The authorities have no closed the case yet, but the leads and evidence they had followed are considered "exhausted." "If additional leads surface in the future, which have not already been investigated, the case will be reassigned to a detective to investigate the new leads," Lt. Hugo Reynaga told Page Six. The outlet reached out to Wagner's representation for comment but received nothing as of publication.
Caption
The West Side Story actress died over Thanksgiving in 1981 while celebrating with Wagner and actor Christopher Walken on her family's boat. Wood would drown, and her death was initially ruled an accident. The death certificate was later amended in 2012 to change the cause of death from just "drowning," adding "other undetermined factors" to the record.
Retired Detective Ralph Hernandez declared Wagner a person of interest in the actress' death in 2018, making the decision after interviewing witnesses who claimed to have seen Wagner and Wood arguing on the boat's edge before her disappearance.
92-year-old Wagner has long denied the claims, but Wood's sister, Lana Wood, told the New York Post in 2021 that she has always believed the Austin Powers actor was "responsible" for her sister's death.
"I don't believe it was premeditated," Wood told the outlet. "But that doesn't mean I don't think he did it. Of course he did!" She went on to question the series of events described by Wagner and Walken after Wood was discovered floating.
"The things that they were saying that Natalie did" – that the nightgown-wearing actress had taken the yacht's dinghy to "party hop," Lana Wood told the outlet. "They might as well have been saying that she was trying to fly to another planet. They were totally out of character."
Walken's presence on the boat seemed to be a point of tension between Wagner and Wood according to witness accounts of the night. Captain Dennis Davern shared some drinks with Wagner, while Walken and Wood reportedly were asleep. After a bit, Wagner informed the captain that his wife wasn't aboard, leading to the eventual discovery that she was floating face down in the waters near Catalina Island.
With Wagner being taken off the list of potential culprits, what really happened to Wood is likely to remain a mystery. Wood's death at 43 still remains a point of interest for Hollywood storytellers, possibly fueling the "foul play" theories despite police being led down dead ends.
02:
Has Hollywood fallen out of love with Israel?
In 1947, a full-page advertisement ran in the U.S. film industry's trade publication, Variety, saluting then-U.S. President Harry Truman's efforts to encourage the British government to accept increased Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The signatories included many of the luminaries of Hollywood, from singer Frank Sinatra and actor Edward G. Robinson to director William Wyler, whose film about returning veterans, The Best Years of Our Lives, had won the Oscar for Best Picture the previous year. This was a collective cause du jour—whither the European Jewish refugees?—that was also a matter of the utmost personal relevance to many of the luminaries who affixed their names.
Director George Stevens (Swing Time) had spent the war years as the head of a U.S. Army Signal Corps documentary crew, filming the liberation of Dachau and the countless dead left behind there; writer and director Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) had fled Berlin ahead of the Nazis, leaving behind his mother, stepfather, and grandmother, all of whom were murdered in concentration camps. In supporting the Zionist cause after the war, they perhaps wondered about who might have been saved from the inferno of Europe by the existence of a Jewish homeland.
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