Don Whiting, the host/manager at Doug’s Harbor Reef who had seated the intoxicated Wagner party and called the dock operator to be sure they got back to the Splendour, happened to be awake on his sailboat at 1:30, listening to the VHF marine radio. He recognized Robert Wagner’s voice, “sounding drunk,” he later told police. Whiting responded to the radio call from R.J., which he described as “strange.”
A heavily intoxicated R.J. told Whiting via the ship’s radio that Natalie was not on the Splendour, and he thought she was at the bar at Doug’s. R.J. asked Whiting if he would check the bar for Natalie, and see if the dinghy was at the Two Harbors dock.
Why R.J. waited until 1:30 A.M. to ask for help to find Natalie, or to report her as missing from the boat, is one of the lingering questions from that fraught, alcohol-fueled night, since all three men noticed she was overboard or missing between 10:45 and midnight, according to their police statements.
It was equally mystifying that R.J. would think Natalie, who was terrified of dark water and never took the dinghy alone at night, would get into the Valiant by herself in the cold, drizzly midnight hours in choppy waves; or imagine that she was at the bar, which was closed. It was the first of several odd, contradictory explanations R.J. would offer for Natalie’s disappearance from the boat.
Whiting’s private notes of the radio contact from R.J. that night state that he “overheard Splendour calling the Harbor Patrol, and the Harbor Patrol had closed up and gone home, so [I] picked up and responded to R.J.’s call… he was extremely drunk. The calls were almost incoherent. But we did switch off to a different channel and discussed the matter.” According to Whiting’s notes, R.J. “didn’t want to call the Coast Guard. He arranged that [I] would start a local search.” Whiting’s impression was that R.J. “didn’t want all the publicity for a missing wife if she was just hanging out at the bar or something.”
By happenstance, Paul Wintler, an employee who lived on the campgrounds in Two Harbors, had been awakened by loud music just before 1:30 and turned on his radio monitor to pick up the emergency airwaves. Wintler overheard R.J.’s radio distress call to Whiting and immediately got in touch with Whiting to offer his help.
Astonishingly, the search for Natalie Wood, who was missing in the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island, proceeded at the direction of a restaurant host at Doug’s Harbor Reef instructing a campgrounds maintenance man.
Wintler looked around shore for Natalie, and then checked the pier for the Valiant. When he didn’t see Natalie or the dinghy, the campgrounds employee borrowed Harbor Patrol Boat #10 to go out to the Splendour to talk to R.J., around two in the morning. Wintler described R.J. to police as “drunk and a little panicky.” He told Wintler he and Natalie “had a fight,” and R.J. thought she was going to the bar at Doug’s. He asked Wintler to drop him off at shore so he could look for her, even though the bar/restaurant—the only public place in rugged Two Harbors—was closed.
Wintler used the Harbor Patrol boat to drop R.J. off at the pier at Two Harbors and began to search the dark waters off Catalina for Natalie or the dinghy sometime after two A.M. “I kind of figured out which way is the wind blowing,” he recalls, “and I kind of went along the shore… and I didn’t find anything.” After fifteen minutes or so, R.J. flagged down Wintler from the pier to take him back to the Splendour, “agitated” that Wintler couldn’t find Natalie. “He was saying, ‘Where is she?’ and I can’t answer, and after a while you get tired of that.”
R.J. repeated to Wintler he believed Natalie was in the dinghy; though strangely, he never mentioned to Wintler, the person searching for Natalie, that she was a weak swimmer, that she would not go in the dinghy alone at night, or that she was afraid of the water.
Wintler brought R.J. back to the Splendour around 2:30 A.M., “thinking, ‘I got to call somebody [for help].’ ” By that time, Don Whiting and his boat mate, Bill Coleman, the cook at Doug’s Harbor Reef, had arrived at the Two Harbors pier, where they coordinated with Wintler to expand their makeshift search for Natalie, sending a few local residents in harbor boats to patrol the water.
Shortly after 2:30 A.M., by Whiting’s statement, he and Wintler realized they needed guidance in their amateur search for a movie star lost at sea. They decided to awaken the local harbormaster, Doug Oudin, since R.J. did not want them to alert the Coast Guard or Baywatch. Oudin quickly got dressed and took a skiff out to the Splendour, where he encountered R.J. and Davern, “buddies sitting around in the boat drinking.” Walken, at that time, was in his cabin. The skipper and R.J. were so intoxicated they could barely stand up or form a sentence, according to Oudin. “There’s no doubt about it. They had trouble talking to me.”
Oudin tried to get details from R.J. and the captain to assist him in the search for Natalie and the Valiant: “What kind of dinghy is it, how much fuel did you have… did she know how to run the boat, how was she dressed? They didn’t really know much.” R.J. and Davern contradicted R.J.’s earlier explanation that Natalie had gone to the bar. “They said… they saw no reason that she would have gone ashore again.”
Both R.J. and Davern told the harbormaster they thought Natalie was wearing a nightgown at the time she disappeared from the boat, making R.J.’s 1:30 A.M. radio call to Whiting reporting that she had taken the dinghy to go to the bar both contradictory and peculiar. Neither the skipper nor R.J. offered any reason for Natalie’s disappearance. “They just said, ‘We noticed the dinghy is gone, and she’s gone.’ ” Davern and R.J. told Oudin that Natalie had gone to bed, “and she just didn’t want to sit around with the boys while they were drinking and partying.” R.J. didn’t say anything about “the fight” he had with Natalie, which he mentioned to Wintler.
Oudin noticed “they were very panicked, especially Wagner. He was distraught. He said, ‘What are you doing? Do something.’ He was extremely upset.” At the same time, both R.J. and Davern asked Oudin not to contact the Coast Guard. “They said, ‘We want to keep this kind of low-key.’”
In contrast to what he told Wintler and Whiting, that he thought Natalie was on the dinghy, R.J. told Oudin it was “completely out of character” for Natalie to take the dinghy out at night alone. “He said she wouldn’t have.” R.J. also told Oudin that Natalie was afraid of the water.
The harbormaster left R.J. and Davern sometime around 2:45 A.M. to arrange for an expanded search, thinking he was going to find Natalie with the dinghy. Both men, he observed as he got in his skiff, “were scared-looking.”
Oudin arranged for five little harbor outboards to search the beach, sending one boat to Emerald Bay and another toward Blue Caverns, searching the coastline. He sent Wintler on a “land patrol” up to the campground. After forty-five minutes, Oudin took his skiff back to the Splendour, informing R.J. he was “not having any luck” and had no choice but to call the Coast Guard, agreeing not to mention Natalie’s name. Whiting, who was with Oudin, recalled R.J. and Davern as “a little dazed.” Whiting told police, “The skipper said to R.J., ‘Boss, do you think she could have gone to the mainland?’ and Wagner said, ‘Yes, that’s a possibility.’”
Oudin finally made the call to the Coast Guard at 3:30 A.M.
Meanwhile, a few small Isthmus harbor boats, manned by volunteers, continued to sweep the shark-infested waters off Catalina for signs of Natalie or the Valiant.
The first call to a Baywatch lifeguard to begin a search for Natalie in the 85- to 100-foot, 54-degree waters around the Splendour, and in the Isthmus harbor, was not until 5:15 on Sunday morning, six hours after she disappeared from the boat. The Coast Guard initiated the call to a pair of experienced divers named Roger Smith and Jean-Claude Stonier, who in turn called Bill Kroll at the Sheriff’s Department in Avalon.
While Smith and Stonier dove under the Splendour between 5:30 and 6:00 A.M., searching for Natalie, Deputy Kroll questioned Robert Wagner.
R.J. told Kroll that he, Natalie, Walken, and Davern had been drinking in the main cabin of the boat “when we realized N
atalie wasn’t around. We searched the boat and found the Zodiac dinghy was missing. We then thought that Natalie had gone ashore to the bar. This all took place around 12 midnight. When she didn’t return by 1:30 A.M., I got on the radio and called the Isthmus to see if she was there. I got a hold of some guys who worked at the Isthmus and asked if they could check the Isthmus for Natalie… they contacted the Coast Guard.”
R.J.’s statement to the local Sheriff’s office detailed his actions after 1:30 A.M., but failed to account for the critical hours from the time they knew Natalie was missing from the boat—between 10:45 to midnight—and 1:30, when he finally made his first distress call on the ship radio. Moreover, R.J.’s explanation for why and how Natalie left the Splendour—to take the dinghy ashore by herself to the bar—was something he had already told the harbormaster Natalie would never do.
At the same time R.J. was giving his statement to Kroll and divers were searching in the choppy waters around the Splendour, the night manager and the cook from Doug’s Harbor Reef spotted the Valiant tangled in kelp inside a small cave at Blue Cavern Point, where it had drifted about one and a quarter miles northeast of the Isthmus pier.
According to the police statements of Whiting and Coleman (both now deceased), the key was turned off, in neutral, with the oars still in place, suggesting that Natalie had never been in the dinghy. The two boat mates also noted there was a wine bottle inside the Valiant; presumably the third bottle that Davern and Walken had retrieved from the Splendour for dinner the night before.
However, Roger Smith, one of the Baywatch lifeguards, asserts that he and his diving partner found the dinghy. “We swam it out of the cove… and when we swam it out, all the oars were in disarray. Everything was in disarray, as if somebody had been trying to climb back into it.” Smith also noticed “scratch marks” on the Valiant.
Whiting later told police that once the Valiant was taken out of Blue Cavern Point, he and Coleman used it to continue the search for Natalie. As a result, the dinghy’s evidentiary value was compromised, which lifeguard Smith found typical of the search for Natalie Wood. “Several errors were made. The one thing was not calling us out to begin with, to search for her, soon after she was missing… they had shore boat operators out there looking for her!”
The discovery of the dinghy at 5:30 A.M., with no Natalie, was an almost certain indication that her worst fear came true, and she had been helpless in deep, dark seawater.
The grim drama reached its nightmarish final act at first light, when Doug Bombard, the owner of Doug’s Harbor Reef, who had the flu the night before, joined the search team at the Isthmus, using a small Harbor 4 patrol boat. “I was hoping that we’d find her clinging to the rocks or sitting up on the hill. I kept running the boat right up next to the beach, thinking that if she had drowned, that she’d probably be inside the kelp line, because the current comes down the island and swings in.”
While Bombard was trolling about a hundred to a hundred fifty yards off Blue Cavern Point, close to 7:45 A.M., “I saw something red, and that was her down jacket. It ballooned up, and had enough air so it acted as a kind of life preserver.” Bombard used his boat radio to alert Baywatch he thought he had spotted Natalie. Lifeguard Roger Smith immediately radioed back to the Isthmus Harbor Patrol to alert Bombard to locate her but not touch her “because we might be talking about a homicide. I wanted to recover her onto the Baywatch. And so I saw them speeding over there really fast, and Doug pulled her out of the water just as we got there.” Smith was too late.
Bombard steered the boat closer to the jacket, discovering what he hoped he would not find. “Natalie was hanging underneath the jacket, which buoyed her. A lot of times when a person drowns, if they don’t have a lot of fat, they go to the bottom. There was only one thing that kept her up, and that was that coat. She wasn’t floating, she was hanging, actually, almost in a standing position, with her face down and her eyes open.”
Underneath the red jacket, Natalie had on a floral print flannel nightgown, no undergarments, and blue slipper/socks, not the way Natalie Wood would dress to go to a bar. Coroner’s records would note she was wearing four rings, an I.D. bracelet on her right wrist (a gift from R.J. she kept on always), and a gold chain around her waist. There was no cuff bracelet on her left wrist—suggesting that Natalie did not intend to go anywhere, for she would not have been seen in public without The Badge. She had died as Natasha, not as “Natalie Wood.”
Smith, the lifeguard who assisted Bombard in lifting her out of the water that morning, was struck by how beautiful Natalie was.
“All I remember is her eyes.”
DOUG BOMBARD, WHO SPOTTED NATALIE IN the dark waters off Catalina, was one of the many who tortured themselves with if only when she was found drowned. He was distressed that the harbormaster—who himself was not informed by anyone on the Splendour that Natalie was missing until 2:30 A.M.—had waited until daybreak to call him to assist in the search.
“I thought, ‘Goddammit, I wish they’d have said something.’ ’Cause you always think—as far as winds and currents and things like that are concerned, I probably am the authority in the area—and you think that maybe just a little better knowledge about the area might have saved her. But in this case, I don’t think that would have been a factor, because I think by the time Bob called, probably it was too late.”
Smith, the Baywatch lifeguard who was notified when R.J. finally agreed to call the Coast Guard at 3:30 A.M., approximately four hours after he noticed Natalie missing, had the same nightmares. “She didn’t need to drown… had there been a search by professional lifeguards like us, we would have been out there searching for her, following the current from the boat and stuff, so we probably would have found her hanging off of that stupid craft… she’s the only one I’ve lost like that. And it was just a sad bunch of circumstances.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department rotation elected Detective Duane Rasure, a good-natured, self-described cowboy in his forties whose wife, ironically, idolized Natalie Wood, as the investigator sent to Catalina early that Sunday morning to find out how she came to disappear from the Splendour the night before, wearing only a flannel nightgown and a quilted jacket.
On his way, Rasure stopped at the heliport in Long Beach to question R.J. and Walken, who were flown back to the mainland as a courtesy by a Sheriff’s Department helicopter, two hours after Bombard found Natalie off Blue Cavern Point. R.J. had asked the skipper to stay in Two Harbors to identify Natalie’s body.
By the time sheriff’s investigators took statements from R.J. and Walken the end of that long Thanksgiving weekend, news that Natalie Wood had been found floating near a cove off Catalina Island was on radio and television, sending shock waves around the world, inciting international gossip. Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who had been notified of the drowning around 8:00 A.M. and had already sent his investigator, Pamela Eaker, to examine Natalie’s body, wrote later, “That first morning the whispers were of murder.”
Rasure met with R.J. at 9:54 A.M. Sunday to interview him about the events leading to Natalie’s drowning. Less than six minutes later, at 10:00 A.M., R.J. was released. This, in paraphrase, is the sheriff’s complete report of R.J.’s statement for police of what happened that night:
He stated that Natalie went to her bedroom and shortly thereafter they noticed that she and the dinghy were missing. He first called to see if she went back to the restaurant, and the next thing he recalled they were unable to find her and people were searching.
Rasure noted in his report: “Mr. Wagner was in an emotional state at this time, at this interview, so it was terminated.”
The detective was satisfied with R.J.’s explanation. “Really, I had the basics of what I needed,” he states, acknowledging that he was already forming the opinion that “it was an accident.” According to Rasure, the Sheriff’s Department viewed Natalie’s death that morning as “nothing more than a big-time celebrity drowning, in our minds. I�
�ve got nothing so far to make me think that anything’s wrong. We had an accidental drowning.” He did not ask R.J. how he believed Natalie went overboard.
Moments after he spoke to R.J., Rasure met with Walken in an office at the heliport. Rasure and his partner, Detective Roy Hamilton, spent a few more minutes with Walken than they had R.J. Rasure found Walken forthcoming, and he provided more details than R.J. had, but he was equally vague about the events surrounding Natalie’s disappearance. After discussing “the beef” between himself and R.J., Walken told Rasure that Natalie went to her room. Walken thought she had gone to bed:
He next remembers the captain making a remark that the dinghy was gone. At about the same time, they noticed that Natalie was gone. They noticed that she was missing from her bedroom. He stated he thought this was sometime just after midnight. He added he did not hear a motor or a small boat. He next remembered a shore boat coming alongside, and Mr. Wagner went ashore to look for her. He recalled Mr. Wagner saying that neither she nor the dinghy had been found.
Walken had no explanation as to how or why Natalie left the boat.
After taking R.J.’s and Walken’s statements on the fly, Rasure and Hamilton departed for Catalina to interview people on the Island who had seen Natalie that weekend, and to take a statement from Davern. The skipper, who had just completed the gruesome task of identifying Natalie’s body, was questioned at greater length by the two detectives than either R.J. or Walken, providing an equally hazy account of how Natalie got off the boat and of his, R.J.’s and Walken’s activities before and after. Davern told police:
They all went back aboard the Splendour and sometime later he observed that the Zodiac, which was usually tied to the stern, was gone. He recalls that he next called for the harbor patrol. Originally they had decided not to call the Coast Guard, however some time later they did notify the Coast Guard station at Long Beach.
Natasha Page 53
