would announce we had
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: just passed through, and people would wait for us in
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: every little town unquote. And for their honeymoon, the two
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: of them took a yacht out into the Florida Keys,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: because both of them loved the ocean and it was
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: one of the things that drew them together, though even
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: then Natalie mentioned her fear of the water, and for
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: a while it looked like a love story the public
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: could believe it. Unfortunately it wasn't, and the couple announced
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: their separation on June twentieth, nineteen sixty one. Only a
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: few years later and the divorce was finalized on April
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: twenty seventh, nineteen sixty two, and the official story was
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: pretty vague, and the gossip columns filled in their own versions,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: of course, and rumors spread that Natalie had started an
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: affair with Warren Beatty, her co star and Splendor in
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: the Grass, and over the years the press stopped treating
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: it as gossip and just started printing it as though
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: it were true. But that wasn't what happened, and the
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: truth of what ended the marriage didn't come out for years,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: and multiple sources have since confirmed the same story because
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: sometime in early nineteen sixty one, Natalie discovered Wagner in
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: a sexual relationship with a man, Chris Cross. What the
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: what kind of plot to us is this? And Finn's
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: dad heard the account from five separate people, and three
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: were close friends of Natalie's and one was Maria's best friend,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: and the fifth was Flana, and she walked into their
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Beverly Hills house and found him with another man, and
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Lana described what she saw that night, saying, quote, I
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: had never seen her that bad. I was asked to
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: leave the room and that something bad had happened, and
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: that Natalie was leaving RJ. It wasn't until later that
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: she said she caught him with someone, and that someone
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: was another man. Oh my god. Unquote. She showed up
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: at her parents' door that night, barely holding it together,
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: and once inside, she shut herself in the bedroom she'd
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: grown up in and would not come out. And the
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: next thing she knew, she was in a hospital bed
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: because she had post on sleeping pills. But to protect
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Wagner's public image, Natalie said nothing again because her mom
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: trained her never say anything that might make you look
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: bad or anybody else power make them look bad. Terrible.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: She absorbed the blame for the divorce in silence and
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: let the beady rumors stand unchallenged, following the pattern she'd
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: been taught since childhood. Protect the person with more power,
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: swallow the truth, and in pages from what's been described
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: as her unpublished memoir, she wrote about the end of
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: the marriage, saying, quote so shattering it destroyed the relationship.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: It was more than a final straw. It was the reality,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: crushing the fragile web of romantic fantasies with sledgehammer force unquote,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: And she later told people, quote, we knew each other
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: better than we knew ourselves. I always knew he was okay.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: It was myself I didn't know about unquote. So after
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: the divorce, Natalie was twenty four and one of the
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: highest paid actresses in Hollywood. She certainly didn't lack company
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: and Warren Beattie, Michael Caine, and David and nivenn Junior,
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Frank Sinatra, who she'd known since she was fifteen yee,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: and in nineteen sixty five she was briefly engaged to
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: a Venezuelan shoe manufacturer named Ladislav Buttnik, but none of
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: it lasted and the relationship with Beattie was the most volatile. Quote.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Our affair was a collision from start to finish. While
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Robert Wagner never did express hostility, Warren couldn't stop. And
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: I contributed my share of fireworks too. In fact, we
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: were both so confused that we thought fighting in hostility
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: meant real emotional honesty unquote. And she threw herself into
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: psychoanalysis after the divorce and sessions nearly every day for years,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: and she once joked that her therapy bills were quote
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: unquote at least the equal of the annual defense budget
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: of most Central American nations. I don't blame her if
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: it's every day, Oh my god, But again, who can
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: blame her? Like everything she's been through, it's horrible, But
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: the therapy couldn't outpace what was happening underneath. And Finstad
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: traced the habit back to age fifteen, and the barbituate
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: second all be came the constant she reached for at bedtime,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: and as late as nineteen seventy eight, she admitted in
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: an interview with Ladies Home Journal that second al was
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: still part of her nightly routine, and three times between
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty six, the pills nearly
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: killed her. The first was the oas that landed her
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: in the hospital the night she discovered Wagner's affair, and
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: the second came in November of nineteen sixty four and
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: her stomach was pumped at a Hollywood hospital nobody outside
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: her inner circle ever knew. And the third in January
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty six, was different because there are two
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: versions of what triggered it specifically, and Warren G. Harris's
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: biography tells it this way, which as Beattie showed up
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: unannounced trying to persuade her to star in Bonnie and Clyde,
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: and instead she's a fistful of barbituates, And either way,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: doctor saved her life at a Hollywood hospital, and afterwards
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: she told Lana the truth that she hadn't been trying
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: to survive. And Lonna's memoir tells a different story about
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: the trigger and she wrote that during the production of
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: This Property is Condemned in nineteen sixty five, Natalie had
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: a passionate affair with the film's director, Sidney Pollack, and
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Pollock broke it off and Natalie fell apart, and according
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: to Lana. It was Pollock's rejection, not Bettie or Wagner,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: that pushed her sister to that point. So three overdoses
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: in five years, and after the third time she would
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: stop working because she had been in front of the
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: camera since she was four years old and she had
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: never stopped before. But this time survival came first and
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: everything else could wait. And in nineteen sixty six she
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: paid Warner Brothers one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: to buy her out of her contract. Then she cleaned house,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: cutting every agent, every manager, the publicist, the accountant, and
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: the lawyer's loose. In that same year, the Harvard Lampoon
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: handed her an award for Worst Actress of last year,
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: this year and next unquote What the actual hell is that?
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: Why does that even exist? But nobody had ever actually
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: shown up to collect it before, but Natalie did, and
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: the Harvard Crimson noted she was quote unquote quite a
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: good sport. And Penelope landed with a thud in nineteen
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: sixty six, and with that poor reception that Natalie walked
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: away from Hollywood and didn't come back for three years,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: and which she did come back, it was with a
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: new film and a new relationship, and the introduction came
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: through Robert Redford, who knew them both and Richard Gregson
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: was a British producer who also happened to be Redford's agent,
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: and the courtship lasted close to three years and they
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: married on May thirtieth, nineteen sixty nine, and Redford served
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: as the best man. And her comeback vehicle was Bob
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: and Carol and Ted and Alice in nineteen sixty nine,
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: a sharp comedy that took aim at the era's obsession
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: with free love, and it was a hit by all accounts,
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: and it showed audiences something that the industry had doubted,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: and the child star from the studio era could hold
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: her own in a landscape that had completely changed. And
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: on September twenty ninth, nineteen seventy, she and Gregson welcomed
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: a daughter, Natasha, and motherhood would change Natalie profoundly, and
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: she poured everything she had into being a mother. Unlike
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: her own mother, she actually was a good mother, and
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: she made a home that actually felt real, the family
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: that wasn't built around a camera. But then the familiar
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: pattern surfaced again and Gregson had an affair with Natalie's secretary. God,
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: this is just predictable as hell, and she filed for
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: divorce on August fourth, nineteen seventy one, and it was
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: finalized on April twelfth, nineteen seventy two. And after a
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: brief relationship with future California Governor Jerry Brown, Natalie picked
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: up the phone and she called someone she already knew
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: better than anyone, and by the end of January nineteen
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: seventy two, she and Robert Wagner were back in each
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: other's lives. I'd like to take a quick pause to
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: talk about something that's a little bit embarrassing to admit,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: and that is that I genuinely don't mind scooping my
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: cat's litter box anymore. And it's because of Smalls. Thank
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: you to Smalls for sponsoring this video. Now. Smalls, for
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: those of you who don't know, is fresh human grade catfood,
• 31:21
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• 31:24
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• 31:27
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• 31:31
  Speaker 1: And since switching, my cat's poops are smaller and honestly
• 31:35
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• 31:38
  Speaker 1: They are so shiny and soft, and they go absolutely
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: feral as soon as their bulls hit the floor. My
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: cats are my babies, and they deserve the best, not
• 31:48
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• 31:51
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• 32:29
  Speaker 1: so much to Smalls for sponsoring the video and supporting
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: the channel. And let's get back to it now. While
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Natalie had been rebuilding her life through the nineteen sixties,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: Wagner had been doing the same, and after their divorce,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: he'd moved to Rome, where he reconnected with actress Marian Marshall,
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: an old friend, and they married on July twenty first,
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, at the Bronx Courthouse, and their daughter, Katie,
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: was born on May eleventh, nineteen sixty four, and the
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: marriage lasted seven years before they separated in June of
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy and their divorce was finalized on October fourteenth,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one. So by the time Natalie reached out,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: they were both freshly single, both carrying the wreckage of
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: second marriages, and both older than they'd been the first
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: time around. And they just started with phone calls, and
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: by January of nineteen seventy two, the phone calls had
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: turned into something more, and Wagner had asked her to
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: come see him at his Palm Desert home, and Natalie
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: later told people, quote, friends told me to put on
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: the brakes. We were both in shock. We talked about
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: what had happened to our marriage. He had become a
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: man instead of a boy unquote, And looking back, she
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: felt she needed every single one of those years away
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: from each other to get it right, and that they
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: couldn't have found their way back without first losing each other.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: So in April they made it public in the most
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Hollywood way possible, and their first public appearance as a
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: couple came at the nineteen seventy two Oscars, and from
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: there it was a flight to New York and next
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: was a trans atlantic crossing on the Queen Elizabeth the
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: Second and on July sixteenth, nineteen seventy two, they married
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: for the second time, and they set their vows on
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: the deck of the fifty five foot yacht, the Ramblin Rose,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: floating just off Paradise Cove in Malibu, and the guest
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: list was pretty tiny, close friends, family, and both of
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: their daughters from previous marriages, and that was it. It was
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: nothing like the first wedding. This time it was just
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: quiet and intimate. And in People's nineteen seventy six profile,
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: the magazine described the reunion as quote the triumph of
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: hope over dismal experience unquote. The balance of power had
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: shifted since the first marriage. The first time around, it
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: was Wagner who was on the rise, though not in
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: movies on TV, in his role in ABC's It Takes
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: a Thief, which premiered in nineteen sixty eight had made
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: him a household name on the small screen, and that
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: show opened the door to Heart to Heart, and it
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: premiered in nineteen seventy nine, ran five seasons and turned
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: out to be the defining role of his career. Behind
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: the scenes, though, the couple had quietly built some more
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: lucrative than any single role, and their compensation for The Affair,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: a TV movie they appeared in together in nineteen seventy three,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: included something unusual. Producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg gave
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: them a fifty percent ownership stake in three TV series
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the pair were developing for ABC, and only one made
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: it to air, and it was called Charlie's Angels. And
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: Natalie meanwhile, had settled into something she'd never really experienced before,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: a family, and on March ninth, nineteen seventy four, Natalie
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: and Wagner welcomed their daughter, Courtney and Gregson returned to
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: England after the split and with her biological father across
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: an ocean, Natasha grew up with Wagner as the only
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: dad she really knew, but there was never a formal adoption,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: but Natasha would take Wagner's name and has always called
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: him father, and Natalie told biography dot Com quote work
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: doesn't play the same role in my life it used
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: to unquote. She meant it, and from that point on
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: she pulled back from the industry almost entirely, and only
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: a few projects made it to screen before the end.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: In three years after the affair, she and Wagner joined
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: Laurence Olivier for a television production of Cat on a
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Hot Tin Roof, and she popped on two of Wagner's
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: TV series as well, and in nineteen seventy nine she
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: won a Golden Globe for the miniseries From Here to Eternity.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: And from the outside, it looked like Natalie Wood had
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: finally gotten everything she wanted, a stable marriage, children, financial security,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: and a career on her own terms. But Wagner had
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: been carrying something he didn't talk about, and in his
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: two thousand and eight memoir Pieces of My Heart, Wagner
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: wrote about a darkness that had lived inside him for years,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: and he admitted to being consumed by jealousy over Natalie's
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: earlier relationship with Warren Beatty, and he described waiting outside
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: Betty's home with a gun, seriously contemplating murder quote, I
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: was pretty young, and I don't think I could have
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: ever gone through with that act. But I was pretty
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: frustrated and upset unquote. But that possessiveness didn't fade with time.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: But for most of the second marriage it didn't have
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: a target because Natalie was home with her daughters and
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: her career was small and selective, and there was nothing
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: to really set it off. And then in nineteen eighty
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: one that Natalie took on her first major film role
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: in years in Brainstorm, a science fiction film directed by
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Douglas Trumbull. Was supposed to be her comeback, and her
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: co star was Christopher Walken, who'd won an Academy Award
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: for The Deer Hunter. A prorection moved to North Carolina
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: that September and the shoot was scheduled for six weeks
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: on location, and Wagner visited the set during a break
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: from Heart to Heart and he didn't like what he found,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: and in his memoir he rode quote, the bell wasn't
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: exactly clanging. But I was aware that I didn't have
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: her full attention. She was more involved with the movie
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: than she was with her family. And the thought occurred
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: to me that Natalie was being emotionally on Faithful, and
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: her medicine cabinet at the time told its own story
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: because she was on at least eight different prescriptions, one
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: of them was the painkiller Darwin. And she had plans
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: that stretched well beyond Brainstorm, and she agreed to appear
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: on Anastasia at the Amason Theater, set to open February twelfth,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, with Wendy Hiller as her co star,
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: and it would have been her first time on a
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: live stage. And on top of that, she bought the
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: rights to Barbara Wersbaw's Country of the Heart and was
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: developing it as a film, and Timothy Hutton was lined
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: up as her co star, but sadly, none of it
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: would ever happen. So the Brainstorm cast had been shooting
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: on location in North Carolina since September, and by late
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: October of nineteen eighty one, they were back in Los
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: Angeles to finish what was left of the film, and
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: the couple threw a Thanksgiving dinner at their house and
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the plan for after Thanksgiving was simple. They'd take this
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: Splendor the boat they named after the nineteen sixty one
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: film that earned Natalie her set and Oscar nominations, blunder
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: in the grass out to Catalina Island and spend just
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: a few days on the water and Friday, November twenty
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: seventh through Sunday to November twenty ninth, and nothing was
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: out of the ordinary, But people close to Wagner later
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: told investigators that two to four other guests had been
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: invited along for the weekend, but none of them could
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: make it. So when the Splendor headed out of the
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: Marina del Rey that Friday afternoon, there were only four
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: people on board, Natalie Wagner and Walkin and the boats
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: skipper Dennis Davern, and the weather was just absolutely miserable,
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: just cold and raining. And nobody has ever said publicly
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: why Walkin's wife, Georgianne stayed behind, But from the moment
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: walking stepped aboard, the atmosphere was wrong. And allegedly Walkin
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: came aboard wearing a pea coat with the collar flipped up,
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: and Wagner disliked him on site, and people were already
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: whispering that the two of them were more than co stars,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: and Davern saw it from the first hour, saying, quote,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: you could see a little bit of jealousy from Robert Wagner,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: it just kept getting more tense every minute of the
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: dayote now. Lieutenant John Corina of the Los Angeles County
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department later described that Wagner felt that Natalie was
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: paying far more attention to Walkin than she was to him,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: and the whole trip was just tense. And according to Daverne,
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: Wood and Wagner thought constantly, and the root of it
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: was always the same. Natalie and Walkin were drawn to
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: each other, and everyone could see it. So Saturday night,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: November twenty eighth, the weather was no better than it
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: had been all weekend. Rain was off and on, temperatures
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: were dropping, and when they weren't together, they were treated
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: to separate quarters on the boat. And what we know
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: for certain about that evening is limited. All four of
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: them were together on the Splendor, and by eight o'clock
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: the next morning, Natalie would be dead. But here is
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: what we do know. So Saturday afternoon, Walkin and Natalie
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: left the yacht and headed to a place called Doug's
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Harbor Reef, a waterfront restaurant run by the local harbor manager,
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Doug Bombard, and they started drinking, and Wagner and Davern
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: joined them later, and once dinner rolled around, all four
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: of them sat down together and the tab was pretty
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: heavy champagne two bottles of wine cocktails on top of that,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: and at some point during dinner a glass shattered against
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the wall, and staff couldn't agree on who threw it,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: but it was either Wagner or Walking. The server working
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: their table, Christina Quinn noticed that Natalie barely touched her food,
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: and she described Wood as restless and unsettled. Quote did
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: not eat much of her dinner and was doing a
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: lot of complaining about small things, such as there was
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: too much light on the table, the table was too big,
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: the fish was not fresh unquote, and Quinn added that
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: Natalie quote appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: and sometimes solo, and Ted Bauer, the bartender that night,
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: backed up what everyone else was noticing, saying, quote unquote,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: Natalie was pretty shaky, and Don Whiting, who managed the restaurant,
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: got worried enough to pull the harbor Master aside, and
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: he told him to watch the group and make sure
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: they actually got back to the Splendor safely. And Whiting
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: statements to investigators painted a pretty clear picture and he
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: said it looked to him like there was trouble between
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: Wagner and his wife, and Wagner seemed annoyed with Natalie,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: and the whole party had been drinking really hard, and
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: he wanted the harbor master to know. So around ten pm,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: the four of them left the restaurant and headed for
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: the pier where the small boat was tied up to
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: take them back to the Splendor, and it was called
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: the Prince Valiant. And William Peterson, who operated the shore boat,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: was watching them leave, and he saw Natalie lose her
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: footing on the pier and let out what he described
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: as a quote little yell as if she had slipped unquote.
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: And she got into the boat after that, and they
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: made it back to the yacht. And what happens next
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: depends on who you believe now. Davin's most revealing account
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: came in a Vanity Fair piece published in March of
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: two thousand and He described a weekend where the attraction
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: between Natalie and Walkin was impossible to miss, and by
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: the time they got back to the Splendor after dinner,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: Wagner had reached his limit, and he picked up a
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: wine bottle and slammed it down hard enough to break it,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: and then he looked at Walkin and shouted, quote unquote,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: what are you trying to do my wife? Unquote, And
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: Natalie walked out and the door to her room slammed
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: shut behind her, and Wagner went after her, and minutes
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: later the sound of them fighting carried through the walls,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: and Gavin cranked a stereo ladder so he wouldn't have
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: to listen, and at one point Davern peered outside and
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: caught both of them standing at the back of the yacht,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: and the fight had moved to the open air, and
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: their body language made it obvious it hadn't cooled down
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: at all, and then everything went quiet. In Wagner's book,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Pieces of My Heart, confirmed there had been a fight
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: between him and Natalie before she went missing, but his
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: version of what happened looked nothing like Davern's. And on
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: other boats nearby, people were listening because people who anchored
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: in the same cove heard this too. Sound carries on
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: water really far and really well, and multiple witnesses on
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: neighboring boats told investigators about loud fighting that carried across
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: the water from the Splendor that night, and one recalled
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: yelling and the sound of things crashing inside what seemed
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: to be the stateroom, and others picked up a man's
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: voice and a woman's voice going at each other on
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: the yacht's rear deck, and they were sure it was
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: Wood and Wagner, And then came the cries. In About
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: forty yards from the splendor, a woman named Marilyn Wayne
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: was asleep on a sailboat called the Capricorn, and Wayne
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: was a commodities broker from Los Angeles, and her cabin
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: window had been left open, and in a sworn statement
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: to investigators, Waine said, a woman's voice woke her. His
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: boyfriend first and then woke her quote help me, someone,
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: please help me. I'm drowning unquote. And the words came
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: again and again. And Wayne's son was on the Capricorn
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: as well, and he heard the same thing, and he
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: looked down at the digital watch he'd just gotten and
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: the time was a few minutes past eleven o'clock. Mixed
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: in with the woman's screams, Wayne and the others heard
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: a man responding, and his voice was thick with alcohol, saying,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: quote unquote, okay, honey, we'll get you. Then repeated multiple
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: times quote unquote were coming to get you, so Wayne
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: stayed where she was and at the time she just
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: figured it was some kind of rowdy party and sounded
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: like the people out there already knew the woman was
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: in trouble, and the cries went on for what Wayne
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: estimated was fifteen minutes or more fifteen minutes. Someone's screaming
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: for help and he don't go. Look, it's that's something
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know about that, but okay. They stopped around
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: twelve ten am. An official record state that Natalie Wood
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: went missing from the Splendor at approximately eleven oh five PM,
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: and according to Wagner, by the time he turned in
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: for the night, Natalie was gone. One fact was never
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: in dispute. Wagner was the last person seen with her
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: before she vanished, and forensic analysis placed the time of
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: death somewhere between midnight and one in the morning, and
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: the contents of her stomach backed that up, and there
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: were still about five hundred CC's of food that hadn't
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: fully digested, consistent with a meal eaten three to four
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: hours earlier, which lined up with an eight to nine
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: pm dinner, And what followed was a slow, staggered response
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: that would become one of the central mysteries of the case.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: Then it wasn't until roughly one thirty in the morning
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: that Wagner got on the radio and he reached out
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: to Doug's harbor reef and wanted to know if Natalie
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: had shown up there, and he had people checking for
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: her on land and on shore, but not in the
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: and at around two thirty am, the restaurant manager alerted
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: the harbor master, and the coastguard didn't get a call
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: about Natalie until three twenty am, and Roger Smith, the
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: lifeguard on duty, didn't find out until after five am
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: that morning, and by then Natalie had been in the
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: water for roughly six hours and the whole time a
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: lifeguard boat had been sitting about one hundred feet from
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: the splendor, and by five thirty am the small boat
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: had been found beached on shore and Doug Bombard ran
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: the harbor at Isthma's Cove and had lived on Ketalina
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: for years and searchers woke him about thirty minutes before
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: sunrise and they told him they thought Natalie had slipped
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: and gone into the water sometime around three in the morning,
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: and by the time but Bard was up and moving.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: The small boat had already been pulled in, and he
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: went out onto the water toward Blue Cavern Point, and
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: one hundred yards out, something red caught his eye on
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: the water, a small shape like a bubble sitting on
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: the surface, and it was Natalie. An air had gotten
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: trapped inside her red down jacket, keeping that one patch
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: of fabric visible above the water line, and Bombard radioed
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: for a second vessel to assist, and her down jacket
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: had taken on so much seawater that it added roughly
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: forty pounds to her weight, and he couldn't pull her
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: out alone. And when they turned her over, she was
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: dressed in a flannel nightgown, a down jacket and a
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: pair of bull socks and nothing else. So the next day,
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: on November thirtieth, Chief Medical Examiner Thomas Nogucci released his findings,
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: and he called it accidental drowning complicated by hypothermia, and
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: the bruises covering Natalie's body, Noguchi said, were quote unquote superficial,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and he believed they came from her struggle in the water,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: and scratches found on the small boat in his view,
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: showed she tried to haul herself aboard, but lost the
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: fight against exhaustion and cold, And the autopsy told a
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: fuller story because her blood test did at zero point
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: one four percent alcohol, and on top of that, toxicology
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: picked up both a motion sickness medication and a painkiller,
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: and either one would have made the alcohol hit a
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: lot harder, and together that combination was very dangerous. And
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Agucci documented quote superficial skin bruises on the extremities and
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: abrasions on the left side of the face unquote, and
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: he noted there was quote unquote no evidence of strangulation,
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: and ocean temperatures that night hovered around fifty seven degrees
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: and according to forensic analysis, she didn't survive long once
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: she was in. And then there was the small boat,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: and it told its own story because the key sat in,
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: the ignition switched off, the gear was a neutral, and
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the oars hadn't been untied, and the report noted that
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: it looked quote unquote as if the boat had not
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: even been used. No one collected nail clippings from Natalie's fingers,
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: so there was never any way to confirm whether the
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: scratches on the boat came from her. And when detectives
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: finally went looking for the boat. Decades later it had vanished,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: and lifeguard Roger Smith, who'd been called six hours after
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: Natalie went into the water, had his own assessment, and
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: he told the La Times quote she probably cried for
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: help for hours unquote, and he said he always believed
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: she could have been saved, saying, quote, her fingers were
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: still pliable when she was pulled from the water, suggesting
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: she had not been dead for hours unquote. And Smith
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: got a look at the boat before it was lost,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: and inside the seats had been knocked out of place,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: and along with the walls of the raft, he saw
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: what looked like marks left by finger nails scratched in
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: by someone fighting to drag themselves over the edge. And
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: his conclusion was blunt, saying, quote, I think she was
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: at least alive for three of the hours hanging on
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: that skiff unquote. And then there was the question no
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: one could answer, what was Natalie Wood doing near that
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: boat in the first place. And by every account, she
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: had never once taken the boat out by herself, and
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: her terror of dark water had been part of her
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: identity for as long as anyone knew her, and Lieutenant
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: John Carina asked directly, quote, why would Natalie Wood, this
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: big movie star, try to go out on a dinghy
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, in her socks, in
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: her pajamas, at midnight in rough seas unquote. And this
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: was a woman who refused to set foot in a
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: swimming pool in her own backyard. And when Lana Wood
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: was asked whether there was any chance her sister would
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: have gotten into the boat and left the yacht on
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: her own, she didn't hesitate, saying quote unquote, no, no,
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: not with a gun to her head. Lana also spoke
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: about what it felt like to imagine her sister's final hours, saying, quote,
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: when I think of her in the water, in the dark,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: in the cold, and the one thing that she feared
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: was water, and that's where she finishes her life. Quote.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: Lieutenant Karina added further, quote she got in the water somehow,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: and I don't think she got in the water by herself. Quote.
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: So Detective Dwayne Rasher, working out of the Los Angeles
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau, caught the case, and he spoke
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: to all three men who'd been aboard the Splendor that
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: night Wagner, Walkin, and Davern each told him the same thing.
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: They believed Natalie had climbed into the boat and motored
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: ashore on her own, and Rashure told forty eight hours
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, quote, I didn't doubt anything, Robert Wagner
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: told me. Christopher Walkin, he basically told me the same story.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: It was pretty well confirmed. They assumed that she got
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: in that zodiac and went to shore. Unquote, not one
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: of them said a word about any fighting that night,
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: which is interesting given that there was a massive blowout fight.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: And according to Wagner, the two of them had spent
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: the evening together on the yacht and he figured she'd
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: turned in for the night, and he eventually went looking
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: for her and found the master bedroom empty, and Davern
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: meanwhile realized the zodiac was missing, and they figured she
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: had taken it and left. And Rusher also asked about
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: something he'd observed on the yacht, broken glass scattered across
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: the salon, and Wagner blamed it on the ocean chopping
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: conditions during the crossing, he said, and Rasher accepted the
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: explanation without pressing any further, and years later, in Pieces
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: of My heart, Wagner told a very different story about
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: the glass. In the book. He admitted to grabbing a
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: wine bottle, like we said before, in the middle of
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the confrontation with Walkin and slamming it hard enough to
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: shatter it. And back in nineteen eighty one, every man
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: on the boat had pointed to rough Seas as the
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: explanation for the glass, and Wagner's own book contradicted them,
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: and the retired detective sergeant said he quote never really
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: got suspicious of a murder. I think he told me
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: the truth unquote. And after the initial conversation, Rusher sat
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: down with Wagner just once more. And that second interview
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: took place the day after the funeral, and Wagner was
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: in bed and his lawyer was sitting right there with him,
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: and Natalie was buried on December second. Within days of
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: the burial, a spokesman for the coroner's office announced that
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: the case was closed and when asked how long the
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: whole thing took for sure, put the total at around
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: five weeks. That's it, five weeks. But not everyone involved
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: was as satisfied with the outcome, and Nogucci, who'd ruled
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: the death in accidental drowning. Later wrote about the morning
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: after Natalie's body was recovered, saying, quote, the whispers were
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: of murder, and I could not deny them unquote. Natalie
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: was forty three years old when she died. She left
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: behind two daughters, a sister, and a career that spanned
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: nearly four decades, and the case that was supposed to
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: explain what happened to her lasted only five weeks. So
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: now the case may have been closed, but the physical
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: state of the boat raised its own set of questions.
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: Its condition told the same story it had told from
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: the beginning. Nothing about it suggested anyone had used it
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: that night, and Nogucci cataloged three pieces of physical evidence
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: that told a consistent story. Scratches from fingernails on the
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: boat's exterior, an abrasion across Natalie's own cheek, and algae
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: on the yacht's swim step that hadn't been disturbed. That's
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: very important, and all of it suggested she'd been in
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: the water clawing at the boat, not standing on the
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: boat adjusting a rope. And Davern called Wagner's version of
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: the boat story a lie, saying, quote, that story is
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: one hundred percent false. The dinghy really wasn't banging because
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: it was tied off with two lines securely to the
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: boat unquote. And then there was the delay that no
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: one on the yacht has ever fully accounted for. And
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: Roger Smith was the county's supervising rescue boat captain on
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: duty that night, and once he reached the Splendor, he
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: wanted to know why it had taken so long for
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: anyone to call, and according to a sworn statement, Wagner's
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: answer was, quote we thought she was off on another
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: boat screwing around, because that's the kind of woman she
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: is unquote, And by Wagner telling he knew she was
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: gone by roughly midnight, and nobody reached out for help
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: until an hour and a half later, and even then
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: the call had nothing to do with searching the ocean.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: It was to the restaurant, asking if she'd come back
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: on her own, and finstead framed the gap bluntly, saying, quote,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: the first call isn't made until one thirty am in
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: the morning, and that's two and a half hours between
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the time that someone has heard screaming in the water unquote,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: and the coast guard didn't hear from anyone until after
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: three am, and that was two more hours gone. And
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: then there was the question of what Wagner himself has
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: said over the years and how many times it's changed,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: because his first version given the Rasher in nineteen eighty one,
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: contained no mention of an argument, and the shattered glass
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: was from waves, he said. Then five years later, in
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: the nineteen eighty six book called Heart to Heart with
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: Robert Wagner, the story evolved, and now it was a
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: political debate that had bored Natalie enough to send her
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: off to bed, said math isn't mathing for me personally,
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: And in Pieces of My Heart he conceded far more,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: and he admitted that Walkin had urged Natalie to throw
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: herself completely into her work, and that it sent him
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: over the edge. And he admitted picking up a wine
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: bottle and smashing it on the table in anger, And
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: for the first time he put it in writing that
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: he and Natalie had fought before she went missing. So
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: with every retelling, Wagner's account drifted further from what he'd
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: originally claimed and closer to the version Davern had been
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: pushing for years. And once the investigation started up again,
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: Wagner stopped talking altogether, and detectives say he hasn't agreed
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: to a single interview since. And Lieutenant Karina said his
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: team had gone to Wagner more than ten separate times
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: asking to talk and the answer was no every single time.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: And Wagner's attorney pushed back, saying, quote, mister Wagner has
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: fully cooperated over the last thirty years in the investigation
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: of the accidental drowning of his wife in nineteen eighty one.
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: He has been interviewed on multiple occasions by the Los
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: Angeles Sheriff's Department and answered every single question asked of
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: him by detectives during those interviews unquote. And Lieutenant Kreina
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: wasn't persuaded. He told reporters that Wagner's version of events
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: didn't line up with what other witnesses had said. And
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Christopher Walkin's approach to the case has been different from
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: Wagner's in nearly every single way. And in nineteen eighty
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: six People Magazine asked him what happened and he said, quote,
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: I don't know what happened. She slipped and fell in
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: the water. I was in bed then it was a
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: terrible thing. Look, we're in a conversation. I won't have
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: It's a boreuote m. That sounds a lot different. She
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: slipped and fell what I thought she got into the boat.
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: I thought she was going ashore right? And why is
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: talking about a woman that died under your watch? Oh,
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: bore that is so This makes me really not like
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Christopher Walkin. But he would stay quiet for more than
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: a decade after that, and the next time he spoke
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: publicly about it was nineteen ninety seven, when Playboy got
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: him to open up a little more, saying, quote, anybody
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: there saw the logistics at the boat the night where
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: we were that it was raining, and would know exactly
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: what happened. What happened that night, only she knows, because
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: she was alone. She had gone to bed before us,
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: and her room was at the back, and the dinghy
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: think she went out to move it. There was a
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: I had walked on it myself. She had told me
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: she couldn't swim. In fact, they had to cut a
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: swimming scene from Brainstorm, And she was probably half asleep
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: and she was wearing a coat unquote. Took it ten
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: years to come up with that. Okay, great Gray, and
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: morning host Gail King tried once more, but Walking shut
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: it down, saying, quote, I stopped talking about that thirty
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: years ago. And there's so much information books and internet.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: Anything you want to know, just go look unquote. And
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: once the case was back open, Walking brought on an
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: attorney and sat for questioning and gave detectives what they
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: asked for. Detectives confirmed to forty eight hours that he
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: has never been considered a person of interest, and Wagner,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: the one who won't sit down with them, carries that
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: designation alone. Now, Dennis Davern was the captain of the Splendor,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: as we know, working for Wagner and Wood, and he
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: was the fourth person aboard that night, and for decades
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: he was the quietest. And his original statement to Detective
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: Rasher matched Wagner's nearly word for word, and Lieutenant Karina
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: later noted, quote, if you look at Robert Wagner's statement
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: at the time, they almost parrot each other unquote. And
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: that version held for years, almost like they talked about
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: it before talking to the police, allegedly, but piece by piece,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: Davern started telling a different story because you know, when
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: you lie, it's hard to remember the lie, you know. Allegedly,
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: and Marty Rooley, who would later co write his book,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: said that Davern had contacted her as early as nineteen
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: eighty three, just two years after the drowning, though he
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: wasn't ready to go public, and through the late eighties
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: and nineties he shopped his account around to publishers and
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: tabloid outlets looking for someone willing to run it, and
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: few would bite. The first time his version of events
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: reached a mainstream audience was March of two thousand and
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: Vanity Fair published a feature in which Davern laid out
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: what he had said he'd witnessed Walkin and Natalie flirting
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: all weekend, and the situation turning volatile after dinner once
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: everyone was back aboard the yacht. Finally, in September of
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, the book came out, and it
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: was called Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendor, co written with Really.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: In the day after the Sheriff's Departments made its announcement
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: about reopening the investigation, Davern appeared on NBC's Today Show
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: and said out loud what he'd been circling for over
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: a decade. Quote. I made some terrible decisions and mistakes.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: I did lie on a report several years ago. I
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: made mistakes by not telling the honest truth in a
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: police report. Unquote. That's against law, by the way, that's
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: obstruction of justice, stature, eliminations or whatever. I don't know,
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: but anyway, what Davern now described was a night defined
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: by rage in silence and in his revised account, and
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: Davern said the friction between Wagner and Natalie had been
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: escalating since Friday, two full days before everything fell apart.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: And back on the boat after dinner, Natalie had already
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: changed into her flannel nightgown and a pair of warm socks,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: and she came out to the salon where the three
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: men were gathered, and she put the kettle on for tea,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: and Davern lit candles and opened a bottle of wine,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: and Natalie and Walkin were laughing together, and it was
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: pretty relaxed, and then out of nowhere, Wagner snatched the
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: wine bottle off the table and broke it, and Natalie
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: stood up and said, quote unquote, I cannot take this,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: and she walked out, and Wakin left too, heading for
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: the guest cabin, but the argument didn't end, and Davern
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: said Wagner went after her, and it wasn't long before
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: the sounds of another argument started coming through the walls,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: and he told CNN he cranked up hystereo because the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: whole thing embarrassed him. And at some point he glanced
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: through the pilot house window and Wagner and Natalie were
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: outside on the deck now, and the way they were
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: moving left no doubt the fight had gotten worse, and
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: in his accounts to Vanity Fair, he described the fight
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: as unlike anything he'd ever witnessed between them, quote saying,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: fighting like crazy. I'd never in a million years seen
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: them fight like that before. And he said the argument
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: moved from inside the cabin out to the cockpit, and
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: then he heard the boat being untied, and then silence,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: and when Wagner came back inside, something had changed, and
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: Davern described him as quote unquote tussled, sweating profusely, as
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: if he had been in a terrible fight in ordeal
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: of some kind. Quote. Wagner told him he couldn't find Natalie,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: and Davern says his instinct was to act immediately, turn
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: on the searchlight and radio for help, and co author
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: Ruley described it on The Today Show, saying, quote, Dennis
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: wanted to do everything, make a phone call, turn on
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: his search light. His instincts told him something was terribly wrong,
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: and Robert Wagner asked him not to unquote, you're still complicit.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: Then Wagner pulled out a bottle of Scotch and the
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: two of them sat there drinking, doing nothing while the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: minutes kept ticking away. And what Davern says happened after
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: Natalie's death is in some ways just as troubling as
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: what happened during and Howard Temple, the polygraphic examiner who
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: later tested Davern, said Davern told him that once Natalie
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: was dead, Wagner gave him a direct order. Quote. Davern
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: made the statement that he stayed at the Wagner home,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: told not to talk. Wagner paid for his therapy, and
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: Davern could not leave the estate without bodyguards unquote, And
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: for twelve months after the drowning, Davern stayed on Wagner's payroll,
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: and years later he said that year felt like he
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: was a hostage, and really elaborated, saying, quote, the first
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: year after Davern stayed with Wagner. He wanted Dennis under
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: his wing, so it was very hard to talk with
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: his family, his family and his friends unquote, And Lona
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: Wood says Davern eventually told her what he believed he
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: saw that night, saying, quote, it appeared to him as
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: though RJ or Wagner shoved her away and she went overboard,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: and Dennis panicked, and RJ said, leave her there, teach
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: her a lesson unquote. How is no one in jail
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: at this point, Davern included he saw her get pushed
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: off the bone, and she can't swip anyway, as she said,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: Davern described sitting there waiting for the moment they'd go
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: rescue her quote unquote, until all the sound stop, the sound,
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: the sound of somebody drowning and screaming for help. I
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: have no sympathy for this man, like there's not a
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: bone in my body that I will offer empathy or
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: sympathy to Davern complicit completely in my opinion, allegedly, you know,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: and in a sworn declaration he submitted to the Sheriff's department,
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: and Davern described the explosive fight between Wagner and Natalie
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: that had erupted over her relationship with Walkin, and the
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: declaration also contained an admission that Davern had supplied kayludes
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: to passengers during the weekend, and both Davern and Lana
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: Wood later appeared on a twelve part podcast that launched
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen under the title Fatal Voyage. The Mysterious
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: death of Natalie Wood and the question of whether Dennis
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: Davern can be trusted has divided everyone who's looked into
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: the case, and his critics point to the obvious he
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: sat on the truth for decades, then started cashing in
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: and tabloid interviews, a book deal, and a podcast, and
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: every revelation came with a price tag. A detective Rasher,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: who originally handled the case, was dismissive, saying, quote, he's
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: just made himself to look good in his book, and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: obviously he's trying to sell a book and make money
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: off of it, and I think that's the whole purpose
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: behind his writing this book unquote, and his supporters point
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: to something else. Though Davern sat for a polygraph test,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: and examiner Howard Temple said the results indicated he was
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: telling the truth, which who the fuck cares he watched
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: a woman die, He listened to her die. He thought
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: she was in the water and didn't look okay. It
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: makes him the good guy. What Lieutenant Karina found Davern
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: credible quote I find his story and his version of
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: events when he talked to us everything fit, makes more
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: sense of what happened and is corroberated by other people unquote.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: So where's Wagner in this? He killed his wife? It
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: seems allegedly looks like seems like the independent witnesses who
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: came forward after the reopening were people Lieutenant Karina described
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: as quote unquote very credible and what they reported matched
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: what Davern had been saying. And Lieutenant Karina also gave
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: a simple explanation for why Davern had lied in nineteen
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: eighty one, saying, quote, you got to understand Davern. Back then,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: people mischaracterized him as the captain of the boat. He's
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: not the captain of the boat. He's the caretaker of
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: the boat. Robert Wagner's the guy who pays him. That's
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: his meal ticket unquote. I don't give a flying fo
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: if you're getting paid. There's no excuse. I literally can't
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: to anybody that defends that. That's just insane. And whether
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: Davern changed his story because the truth finally demanded it,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: or because the market finally rewarded it is something only
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: he knows for certain. I think both make him look terrible.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: But the investigators who spent the most time with the
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: case believed him, which in that case, she got murdered.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: So for three decades, the record on Natalie Wood's death
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: collected dust, and then in November of twenty eleven, the
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officially announced it was taking
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: another look, and Lieutenant John Karina said, quote, recently, we
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: have received information which we felt was substantial enough to
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: make us take another look at this case unquote, and
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: much of that information trace back to davern his account
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: and the questions it raised. And Wagner's camp responded through
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: a publicist saying, quote, although no one in the Wagner
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: family has heard from the LA County Sheriff's Department about
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: this matter, they fully support the efforts of the LA
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: County Sheriff's Department and trusts they will evaluate whether any
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: new information relating to the death of Natalie Wood Wagner
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: is valid and that it comes from a credible source
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: or sources Other than those simply trying to profit from
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: the thirty year anniversary of her tragic death unquote. Now
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: the press conference, Lieutenant Karina said Wagner was not a suspect,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: at least not yet. But after the announcement, the phone
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: started ringing and roughly one hundred people reached out to
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: investigators with information, and over the following year, detectives track
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: down witness says nobody had spoken to before, and for
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: the first time, they were able to map out what
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: happened across the entire weekend leading up to Natalie's death.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: Two witnesses in particular changed the shape of the case,
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: and Detective Ralph Fernandez said they quote saw figures on
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: the back of the Splendor, a male and a female
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: whose voices they recognized as being Robert Wegner and Natalie
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: Wood arguing back and forth on the boat unquote, and
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: one of those witnesses told detectives she'd watched the confrontation
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: happen with her own eyes, and Lieutenant Cakarina found both
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: witnesses credible and the Splendor had changed hands since nineteen
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: eighty one and was sitting in a Hawaiian harbor, and
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: investigators made two separate trips out there to go through it.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: And the new investigation didn't just turn up witnesses, it
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: sent investigators back to the physical evidence. Actually, and doctor
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: Lakshmannen reviewed the original autopsy findings and produced a ten
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: page supplemental report, and what he found didn't match the
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: story the case had been telling for three decades. And
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: among the findings fresh bruises on her right fore arm,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: left wrist, and right knee that nobody had ever accounted for,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: a scratch on her neck, a scrape on her forehead,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: and the chief medical Examiner's conclusions were careful but damning, saying,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: quote the location of the bruises, the multiplicity of the bruises,
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: lack of head trauma or facial bruising, support bruising having
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: occurred prior to entry in the water unquote. And the
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: last part mattered because the original theory held that Natalie
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: had slipped and struck her head while trying to board
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: the boat, but there was no head trauma and no
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: facial bruising consistent with a fall, so the pattern of
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: injuries didn't support an accident on the boat. And then
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, someone who'd been in the room during
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: the original autopsy came forward and he was a medical
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: doctor now, but back in nineteen eighty one he'd been
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: one of Nogucci's interns, and according to him, the bruising
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: was not minor, and the pattern looked like what you'd
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: expect to see on a person who'd been thrown off
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: a vessel and into the water, and he said he
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: told Noguchi as much at the time, and forensic pathologist
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: Michael Hunter offered a counterpoint, and his theory was that
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: thyroid drug Natalie had been on could have made her
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: skin bruise far more easily than normal. No homicide designation
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: came out of the review, and the timing of the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: bruises remained impossible to nail down, and in twenty twelve,
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: the doctor took the step that nobody had taken in
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: thirty one years, and he amended Natalie Wood's death certificate,
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: saying the cause of death was changed from accidental drowning
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: to drowning and other undetermined factors, and the manner of
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: death was revised to undetermined and buried in the language
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: was a line that carried enormous weight, and the coroner
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: wrote that it was not clearly established how Natalie wound
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: up in the ocean, and two months later, in January
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: of twenty thirteen, a ten page supplemental document came out
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: of the Los Angeles County Coroner's office, revisiting the original
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: autopsy find in detail, and the language in that document
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: was measured, but its implications were not, saying, quote, with
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: the presence of fresh bruises in the upper extremities in
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: the right forearm, left wrist area, and small scratch in
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: the anterior neck, this examiner is unable to exclude non
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: accidental mechanisms causing these injuries unquote. And the addendum flagged
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: another problem and people gave different answers about what time
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Natalie disappeared, and they agreed on whether she and Wagner
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: had been fighting. And it included a line that no
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: official document had ever contained before, saying, quote, this medical
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: examiner is unable to exclude non volitional, unplanned entry into
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: the water quote. In other words, someone may have pushed
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: her it Basically, the document also addressed the question of
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: whether Natalie might have taken her life, but there was
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: just no proof to prove that theory. But when detectives
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: went looking for physical evidence from the original case, some
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: of it was simply gone in items that have been
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: collected during the nineteen eighty one autopsy and investigation had
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: disappeared from the record. And in February of twenty eighteen,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: CBS's forty eight Hours broke the news that the Sheriff's
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: Department had designated Robert Wagner as a person of interest
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: in his wife's death, and it had been thirty six
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: years at this point, and Lieutenant Karina stated, quote, as
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: we've investigated the case over the last six years, I
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: think he's more of a person of interest now. I mean,
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: we know now that he was the last person to
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: be with Natalie before she disappeared. Uote. And of course,
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: the term person of interest carries no legal weight. It
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: doesn't mean suspect that, it doesn't trigger any sort of arrest,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: and it doesn't compel anyone to speak necessarily. And Wagner
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: continued not to consistently turning the away, which seems pretty
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: guilty to me. I don't know, And his publicist released
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: a statement saying, quote, after thirty years, neither mister Wagner
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: nor his daughters have any new information to add to
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: this l investigation. Unquote, and the rest of the statement
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: took aim at people Wager's team believed were using Natalie's
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: death for personal gain, But the investigators weren't asking for
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: new information. They were asking him to explain the old information,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: specifically why his account of that night kept shifting. Again.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: Lies are really hard to keep up after a few decades,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: because in Pieces of My Heart, Wagner wrote his most
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: detailed version of the evening, saying, quote, I went below
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: and Natalie wasn't there. Strange. I went back up on
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: the deck and looked around for her and noticed that
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: dinghy was gone. Stranger. I remember wondering if she had
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: taken the dinghy because of the argument, And then I thought,
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: no way, because she was terrified of dark water. And
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: besides that, the dinghy fired up so loudly and we
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: would have heard it. Yes, I blamed myself. Natalie would
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: have felt the same way had it happened to me.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: Why wasn't I there? Why wasn't I watching? I would
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: have done anything in the world to make her life
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: better or protect her unquote. And he and Natalie had
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: been arguing that night before she was gone, as we know,
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: and investigators noted that Wagner's story had moved over the decades,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: and Lieutenant Karina said, quote, I haven't seen him tell
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: the details that match all the other witnesses in this case.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: I think he's constantly he's changed his story a little bit,
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: and his version of events just don't add up. Quote. Meanwhile,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: Christopher Walkin cooperated with the reopened investigation, and he hired
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: an attorney, sat for an interview, and answered detective's questions.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: And in his original statement to police, Walkin framed what
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: happened that night as a heated back and forth between
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: husband and wife over how much Natalie was spending on
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: her career, and he told police he'd jumped in for
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: a moment, then left the room and went out on deck,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: and by the time he walked back inside, Walkin said
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: the tension had cooled, saying, quote unquote, everybody was apologizing,
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: and Natalie headed back to the master cabin after that.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: And Walkin has never been named a person of interest
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: that Wagner has, and he has never sat down with
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: the detectives investigating his wife's death. The detective Hernanda's notes, quote,
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: we have not been able to prove that this was
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: a homicide and we haven't been able to prove that
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: this was an accident either, And the ultimate problem is
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: we don't know how she ended up in the water unquote.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: But let's strip away the celebrity, the gossip, the tabloid headlines,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: and what's left is a set of facts that have
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: never been reconciled. Natalie Wood's body showed fresh bruising across
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: her upper arms, her forearms, her wrists, and her legs,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: and even her head, and Hernanda says quote, she looked
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: like the victim of an assault unquote, and the coroner's
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: supplemental report reinforced that impression, and the pattern and placement
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: of the bruises, combined with the absence of any head
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: injury or facial trauma, suggested something other than a fall.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: If she'd slipped and hit her head on the boat,
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: the injuries should have looked different. And multiple witnesses independent
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: of the captain her but a man and a woman
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: fighting on the back of the splendor, and their accounts
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: match Davern's. And the argument was loud and intense, and
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: then it stopped all at once, and Davert said quote,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, there was nothing, complete
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: silence unquote, and Lieutenant Karina affirmed, quote no one saw
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: anybody go in the water, nobody heard a splash, nobody
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: heard anything unquote, And that leads to the question that
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: has hung over this case from the beginning. Why would
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: a woman who had been terrified of the water since
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: childhood climb into a diggy by herself in a flannel
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: nightgown and socks at midnight, in the rain, with the
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: ocean rough enough to rock the boat. It makes no
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: sense at all, Lieutenant Karina said the story quote made
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: absolutely no sense if you really think about it. Quote.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: Those who believe this wasn't an accident point to motive
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: as well as opportunity. An author and former federal prosecutor
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: Samporoni spent years investigating the financial dimensions of the case,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: and at Perni's telling, the financial picture was pretty damning,
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: and he argued that the evidence was beyond dispute. Wagner's
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: wealth expanded significantly because of Natalie's death, and more significantly,
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: Pironi argued Wagner had something to lose because if Natalie
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: divorced him a second time, the financial and reputational consequences
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: would have been devastating and jealousy was the accelerant, and
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: investigators confirmed that Wagner had been angry all weekend about
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: the closeness between his wife and Christopher Walkin, and that
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: anger reached its peak on the night she died. And
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: CBS put the question to Karina directly, did the evidence
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: point them towards something other than an accident? And he
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: said it does, quote I think it's suspicious enough to
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: make us think that something happened unquote, no one heard
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: the small boat's engine start that night, and no one
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: heard it pull away, and the key was off and
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: the oars were tied up, saying quote, it didn't add up.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: So why hasn't anyone been charged? Why the hell hasn't
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: anyone been charged? Every other possible charge has passed its
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: statute of limitations. That's why? Why is this a thing?
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: Why does a statute of limitations exist? I don't understand.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: I genuinely will never understand it. I don't. But only
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: murder remains on the table, and prosecutors would need to
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: show that somebody deliberately forced Natalie into the ocean. If
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: she fell in during an argument, even a violent one,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: that's not murder under California law necessarily, and Perni believed
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: the failure wasn't in the evidence, it was in the
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: investigator's grasp of the law, which I don't really understand that,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: because if you push someone in the ocean and then
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: let them drown, that's murder. You're complicit, that's that's a
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: that's a you're you're not assisting in the murder, it's
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: still a charge whatever, dude. But he said they got
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: tripped up on the corpus delay, the legal principle that
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: requires proof a crime was actually committed, and never realized
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: they had enough for circumstantial a second degree murder case
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: because it wasn't planned necessarily. But he also didn't do
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: anything about it. Any letter die allegedly, So what is that?
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: What is the legal system doing? Dude? I'm I'm a YouTuber,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: I know that anyway. Legal experts, though, were more cautious,
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: and Lorie Levinson, professor of law at Loyal Law School,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: said quote, it's too easy for attorneys to undermine the
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: credibility of a witness that has changed his testimony after
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: such a long time, And when prosecutors actually win convictions
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: on decades old cases, it's almost always because a lab
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: found something new, which is very true. I understand that
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: it's just frustrating, but you know, they need DNA essentially
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: a fingerprint match, something more concrete, and a recanting witness
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: with a book deal is a different situation entirely unfortunately,
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: And there are counter arguments that Carrie real weight though,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: because Natalie's blood alcohol was zero point one four percent
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: that night. On top of that, the painkillers and motion
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: sickness medication in her system would have compounded the impairment.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: Shore and the original coroner had concluded she slipped trying
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: to board the boat, which as we know now seems
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: extremely unlikely, and Wagner's spokesman maintained she'd taken it out
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: on her own before. And in nineteen eighty three, Christopher
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: Walkin offered what may be the most honest assessment anyone
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: has ever given, saying, quote, the real story of her
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: death is that she drowned, and nobody knows how she
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: drowned or what happened except her. That's what it is.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: There is no real story nobody will ever know unquote,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: which at this point I think is true. Like that is,
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: that is where it's going to stay, and that's what
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: it's gonna be, which is unfortunate. I think he's extremely
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: flippant with it, but I really don't think there can
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: be anything done about it because the clock has only
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: worked against the truth. And Lieutenant Careina pointed out, quote,
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: our biggest challenge is time. Many witnesses have passed away
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: who were on boats nearby, the original investigator has passed away, unquote,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: and some of the physical evidence collected during the original
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: autopsy couldn't be found. The boat itself was gone, and
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: in May of twenty twenty two, the Sheriff's Department announced
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: that all leads had been exhausted and no criminal charges
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: have ever been filed. And the case sits where it
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: always has sat, somewhere between an accident that doesn't make
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: sense and a crime that can't be proved. All right,
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: let's take a quick pause to talk about something that
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: has plagued all of us, and that's that mid afternoon
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: energy crash where your only other options are another coffee
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• 1:23:51
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• 1:23:54
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• 1:23:58
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• 1:24:01
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• 1:24:38
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• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: the video at supporting the channel. And let's get back
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: to it now. We've discussed the facts of what happened
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: to Natalie Wood as a teenager and what matters now
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: is in any single event, but it's a pattern and
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: finstad in her biographical work cataloged Natalie's inner world with
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: a kind of forensic precision, saying quote, as I plumbed
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: her past, Natalie Woods demons and their origins revealed themselves
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: as if released from a genie's lamp. Family violence, alcoholic father,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother, psychological abuse as
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: a child, star, paranoia, phobia's bedroom of st Rory book
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her pimped
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: at fifteen years old to Frank Frickinsinatra forced to return
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: to afterward exploited as a teenager into a sexual liaison
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: with a forty two year old director Nicholas Ray to
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: prove that she could play a bad girl in Rebel
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: without a cause unquote, and so on and so on,
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: and every time that list traces back to the same source.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: Maria taught her daughter one rule above all others. The
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: career comes first. And when ten year old Natalie broke
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: her wrist on the set of The Green Promise, Maria
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: hid the injury. And when sixteen year old Natalie came
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: back from a hotel room shaking in disheveled, Maria told
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: her to absorb it, just shake it off. Maria's own words,
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: as Lenna remembered them, were the same both times. She
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: would never work again as an actress, and she would
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: lose everything if she became one of those complaining people.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: Just suck it up, broken bone handled. With the identical
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: instruction say nothing, protect the career endure. Finstead said it straightforward, saying, quote,
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: I'm sure it was always in her psyche when you've
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: been it never really disappears, particularly when it's someone you've idolized,
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: and when your mother conspires to keep it a secret unquote.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: Mana saw the aftermath play out for years, and you
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: could tell how much it affected her, and it changed
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: the way she looked at men. And the men who
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: allegedly did it lived the rest of his life untouched.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: And in nineteen eighty one, the same year Natalie drowned
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: the Pacific, Kirk Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: and in nineteen ninety six, the Academy of Motion Picture
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: Arts and Sciences handed him an honorary OSCAR, celebrating him
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: as quote unquote, a creative and moral force, moral force.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: And he died on February fifth, twenty twenty, at the
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: age of one hundred and three, with no charges, no
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: public reckoning, and no accountability of any kind. Bliss never
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: denied his reputation, and he admitted publicly that fidelity wasn't
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: something he practiced personally. An actress and dancer Neil Adams,
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: speaking to the Associated Press in twenty sixteen, described her
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: friend with a laugh, saying, quote, you could not sit
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: beside him without his hand crawling up your leg. Ha
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: what the rumors about what he'd done to Natalie were
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: never really a secret. The day the news of Douglas's
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: death broke, Natalie Wood's name started trending on Twitter, right
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: next to his. The connection was that widely understood, and
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: for decades, Lonna had kept a promise she'd made to
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: her sister to never publicly name him. And she'd held
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: that promise through Natalie's death, even through decades of whispered speculation,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: and through the reopened investigation. And it was the hashtag
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: me too movement that finally changed her mind, and she
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: said in an interview that it gave her the courage
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: to say what she'd been carrying. And then her memoir
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: Little Sister came out in twenty twenty one, and it
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: was the first time she'd ever put Kirk Douglas's name
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: to the accusation publicly quote with no one still around
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: to protect I'm sure she'll forgive me for finally breaking
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: that promise unquote. And after her sister's death, Lona kept
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: returning to the same questions, how could Natalie, with her
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: lifelong terror of dark water, have ended up alone in
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: the ocean Because Natalie didn't swim and her fear of
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: dark water was deeply ingrained, and the woman who'd been
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: groomed since childhood to endure anything, to silence every wound,
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: and to never make trouble for powerful men, was found
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: floating face down in the one place she feared more
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: than anywhere on earth. And Natalie spoke about it herself
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: more than once, and there was never any ambiguity, and
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: in a segment from A and E's biography series, she said, quote,
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: I've always been terrified, still am of water, dark water, sea,
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: water unquote, And in a separate interview, she was even
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: more direct, saying quote, I'm frightened to death of water.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: I can swim a little bit, but I'm afraid of
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: water that is dark unquote. And director Elia Kazan, who
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: worked with her own Splendor in the Grass, wrote in
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: his memoir that Natalie had confided to him before a
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: difficult scene, and she told him she had quote a
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: tear of water, particularly dark water, and being helpless in
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: it unquote. That scene required her to throw herself into
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: a lake, fighting to stay afloat as her character tried
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: to drown, and for most actors it would have been
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: a technical challenge, but for Natalie. It was just an
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: all out crisis, and to get her through it, Kazan
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: and Charlie Maguire, his assistant, lowered himself into the water
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: right next to her, positioned where the camera couldn't see him,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: and even with Charlie beside her, the fear didn't let up.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: And still she performed the scene anyway, and she nailed it.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: Once they pulled her out, she grabbed onto Charlie and
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: would not let go. And back on solid ground, her
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: whole body was shaking, saying quote, she continued to shake
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: with fear, then laughed hysterically with relief unquote. And her
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: sister put it in the simplest possible term, saying quote,
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: she hated the water, hated it, unquote. So the fear
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: wasn't like abstract or occasional. It governed how she moved
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: through the world and through her career. Everyone close to
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: her knew it was there, but few knew where it started.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: And with that story her mother told her when she
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: was still too young to understand what it meant, Maria
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: repeated that prophecy to her children four years and she
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: said it was meant to keep them safe. What it
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: actually did was planted terror in Natalie that never loosened
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: its grip, and then that stunt went wrong on the
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: set of The Green Promise when Natalie was ten and
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: she was plunged into rushing water when that bridge collapsed
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: underneath her, a fortune teller's warning the near drowning fused
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: together inside her and neither ever let go. And if
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: her death was an accident, then what happened on November
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: twenty ninth, nineteen eighty one was the cruelest kind of coincidence.
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: The woman who'd been told since childhood that dark water
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: would take her life died exactly that way. Her mother's
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: prophecy whispered into a little girl's ear decade after decade,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: fulfilled itself in the Pacific, And if it wasn't an
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: act accident, the meeting shifts into something harder to sit with.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: A woman who was taught from birth to be silent,
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: to absorb pain without complaint, and to protect the careers
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: and reputations of people who had power over her. That
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: that woman was silenced for good in the one element
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: she feared since before she could understand why. Either way,
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: it's absolutely heartbreaking. In either way, nobody came to help her.
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: So in May of twenty twenty two, Lieutenant Hugo Renega
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department made a quiet
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: announcement that carried forty years of weight behind it, saying, quote,
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: all leads in the Natalie Wood case have been exhausted
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: and the case remains open, unsolved case unquote. And the
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: detective who had been assigned to it, Ralph Fernandez, had
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: retired two months earlier and no one replaced him, and
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: Robert Wagner, now ninety five years old, was formally cleared
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: as a person of interest. So every time I say
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: he maybe did it, this is alleged and I just
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: have an opinion and I'm not saying he actually did it.
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: For lee reasons, thank you. And the file stays open
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: on paper, and if something new shows up, they say
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: that they will put an investigator on the case to
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: look at it. But the people who know these cases
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: understand what that language means. It means the act of
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: pursuit is over. And the official record never called it
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: a homicide, but it also stopped calling it an accident.
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: And what's left is a family divided by what they
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: believe happened. That night, and a silence that each side
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: has interpreted in opposite directions. And Natalie's sister, Lana Wood,
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: has never wavered, And in twenty twenty one, she said clearly, quote,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: of course Robert Wagner killed her unquote, I'm on her side,
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: And she told a podcast host that she believes there
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: was a violent argument on the yacht that spiraled beyond
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: anyone's control. Quote, I think that things got out of hand.
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 1: I know Natalie can verbally push, and Natalie was a
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: very by the rules person. She did not put up
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: with a great deal that she felt was harmful to
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: her unquote. And Lana has spent decades pointing to the
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: details she says make the accidental version impossible. At Crime Con,
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: she told the audience something worth hearing, saying, quote, Natalie
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: would not go anywhere not fully made up, wearing something terrific.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: She certainly would not get into a dinghy in her
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: nightgown by herself. She would get dressed, put on full makeup,
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: and have Dennis Davern take her ashore to stay in
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: a motel on Catalina, which is exactly what she did
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: the night before when she wanted to leave unquote, and
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: She demanded one thing above all others, that Wagner quote
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: unquote tell the truth for once and for all. And
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: Lonna told The New York Times, quote, protecting Natalie, that's
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: what I really feel I have to do now. If
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: it's not me, it's not going to happen unquote. A
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: detective Hernandez confirmed as much. Quote she is the one
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: family member willing to cooperate in this investigation unquote, and
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: others have picked up the fight alongside her and Peroni,
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: the former assistant US attorney turned author, walked into the
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles County Corner office and personally filed a petition,
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: and he wanted a new inquest into how Natalie Wood died,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: and the petition was built on evidence he'd spent years
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: compiling on his own. And Marty Ruley, Devren's co author
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: in Lana's longtime ally said in November of twenty twenty
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: four what many close to the case believe quote the
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: case will remain open as long as Robert Wagner is
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: alive because he is the suspect unquote. And Natalie's daughters
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: see it differently, though, Natasha Gregson Wagner told The New
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: York Times says, quote unquote, I know it was an accident,
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: And in twenty twenty, she produced an HBO documentary called
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: Natalie Wood What Remains Behind, an effort to shift the
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: public conversation away from conspiracy and back towards her mother's life,
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: and she described Wagner as quote unquote courageous for participating
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: and quote unquote, he's one of the great loves of
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: my life. And in her memoir More Than Love, Natasha
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: wrote what amounts to a closing argument, saying, quote, my
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: mother no longer has a voice of her own, but
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: I do. And this is what I know. Wagner loved
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: Natalie more than love. No one in my world questioned
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: my dad's love for my mom or his utter despair
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: at her loss unquote. And Courtney Wagner, who was seven
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: when her mother died, So I feel like we really
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: don't know our parents at seven years old. But I
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: am sympathetic because she did lose her mother, and Lord
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: knows what her father has told her. I don't know,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: And you know what, I don't know what happened, But
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: I don't know. You're just looking at it from outside,
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: looking in it. I can only assume there's manipulation happening
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: in my opinion, and I might be wrong, but she
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: would go on to say, quote, I remember walking up
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: to my sister screaming, and luckily I had a nanny
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: that I was very close to that was by my
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: side unquote. But both daughters stood behind the man who
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: raised them, and their aunts stand on the other side alone.
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: And the case keeps losing ground to time, and Chief
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: of Detectives McSweeney once said, quote, we don't close these cases.
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: These cases have active periods and more passive periods unquote.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: And this one has been passive for a long time now.
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: But for more than forty years, the mystery of how
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: Natalie Wood died has consumed nearly everything about who she
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: was while she was alive, and the case still remains open.
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: And I wanted to do this video to mainly focus
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: on her life and all of her accomplishments and what
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: really happened to her and who she was as a person,
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: and to honor that part of her life. And I
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: truly just I want justice for her because this seems
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: so just disheartening, and I'd like her family to be
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: at peace with it. And it sounds like some of
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: her family is like her daughters, but like her sister.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: I feel like her sister knows the most about her,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: especially given the time where she was, you know, around
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: the same age and adult. And yeah, the questions still
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: remain unanswered, though, And before November twenty ninth, nineteen eighty one,
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: there was just a one who fought for every role
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: she ever played, who survived a childhood that should have
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: broken her, and who loved her daughters fiercely, and who
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: spent her whole life trying to become something more than
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: what people needed her to be. And she deserved better
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: than the silence that followed. But that is that for
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: Natalie Wood. Let me know what you guys think down below.
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: I'm sure we can have a lot of conversation about
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: it down below. Yeah, this case, I don't know, it
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: really really makes me angry. It merely makes me angry,
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: And I'm curious to know what you guys think, and
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: also what other cases you want me to deep dive into.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: Let me know and I will see your beautiful face
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: in the next one. Okay, Bye,