Has Robert Wagner told police everything he knows about Natalie Wood’s tragic death? In a blockbuster world exclusive, a top lie detection expert told The National ENQUIRER he believes that Wagner may not have been entirely truthful during interviews and engineered a three-decades-long cover-up about the mysterious drowning of the screen siren.
Famed lie detection expert Michael Sylvestre used a special truth-detecting device to scrutinize a series of confessions made by the "Hart to Hart" star about his role in his wife’s grisly death off Catalina Island, Calif., in 1981.
Sylvestre, a certified voice-stress analyst, fed tapes of Wagner’s confessions about what happened that fateful night into the DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis Machine — a computerized version of the famed Psychological Stress Evaluation.
The tool, used by more than 50 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. and others overseas, detects stress changes that indicate truthfulness, which show up as waves on the report.
The newest high-tech test is also said to be superior to a conventional polygraph, and is renowned for providing impressive results.
After completing his analysis of two separate interviews, Sylvestre said he believes Wagner may have fudged the truth about Natalie's death "over and over again.”
“His test results are riddled with stress,” Sylvestre told The ENQUIRER, suggesting that he may have been trying “to cover up something."
The materials for the analysis came from two interviews by the Hollywood megastar.
Sylvestre first analyzed an interview Wagner did with Internet radio show “Growing Bolder” in late 2009 to promote his memoir, "Pieces of My Heart." Referring to his wife’s tragic and violent death, the actor declared, “It was, uh, an accident that happened.”
Sylvestre noted, “On the word ‘uh’ his stress level is almost off the charts.”
Wagner also said, “She slipped on the [swim] step of the boat.”
Sylvestre said, “There’s a lot of stress in the word ‘slipped,’ and that [likely] means the whole statement is false. [That] she didn’t slip, something untoward happened.”
At another point, Wagner said, “See, none of us ever heard anything. If we had heard something we would have done something.”
Sylvestre noted, “There are multiple peaks, especially in the word ‘none.'"
Sylvestre told The ENQUIRER he believes, "He definitely heard something.”
A managing partner at Truth & Deception Technologies in Kissimmee, Fla., Sylvestre also said he detected evidence of potential lies in a tape of Wagner’s Sept. 2008 interview with his book’s publisher.
The actor, now 85, maintained that he’d written his memoir as “straightforwardly and honestly and as truthfully as I remembered it.”
But Sylvestre said, “Once again, there’s a lot of stress," which calls into question Wagner's account, he believes.
In another section of the interview, Wagner spoke about dating his current wife, Jill St. John, after Natalie s death.
Sylvestre charged: “When he said they ‘started going out’ there’s a lot of stress in that statement. You would expect him to be pretty calm here. Something isn’t right.”
“This could indicate that he may have been seeing her beforehand and that they were in a relationship,” added Sylvestre.
When quizzed if he “never doubted that Natalie was his soulmate,” Wagner responded, “That’s true. I think that it’s true.”
But, countered Sylvestre, “In my opinion this was not a tremendous love.”
Homicide detectives could use the reports obtained by The ENQUIRER to finally force Wagner to provide a “full confession,” according to a source close to the case. And new information could help uncover, for the first time, what really caused Natalie to plunge to her death from the deck of the couple’s yacht on that fateful Nov. 1981 night.
“A seasoned detective could confront him by saying, ‘You were there that night! You know what happened, and you have to live with it until the day you die. You can free yourself from this nightmare!’” said Bo Dietl, a former NYPD homicide detective.
As The ENQUIRER reported, Natalie’s death was initially classified as an accident but investigators reopened the probe in 2011. A year later, the Medical Examiner’s Officer changed the official cause of death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
Concluded Sylvestre: “Robert Wagner’s goose may be cooked.”
