Trying to make sense of all the new information in the Natalie Wood case? Good luck with that, because so far there hasn't been any. The Los Angeles Times assesses the hoopla: The boat captain gave no details to back up his assertion that Wood widower Robert Wagner was somehow responsible, and the only nugget of news to emerge from the LAPD news conference yesterday is that Wagner is not a suspect. Says an insider in the Sheriff's Department: "Whatever happens, it is unlikely to change the outcome of the original investigation so many decades after the death." (That would be accidental drowning.)
A journalism professor at New School University agrees. "There's nothing new here," she says. "It appears that law enforcement is following media, not the other way around." Natalie's sister, Lana, again dropped veiled suggestions about Wagner last night on CNN, notes AP—"I would prefer to always believe that RJ (Wagner) would never do anything to hurt Natalie and that he loved her dearly, which he did, and I don't believe that whatever went on was deliberate"—but she has said such things before in her push to have the case reopened. In other developments, the AP got duped by a Christopher Walken impersonator, and the Hawaii man who now owns the boat says investigators plan to visit, notes the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. (More Natalie Wood stories.)