Natalie Wood's mysterious 1981 drowning now labeled "suspicious death"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/02/natalie-woods-mysterious-198.html

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What’s her middle name?

Drift.

Too soon?

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What kind of wood doesn’t float? (etc.)

Maybe not too soon as much as “never, please” (considering how just plain bad all the Natalie Wood jokes I’ve ever heard are).

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The whole incident smelled fishy (pun intended) from day one. If you’ve ever been on a boat you know that sound carries well. There should have never been any conflicting versions of events. The boat wasn’t that big.

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And so the murky depths of this mystery deepen. Why, they’re virtually unfathomable!

somebody stop me, please!

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You’re sailing into dangerous waters. Come about!

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The original story’s been torpedoed, so now they’re Walken it back.

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These

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Not to mention, she didn’t float… and her husband’s name is Bob.

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What were the whereabouts of the Juice?

I remember hearing the news when the story broke, and thought the same. I think everybody on the boat knows what really happened. Also probably why Wagner is refusing to talk.

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Almost anything you might want to know about Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner’s lives and her death and the investigation done at the time can be found in this really long 2000 Vanity Fair article:

One thing that comes up again and again from the article though is that the woman was desperately afraid of drowning.

Also, Robert Wagner is 87; if a reopening of the investigation focuses on him (or even if they just wish to talk to him again), then they’re potentially going to face some obvious problems.

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Am I missing something? If the only people on the boat are Wood, Wagner, Walken, and the captain, then the witnesses must be the captain and Walken. Right?

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Yeah. It’s as if investigators had forgotten that humans have infallible objective perception and recall, that’s in no way influenced by prejudices, prior knowledge, outside events and what kind of questions get asked.

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I remember too. It happened around the time of Brainstorm, an interesting movie. There were suggestions she drowned herself because she was famously vain and was getting old.

I heard that Natalie Wood refused to use the on-board shower.

She wanted to wash up on shore.

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being a youngster when she was on gave me the adulation to be a better person

How dare a woman get older and have any pride in herself… certainly both are worth a death sentence…

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Any lawyer worth the sheepskin his diploma is printed on should be able to destroy a witness statement about a nearly 40 year old event