The public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had “superficial skin bruises” on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood’s apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden’s longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner’s then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden’s drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor’s privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant’s side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy’s side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, “What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn’t so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night.”

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a “psychological autopsy” to find out why Wood “felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night.” However, when the report “on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood” came in, Noguchi “decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call ‘gory’ and ‘sensational.’ The report did not alter the official coroner’s conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over ‘too many details,’ I reluctantly filed away that report.”

Noguchi’s discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

In his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—“Wasn’t it strange that the two men on the yacht didn’t even know that she had left the boat? Hadn’t she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stern of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?” and also “When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn’t she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily”—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yarn about Wood’s clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.