Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  There was another, more critical, flaw in the bumping-dinghy theory, according to boating specialist Paul Miller, who examined the Wagners’ dinghy and analyzed the soundproofing inside the Splendour for Noguchi. Miller claims that even if the inflatable dinghy bumped against the Splendour that night, it “wouldn’t make any noise at all” inside Natalie’s cabin. “It’s rubber… and they tied it off behind the stern step.” In Miller’s opinion, Natalie being kept awake in her cabin by a banging dinghy at the stern is “a woman’s fantasy who really doesn’t know much about it, or else a male fantasy who really doesn’t know a lot about boating. It was a very large power boat.”

  Moreover, Natalie had not taken her sleeping pill that night, indicating she was not trying to go to sleep.

  Based on his analysis for Noguchi, Paul Miller believes that Natalie “fell over the side” in an accident. How it happened, he acknowledges, would be “completely a guess.”

  Noguchi, twenty years later, observes there are “some unanswered questions” about Natalie’s drowning, adding, “I personally don’t have personal information to add any more, and I, we, our profession generally try to stick with the scientific facts rather than on innuendoes. I have nothing more to offer.”

  Like Thomas Thompson, certain of Natalie’s intimate friends are troubled by the accounts given of her last night. Ed Canevari, her Santa Rosa playmate and lifetime friend, remembers Natalie’s “deathly fear” of water from the age of four. “I have a really bad feeling about how that came down, the day she died. I know she didn’t like the water. And for her to get in a dinghy, or tie up a dinghy, does not sound like her. I don’t give a damn if she had ten drinks in her. It just does not compute. Something else happened that night.”

  Natalie’s longtime pal, actor Robert Blake, who had to hold her legs underwater to keep her calm in a studio tank during a scene in This Property Is Condemned, commented, “I will never ever understand the stories that I’ve heard, what she was doing out there on the deck by herself at night. Black water just terrified her, even during the daylight… and for her to start messing around with a dinghy… or that the dinghy was making too much noise, or that bullshit story she drank too much… the Natalie I knew, there was not enough alcohol on this planet to get her drunk enough to have anything to do with a rubber dinghy, in the dark, in the ocean.”

  No matter how Natalie went overboard—whether it was retying the dinghy, trying to board the dinghy, falling off the side of the Splendour, or any other scenario—there is still the disturbing timeline indicating no one on the boat started to search for Natalie from the time they told police they first noticed that she and the dinghy were missing-between 10:45 P.M. and midnight—until 1:30 in the morning, when R.J. made his first distress call by ship’s radio. If they had, Natalie might have been rescued.

  Why did R.J. wait an hour and a half to three hours to start looking for Natalie, missing from a boat in the middle of the night? Lana comments, “I don’t understand this. If a member of my family, if I went into their bedroom in the middle of the night and found them gone, it’ll be 911.”

  Both R.J. and Davern knew dark water panicked Natalie, they knew she could barely swim, and they knew she never took the dinghy by herself, as Peggy Griffin, who was often on the Splendour with Natalie, confirms. “Never. Ever. She wouldn’t… she would never get in the dinghy alone.” According to harbormaster Oudin, R.J. told him that Natalie would never take the dinghy alone when Oudin talked to R.J. on the Splendour at 2:30 that morning. R.J. told police that Natalie had balked getting into the dinghy on Friday night, even with himself and Walken beside her, “because she was afraid she would get wet.” Moreover, R.J. informed Rasure that Natalie was afraid of a night crossing Friday night aboard the Splendour—a 60—foot power boat-with three men on board.

  Since Natalie had never been known to take the dinghy by herself at night and she was terrified of dark water, why would R.J. wait almost two hours to alert someone after he noticed she was missing off the boat between eleven and midnight, or at least search for her himself?

  When R.J. used the ship’s radio at 1:30 A.M. to finally report that Natalie had disappeared off the Splendour, why would he tell Don Whiting, who picked up the call, that he thought she was at the bar, which was closed? Particularly since the harbormaster, Oudin, recalls R.J. and Davern mentioning to him, an hour later, that Natalie was in her nightgown? Walken told Sheriff’s investigators he thought he last remembered seeing Natalie in a terry-cloth robe.

  Walken’s, R.J.’s, and Davern’s statements suggest that Walken was sleeping in his cabin on and off. Where were Davern and R.J. between 11:00 P.M. and 11:25 P.M., when John Payne, Marilyn Wayne and Wayne’s son, Anthony, all heard a woman crying for help near the Splendour?

  When R.J. did radio for help at 1:30 A.M., after Natalie had been missing for at least an hour and a half, why did he request to keep the search “low-key,” restricting it to a few shore boats driven by a campgrounds maintenance man, the cook and the night host from the restaurant where they had dinner?

  Rasure, the lead investigator for the Sheriff’s Department, never clarified the three men’s activities on the boat from the time they said they noticed Natalie was missing—sometime before midnight—until 1:30 A.M. He acknowledges he did not even try to put together a timeline. “Well, no, I didn’t in my mind put any, or list anything. I just had to use the time that Walken and R.J. and Davern put it together.”

  With the vast quantities of alcohol consumed by R.J., Davern, and Walken throughout the twelve-hour binge of that bizarre afternoon into the middle of the night, it was conceivable, as John Ryan, who sat at the table beside them at the restaurant that night observed, “They were too whacked out” to respond to the situation.

  Since that devastating night in 1981, R.J.’s only public comments about the events of that weekend have been the November 30 press release issued by Ziffren, and his quotes, through a friend, that late December.

  Walken has rarely discussed Natalie’s death in the media in the twenty years since her drowning, “out of respect for the family.” He told reporter Barbara Howar, in 1983, “The entire experience was painful in so many ways, I’ll never forget it.” In 1997, he offered Playboy his only public version of the weekend: a brief, confusing account that peculiarly misstated the facts, including Walken’s incorrect memory that they were moored at Two Harbors both nights, and an odd, erroneous statement that there was a hotel next to Doug’s Harbor Reef where Natalie “called her kids” on Friday night, when in fact Natalie spent Friday night in an Avalon motel on the other side of the island.

  Walken offered his speculation of how Natalie drowned, telling Playboy he thought she was “probably half-asleep,” trying to “move” the dinghy, when she “slipped, hit her head, fell into the water… the boat floated away.” He said he “remembered distinctly that about 45 minutes after she had gone to bed, R.J. went down to her room, came right back and said, ‘Natalie’s not there.’ And then the Coast Guard was called.” Walken did not disclose that it was four hours before anyone called the Coast Guard.

  The “first assumption,” Walken told Playboy, was that Natalie had gone ashore to call her kids, saying this “was not far-fetched.” Why would Natalie, who was afraid to be in the dinghy alone, take the Valiant ashore without telling anyone at 11 P.M. to call her young children? Walken told the magazine his initial response to her disappearance from the boat was, “I hope everything’s OK. But then time passed.”

  Walken dodged a question from Playboy as to whether he and R.J. had an argument on the boat, responding, “The police thoroughly investigated the whole thing, everybody was questioned. If there had been anything wrong, certainly the police would have looked into it. The story I just told you is the absolute truth.”

  To Howar, Walken said simply, “[Natalie] drowned and nobody knows how she drowned or what happened, except her. Nobody will ever know.”

  One person who claims to know is the skipp
er, Dennis Davern, the wild card in the deck from that disturbing lost weekend in Catalina, who has talked publicly and has offered glimpses into the events of that night. Sheriff’s investigator Rasure considered Davern his “nemesis” from their first encounter, which occurred moments after Davern’s grim task of identifying Natalie’s body for R.J., who flew back to the mainland with Walken. “I didn’t like him. He was a slob, he was drunk, he wouldn’t answer my questions.”

  Rasure was suspicious of Davern in that first police interview, when Davern did not disclose that he and Natalie spent Friday night together in Avalon, and when Davern told the detective he needed to talk to R.J. or an attorney before discussing it. While he was answering questions, recalls Rasure, Davern was “kind of jumping [in time].” The skipper, in Rasure’s observation, was “kind of a mess.”

  A few weeks later, when Rasure took Davern’s second statement, lawyers hired by R.J. were representing him. “He would not talk to me alone anymore.” During his second police interview, Davern, per Rasure, was “always a bit evasive. I never really felt like he just, ‘la dee da dee da’ telling me like it was. I think that’s the way he is.”

  Davern eventually would tell Vanity Fair that he was withholding the truth from Rasure about what happened on the Splendour because he was a “virtual prisoner” at R.J.’s home in the first three months after Natalie drowned: drinking scotch with R.J., going to psychotherapy with him, “cry[ing] on each other’s shoulders,” feeling “he was a part of R.J., that [R.J.] was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K.” According to Davern’s friend Margaret (“Marti”) Rulli, prior to Natalie’s funeral, Davern was asked to sign a prepared statement as to what happened on the boat. “Everything was signed and wrapped up,” Rulli was told.

  From what Davern told Vanity Fair, R.J. warned him the F.B.I. would ask questions if he talked to reporters about that weekend. Davern told the magazine that R.J. arranged to get him bit parts in commercials and on Hart to Hart, occasionally giving him checks, which Davern said his friends told him was “hush money.” (R.J., through representatives, denies that he sought to influence Davern in any way.) Rasure, the sheriff’s investigator, reveals that Davern later told him that R.J. “held him under control for many months.”

  Davern surfaced publicly in a tabloid interview in the mid-1980s, “breaking his silence,” proclaimed the Star, to describe “what really happened the night Natalie died.” According to his friend Rulli, Davern “would go between ‘Yes, I want to tell, no I don’t’… at one point, when his funds were totally depleted, he decided, ‘Well, let’s talk to one of the tabloids.’ He had a few interviews with tabloids, a few he didn’t do.”

  Davern would tell essentially the same tale of that weekend in a series of paid interviews with tabloids from the mid-1980s, offering bits and pieces of the missing hours aboard the Splendour that last night, hinting there was more to come. The interviews were to draw attention to a book Davern hoped to publish in which he would disclose, for profit, the full details of Natalie’s last hours and his seven years as skipper for the Wagners, written with his childhood friend “Marti” Rulli.

  Davern gave a few subsequent interviews to tabloids throughout the 1990s and resurfaced in a spring 2000 British documentary about Natalie, recently offering his most revealing account of Natalie’s last night to Vanity Fair in March 2000.

  Davern’s media accounts all mentioned R.J.’s argument with Walken in the main salon, which Davern consistently claimed ended with R.J. smashing a wine bottle on the table, erupting at Walken, “What are you trying to do? Fuck my wife?” Natalie, according to Davern’s interviews, responded, “R.J., I won’t stand for this any longer!” and went to her stateroom. Davern recalled that Walken stepped outside the main salon, passing through a few minutes later, headed for his cabin.

  The skipper implied to reporters he knew more, releasing snippets of what happened after Natalie and Walken went to their staterooms. Davern’s basic story was that he and R.J. drank wine together on the bridge while Natalie and Walken were in their cabins, with R.J. eventually disappearing below deck. When R.J. came back to the bridge half an hour later, Davern said, R.J. told him that Natalie was missing.

  In these original tabloid versions, Davern stated that he and R.J. next searched the boat for Natalie; when they came back to the deck, they noticed the dinghy was gone. R.J. asked Davern not to start up the engine or turn on the floodlights to look for Natalie, and waited two hours before radioing for help, drinking continuously.

  Davern leaked out more of the story to tabloids as the years went on, first stating that R.J. was in Natalie’s cabin during the half hour Davern said he disappeared below deck; then adding the additional information that Natalie and R.J. were arguing while they were in the cabin, which Davern overheard, since the bridge was above their stateroom. Davern took the story a step further for Vanity Fair, saying that he could hear R.J. and Natalie “fighting like crazy… I’d never in a million years seen them fight like that before… you know, stuff getting thrown around.” In this most recent, more detailed version, Davern claimed the argument in the cabin between Natalie and R.J. was “so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit” of the Splendour.

  The next thing he heard, the skipper said, was “the dinghy being untied—you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on.” After what seemed a long time to Davern, R.J. returned to the bridge about 11:30 P.M., “tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind.”

  In Davern’s previous versions, this was when R.J. informed him that Natalie was missing. In the Vanity Fair account, Davern said he and R.J. continued to drink on the bridge until 1:30, when R.J. said he’d better check on Natalie, returning a few minutes later to say she was gone. In this version, only Davern went to look for Natalie, returning to the deck to notice the dinghy was gone. As in his previous accounts, Davern claimed that R.J. refused to let him turn on the boat’s lights or fire up the engines to look for Natalie, saying, “Let’s think about this. We don’t want to do anything, Dennis, because we don’t want to alert these people.”

  Davern suggested to Vanity Fair that he was still withholding crucial elements of the story—the mysterious period when R.J.’s “ferocious” argument with Natalie was taken up to the cockpit, when Davern heard the dinghy being untied and R.J. went through “a terrible fight” or “ordeal of some kind.”

  Marti Rulli, the skipper’s confidante, confirms that Davern has held back revealing the critical last moments when Natalie went off the Splendour, with Rulli hinting that the climax and its aftermath is a “bizarre” story. “He knows every single thing that happened that night… and he used to have nightmares and scream, scream out horrible things about this incident.” According to Rulli, Davern moved in with her and her husband for more than a year when he left R.J.’s house, going through “torture” over what happened to Natalie that night. “He had nightmares. I’ve witnessed these nightmares.”

  During one such period in 1992, Lana claims that she got a phone call from what she describes as a deeply intoxicated, clearly haunted Davern, indicating he needed to unburden to her how he claimed her sister really drowned that night off the Splendour. During this phone confessional with Lana, and several subsequent calls, Davern confided the climax to the story he has led up to in his interviews, but never revealed.

  “I’ve always known what the heck happened,” discloses Lana, who has kept silent about the skipper’s confession all these years, even in documentaries probing how Natalie drowned. “I’ve always felt that, for the better part of valor, I’ve always just said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s just—it was easier.” After twenty years since her sister’s death, Lana feels “it’s time.” She explains, “As much as some people would like to cover the truth, you just can’t. You can’t after a while… it’s not out of anger or anything else. It’s just out of, ‘It’s time.’”

  According to Lana, when she received the call f
rom the skipper, “Dennis was obviously drinking. Dennis was not a close friend, and I don’t know why he decided to call me, but it took him a really long time to spit everything out.”

  Davern’s drunken confessional over the telephone to Lana mirrored the account he subsequently gave Vanity Fair of a “fight” he overheard between Natalie and R.J. in their cabin, after Walken and Natalie had gone to their staterooms. According to Lana, the skipper said “they were a lot—very, very drunk, very drunk—and that Natalie had come back up on deck to continue the fight with R.J.”

  This is where Davern’s account to Vanity Fair ended, short of what Rulli implies is the skipper’s dark secret. Lana states that Davern revealed what happened next: that Natalie was in her nightclothes, on the deck, when Davern heard R.J. in a drunken argument with her. Shortly thereafter Davern first noticed that Natalie had gone overboard, but he did not actually see her tragic slip.

  From Lana’s account of the skipper’s confessional, Natalie was in the ocean alongside the boat, yelling, while R.J., who was still furious, and desperately drunk, continued the argument from on board the boat. “Dennis was very panicky. He was sitting, and would say, ‘Come on, let’s get her.’ And he said R.J. was in such a foul mood, at that point that Dennis then shut up.” Time slipped away, Davern told Lana, “until all the sound stopped.”

  When he and R.J., “beyond drunk,” went back to look for Natalie, she was missing, the skipper told Lana, “and that’s when everybody panicked.”

  What happened next remains a closely held secret of Davern’s, still leaving as an enigma part of those lost hours on the boat before R.J. radioed for help to find Natalie. “That’s all Dennis would ever say to me,” relates Lana. “I never got anything else out of him about that. There was a lot more times when he would call me and say how miserable he was, and he didn’t know if he could live with this, and on and on and on and on and on. And then later on I heard all about the book stuff that never went.”