‍Star Wagner and Natalie Wood on their yacht before tragedy struck 

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‍EXPLOSIVE new clues from a writer into the death of movie and TV star Natalie Wood, found floating face down in the Pacific after falling off her luxury yacht on Thanksgiving Day in 1981, have more recently emerged and led to the case again being opened and marked ‘unsolved!’

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‍And her husband, Hollywood star Robert Wagner, who has consistently refused newspaper and broadcasting interviews with the Press on the tragedy, is named as a ‘person of interest’ on her file in the District Attorney’s Office.

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‍Natalie had been ashore on a night of heavy drinking with Wagner, actor Christopher Walken of Deer Hunter fame, and the yacht’s captain Dennis Davern. An argument reportedly broke out between Wagner and Walken and Natalie disappeared from the yacht. Her body was found floating face down in the water the next morning.

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‍The Los Angeles County coroner ruled her death as accidental drowning, believing she may have slipped while trying to secure a dinghy banging against the boat.

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‍But the case has always been the subject of conflicting statements and ongoing speculation by the American Press and in London, particularly the Express, the Mail and the Guardian.

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‍In 2011, the case was re-opened after Captain Davern admitted he had lied during the initial investigation, and a fight took place between Wood and Wagner before Natalie disappeared. He also claimed Wagner delayed calling for search efforts.

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

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‍The following year, the coroner's office amended Natalie’s death certificate to "drowning and other undetermined factors," noting that bruises on her body could have been sustained before she entered the water.

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‍The marks on her body are consistent with the possibility that Natalie tried to hoist herself on to the dinghy from the water, but someone was pushing her down and wouldn’t let her stay on.

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‍The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department named Wagner a "person of interest" in the case, stating his version of events "just doesn't add up" and that he was the last person to be with Wood before she disappeared. Wagner denies any involvement in his wife’s death.

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‍In her update of Natalie Wood, The Complete Biography, named the best film book of year by the San Francisco Chronicle, journalist Suzanne Finstad, reveals new details about the star’s drowning since her first edition. And they show that Wood didn’t die by chance, she says.

‍Natalie’s life had always been turbulent it seems. 

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‍Finstad writes: “As I plumbed her past, Natalie’s demons and their origins revealed themselves to me as if released from a genie’s lamp. Family violence. An alcoholic father. A pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother. Psychological abuse as a child star. Paranoias. Phobias. A bedroom of storybook dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her.

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‍“Pimped at 15 to Frank Sinatra. Forced to return an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried to kill himself afterwards. Exploited into a sexual liaison as a teenager with a 42-year-old Hollywood director to prove that she could play a ‘bad’ girl in the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause.”

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‍Says Finstad: “Strangely, her greatest fear, I discovered, derived from a prophecy told to her superstitious Russian mother by a Gypsy—namely, that she would die in dark water.

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‍“Homicide detectives in LA keep what they call a murder book, the official record of a homicide investigation. I was given access to Natalie’s murder book.

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‍“There I found the buried clues to what really happened on the last weekend of her life. It became disturbingly clear to me that not only was Natalie’s death not an accident, but the ensuing investigation was almost non-existent. Detectives looked the other way.”

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‍In the archive of forgotten facts, there are hidden truths, and concealed evidence about Natalie, the journalist adds. What is most shocking is Wagner’s role in her drowning, if true.

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‍Finstad adds: “I found three new witnesses who I put in touch with investigators on the case and now the LA Sheriff’s Department has officially reopened it.

‍She claims that Walken heard the fight between Wagner and Natalie, and he allegedly told a friend not long after she drowned, that Wagner pushed her. But he swore never to talk about it.

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‍And an autopsy photographer told the writer that Natalie’s head wounds were “troubling” and may indicate that she was in a violent fight, and was pushed, or tossed, in the water while unconscious.

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‍The case, it seems, still lacks a witness to establish how Natalie got in the water or who put her there. With that witness, the DA might agree to take the case to a grand jury. But if he does, he wants a “smoking gun.”

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‍SINGER TONY CALLS IN PAL FRANK TO RESCUE FRIGHTENED JUDY GARLAND

‍Frank Sinatra with lifelong pal Bennett

‍I came across a wonderful anecdote from Life in 1960, while digging for some old archive showbiz stories. An interview with Tony Bennett who Frank Sinatra once said was the best singer in the world.

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‍Bennett tells how he was just moments from going on stage for a big opening night in the Empire Room at the Waldorf in New York.

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‍He says: “All of a sudden, I get a call. It’s Judy Garland. She’s frightened and telling me that she’s at the St. Regis Hotel on Miami Beach and she’s being beaten up—a domestic thing or something.

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‍“I didn’t know what to do. Then my ex-wife says to me, ‘Call Frank.’ He was at the Fontainebleau in Miami. I call him up. He had just finished making the movie The Detective, so he knew all the detectives and all the police who had helped with the film. I tell him, Frank, Judy Garland’s getting beat up at the St. Regis. I don’t know what to do.

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‍“He says, ‘I’ll call you back in a few.’ I go and do my show, and after it’s over, Judy calls me up. ‘I asked for help,’ she says, ‘but this is ridiculous.

‍‘There’s five lawyers in my suite and 900 armed policemen outside in the street!’ And then Frank calls me up and says, ‘Was that all right, kid?’”

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‍BATTLE OF THE BEACHES AS TORREY CANYON SHEDS ITS BLACK POISON

‍IT WAS the day the sea turned black. Britain’s beaches were knee deep in sludge and thousands of sea birds were choking to death.

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‍On March 18, 1967, the Torrey Canyon oil spill became one of the worst environmental accidents in the world when the super tanker ran aground off our south-west coast, spilling 36 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean between the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End in Cornwall.

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‍What followed that night was an oil spill eight miles long which grew to 20 miles long within 24 hours and later hit hundreds of miles of coastline. And it set in train a remarkable series of events, with the Press likening it to a war footing. Reporters of all national titles joined local newspapers at the scene.

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‍It was like a wartime Dunkirk situation as thousand of Brits flocked to the shores in the clean up. But the oil kept coming.

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‍So, the government, led by prime minister and Scilly Isles lover Harold Wilson, unleashed RAF bombers to sink the wreck and release thousands of tonnes of detergent. But that proved toxic to marine life.

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‍“The cure was worse than the malady,” a scientist at the Plymouth-based Marine Biological Association, told the Guardian. “Everyone is making it up as they go long.”

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‍Wilson and the Royal Navy finally weighed up their options to protect south coast beaches which the tourist industry would depend on that summer.

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‍Ten days after the fatal accident, caused by human error, Buccaneer bombers took off to send the Torrey Canyon to Neptune’s Locker. Reporters and photographers standing on a hill at the back of St Martin’s had a grandstand view of the planes going over. Then there was a huge pall of black smoke.

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‍Only 23 of the 41 1,000lb bombs dropped in Operation Oil Buster, hit the target. However, “the Navy made an efficient job of it, providing a spectacular event not seen since the war,” wrote Guardian reporter, Dennis Barker.

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‍The RAF Buccaneers were followed by Hawker Hunters and Sea Vixens, and napalm was dropped to burn off the oil. The resulting “ring of fire” sent up a three-mile smoke plume that could be seen 100 miles away. Finally, on March 3, the ship began to sink.

‍The government then poured 10,000 tonnes of a BP-manufactured “detergent”, a crude first generation dispersant, into the sea and on the shore. In some cases, barrels of the stuff were literally rolled off cliffs.

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‍Surprisingly areas where the detergents were not used, because of concerns over seals, recovered in two to three years, compared with the 13-14 years where the detergents were deployed, the Western Morning News later reported.

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‍One good note: The ripples from the spill are still felt nearly 60 years on. For an unknown quantity of the oil remains in a Guernsey quarry, where spill response teams now carry out a training exercise each year, ready for the next Torrey Canyon.

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‍FOOD FOR THOUGHT

‍I couldn’t help but smile when I read bits of the diary of John Pritt Harley, a popular actor and singer at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in the mid-1800s and a close friend of Charles Dickens who called him Fat Jack, as the newspapers did, because he apparently ate so much but was so thin.

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‍Decide for yourself. He obviously enjoyed his food. An entry from 1858 when he was 70, reads: “January 4: Arose half past eight, breakfast half past nine. Toast, cheese, eggs, bread, bacon. Went to Regent Street & saw John Savory and his son Charles. Then in bus to Southwark Street, saw Mat and her mother. Rehearsal at two, home to dinner at four. Roast beef, potato, biscuit, cheese, ale, port and sherry. Tea at seven, toast, cheese, ham. Theatre at eight, saw Ellen Terry on stage. Home at ten, supped beer at eleven, cold roast beef, potato, biscuit, cheese, ale, gin and water. Read Spectator to Betsy. Bed at one. Biscuit.

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‍Fat Jack died at 72.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍22 December 2025

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