Robert Wagner has been named as a “person of interest” in the death of his wife, West Side Story star Natalie Wood, who drowned on a boat trip in 1981.
Speaking to the CBS News show 48 Hours for an forthcoming special on Wood’s mysterious death, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators confirmed that they want to speak to the actor, now 87.
“As we’ve investigated the case over the last six years, I think he’s more of a person of interest now,” Lieutenant John Corina told the investigative news show. “I think he’s constantly changed his story a little bit. And his version of events just don’t add up.”
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Matinee idol Wagner and starlet Wood, then 19, married in 1957 after meeting on a studio-arranged date a year earlier.
Although their courtship was portrayed as a Hollywood fairytale romance, in reality their marriage was turbulent and ended in divorce in 1962.
But after a decade apart, during which both remarried, in 1972 Wagner and Wood resumed their relationship and wed again.
Nine years later, on the evening of 28 November 1981, Wood vanished from her yacht en route to Santa Catalina Island, off the California coast. With her on the trip were Wagner, boat captain Dennis Davern and Christopher Walken, a co-star in the movie Wood was filming at the time.
Her body was recovered from the water the next morning, a mile away from the boat. An inflatable dinghy belonging to the yacht was found nearby, suggesting that the 43-year-old attempted to leave the boat, or slipped and fell trying to retrieve the untethered inflatable.
However, an autopsy revealed bruising to her arms and body and a mark on her left cheek, fuelling speculation that Wood had not left the yacht voluntarily. At the time, the death was ruled an accidental drowning.
Wagner continued to enjoy a career in TV and film, including his best-known role opposite Stephanie Powers in husband-and-wife detective series Hart to Hart, which ran until 1984. He also appeared in all three Austin Powers films as villain Number Two.
In 2011, the case was reopened after the boat’s captain, Davern, told police that, contrary to his original statement, he had heard Wagner and Wood in a heated argument in the hours before her disappearance.
A year later, Wood’s cause of death was amended to “drowning and other undetermined factors”.
LA sheriff’s department spokeswoman Nicole Nishida told The New York Times that recently uncovered details “portray a new sequence of events on the boat that night”, but added that there was not enough evidence to declare Wagner a suspect.
Wagner, who declined multiple requests to speak to police about the night of Wood’s death, maintains his innocence.
“I would have done anything in the world to protect her,” he wrote in a 2009 article for the Daily Mail. “I lost a woman I loved with all my heart, not once but twice, and I will never completely come to terms with that.”
