The Los Angeles County Sherriff is saying that Robert Wagner is a “person of interest” in the 1981 downing death of his wife Natalie Wood, to which the rest of the country said “No s**t, we’ve known he and Christopher Walken probably did that s**t since 1981.” For the record I was born in 1981 and my first words were “Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken killed Natalie Wood.”
There are a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about what happened to Natalie Wood on that boat, and most of them involve fucking. In pretty much every combination. One theory is that Walken and Wagner killed Wood because she caught them having sex. Another is that all three of them were having sex. And some people think Wagner killed her because he caught her having sex with Walken. It’s all very salacious.
In 2011, the captain of the yacht, Dennis Davern, changed his story and gave a statement that Wagner and Wood were fighting when she apparently fell overboard, and that Wagner didn’t call the Coast Guard or try to rescue his wife, who was afraid of the water, instead saying she took the dinghy back to land. It’s weird that he would have kept quiet about this for 30 years if it was true, but it’s equally weird to implicate himself as an accomplice after the fact 30 years later in a case no one was talking about anymore if it wasn’t.
I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened, honestly. I mentioned everyone thinks either Wagner or Walken or both of them together killed her, but we don’t actually know that for sure. It’s entirely possibly that the original theory, that the three of them were drunk and high and Wood slipped over the railing trying to secure the dinghy is true. Or maybe Wood and Wagner and Walken were fighting, but Natalie was alone and accidentally fell overboard. There’s a hundred scenarios, and “person of interest” isn’t really the same as “suspect”. But he probably did that s**t.