Lana Wood, actor and sister of Natalie Wood, called for Robert Wagner to reveal the truth about Wood’s mysterious death in a podcast interview on Friday.
Natalie Wood was a Hollywood icon whose tragic death in 1981 became one of the most infamous unsolved cases. In short, she was on her yacht with husband Robert Wagner, recent co-star Christopher Walken, and the boat’s caption, Dennis Davern. The next morning, she was found washed up on the shore, dead.
Now Lana Wood, on the podcast Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood, has put pressure on Robert Wagner to reveal the truth about his wife’s death. In an interview with investigative journalist Dylan Howard, she said,
“I think that things got out of hand. I know Natalie can verbally push, and Natalie was a very by-the-rules person. She did not put up with a great deal that she felt was harmful to her…I think it escalated to a point where she was either struck or pushed. I don’t believe that it was planned. I don’t believe in any of those bizarre stories, but I do know she would not have ended up somewhere where she would completely never, ever go in a million years or certainly not go out not dressed. There’s just too much that doesn’t add up to who Natalie is.”
Wood’s decades-old case was rife with changing stories and compelling but contradictory evidence. Davern, the captain, changed his story entirely years after her death was ruled an accident. Wagner admitted to a long-suspected but never-confirmed fight on the yacht the night before her death. The case was reopened in 2011, but Wagner has refused to talk to investigators.
Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood is available on the Apple Podcast app. For a quick primer on the case, I recommend Buzzfeed Unsolved's Natalie Wood episode.
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