A top Hollywood private eye believes beloved screen siren Natalie Wood was drugged and pushed to her watery grave!
In another stunning revelation, the coroner who originally examined her body, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, suspected even then that poor drowned Natalie had been knocked out by an injection!
Former Chicago cop-turned-PI Paul Huebl has exclusively claimed to The National ENQUIRER that investigators have ignored a vital clue in the 33-year-old case: high levels of a powerful painkiller, propoxyphene, in the “West Side Story” star’s system.
The sensational claim has exploded the investigation into whether the 43-year-old actress was murdered by her abusive husband, Robert Wagner, on their yacht, “Splendour,” on Nov. 29, 1981.
Experts originally ignored the presence of the drug because they found a prescription for it among her effects after her body was found.
But Paul, who forensically reviewed Natalie’s autopsy report, told The ENQUIRER the amount of propoxyphene in her body was far higher than she would have been expected to voluntarily swallow.
“The reading was .07 mg, which was well over the therapeutic level,” Paul revealed. “She had also taken cyclizine, which is a motion sickness drug. And she had a blood-alcohol reading of .14, which is almost twice the legal limit for drunkenness.
“The drugs alone would have made her drowsy, but combined with the alcohol, which she had been ingesting all weekend, and her sleepy state, she would have been vulnerable to a surprise attack. It would have been more than sufficient for the perfect murder,” Paul charged.
“Splendour” Capt. Dennis Davern has said foul play was involved in Natalie’s death, and has directly implicated Wagner, saying the actor fought with Natalie just before she vanished.
Investigators reopened the case in 2011, and a year later changed Natalie’s cause of death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau Lt. John Corina told The ENQUIRER Wagner is not a suspect in the case, but is classified as a “person of interest.”
Wagner has long maintained he did not fight with his wife and did not kill her.
Confirming Paul’s findings, celebrity funeral home worker Allan Abbott has told The ENQUIRER Dr. Noguchi made ugly incisions on Natalie’s body during the autopsy, trying to determine if her bruising was caused by injections.
“She was embalmed by the funeral director, Bill Pierce,” Allan said. “They had an open casket, and he told me on the day of the funeral that they had to put her in the silver fox coat to cover up all the butchering [from] looking for injection points.
What’s more, “the bruises were all fresh bruises, indicating that they occurred at or near time of death — and not after she entered the water,” world-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Bill Manion told The ENQUIRER after analyzing Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy report.
“Dr. Noguchi did a very careful autopsy, and I believe he looked for injection sites and took the skin to see how old or fresh the bruises were, which indicates to me that he was suspicious.”
