Witnesses Heard Woman Screaming For Help As Natalie Wood Was Drowning, Search Began Over an Hour Later

Sometime around midnight on November 29, 1981, Natalie Wood fell off of her yacht, the Splendour, and into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean off of Catalina Island.

And at least two witnesses may have heard the West Side Story actress crying for help as she drowned to death, according to police records newly obtained by the National Enquirer.

John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, were aboard the Capricorn, which was moored near the Splendour.

Payne told police the next day that “at approximately midnight he heard a woman yelling, ‘Help me, someone please help me.’”

According to the report, “He said this voice was coming from the direction near the stern of the Splendour” but assumed because another nearby boat was having a loud party, he assumed it was just someone “playing around.”

He then heard “a man’s voice coming from the direction of the boat which was having the loud party, yelling in a mocking voice, ‘OK honey, we’ll get you.’ He added that his voice sounded drunk.”

He asked his girlfriend what they should do, the report reads. “She advised John that they should call the Coast Guard, however he did not want to go out there because they thought the woman was from a drunken party,” Wayne told cops. “She said that John made the statement that the woman sounded drunk but she said the woman sounded more hysterical.”

In the end, they called the harbor master, Wayne later claimed in a 2011 statement to police, but did not get a response, per The Hollywood Reporter. However, Curt Craig, who was on duty at the Harbor Patrol office that night, did tell police he got a report from the Capricorn.

Around the same time, Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner, and the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, had noticed she was missing. After a search on the boat, they told cops, the increasingly worried Hart to Hart star used the boat’s radio to ask for help on an emergency channel at around 1:30 a.m.

Don Whiting, manager of the Doug’s Harbor Reef Restaurant, responded to the call, and Wagner asked him to check if Wood had returned to the restaurant. When they realized she hadn’t, the search began in earnest.

By then, it was too late. The Splendor in the Grass star — wearing a flannel nightgown and puffer jacket — was eventually found floating face down near a cove off of the island at around 8 a.m.. A medical examiner determined she died shortly after going into the water at around midnight. She was just 43.

Wagner, now 95, has said he believes his wife slipped and fell. He’s always denied any wrongdoing and was cleared by investigators in 2022. The case remains open.

For more on the mystery, pick up this week’s issue of the National Enquirer, on stands Wednesday, December 10.