Sam Perroni remembers the first time he met actress Natalie Wood.

They were together in The Normal Theater in downtown Normal.

It was 1961.

He was 13.

Wood was up on the movie screen, opposite Hollywood newcomer Warren Beatty, and Sam was back in the seats with a bag of popcorn.

“I fell in love with her in ‘Splendor In The Grass,’” says Perroni, with a warm smile.

Wood, of course, died in 1981, a mysterious, never-fully-explained, middle-of-the-night drowning death off California’s Catalina Island that involved some of Hollywood’s biggest names – most notably, Wood’s husband, actor Robert (“Hart-To-Hart”) Wagner and fellow actor Christopher (“More cowbell!”) Walken, with whom Wood also had been romantically linked. They were all together on a boat that night when Wood, who couldn’t swim and was deathly afraid of nighttime water, fell off of it into the Pacific.

Perroni in the meantime -- the movie-loving 13-year-old who’d grow to 6-feet-8, be a Normal Community High School basketball star and then an Illinois Wesleyan University graduate -- would in time become a highly accomplished trial lawyer and federal prosecutor in Arkansas.

“A tireless tiger in the courtroom” is how one man once described Perroni.

That was Bill Clinton, Arkansas’ governor who appointed him before Clinton moved up to an even bigger job.

And so it was, until a few years ago.

That’s when Perroni, retired as a prosecutor, was reading of the latest development in the Wood drowning, now a cold case of so many years it was all but frozen.

In an odd, curious twist, her death suddenly had been re-classified from “accidental drowning” to “drowning, and other undetermined factors,” later also identifying her husband Robert Wagner as “a person of interest.”

But then nothing more evolved in the case.

Perroni was piqued.

Today, six years later, after a meticulous and exhaustive probe of his own, forming his own investigative team and all on his own dime, crossing the country countless times, analyzing records, revealing new evidence, re-interviewing witnesses and filing three lawsuits in Los Angeles County for access to more information, the result is now on bookshelves.

“Brainstorm: An Investigation of the Mysterious Death of Film Star Natalie Wood,” is the name of Perroni’s book.

It’s a long way from The Normal Theater. But then again, not.

“Things just didn’t add up. The ‘re-opening’ without any resolve all just seemed very fishy,” says Perroni, back in town this month to see old friends, classmates and sign books for the dozens who lined on a cold winter’s day to get one. “I’ve just always wanted to find the true cause of Natalie’s death, who was behind it ... and offer a measure of truth craved by me and so many of Natalie’s fans.”

Simply pursuing “truth” and putting together the book could unto itself be a great Hollywood movie.

The L.A. sheriff’s department slammed doors.

Files were askew.

Wagner and Walken, both powerfully connected in Hollywood, and all of their attorneys, ignored all calls for a more documented explanation of that night.

As the Little Rock-based Arkansas Democrat & Gazette, the state’s leading newspaper, later put it, “Perroni’s endless digging took him down sinuous paths … through Hollywood royalty, L.A. County law enforcement, the coroner’s office, even ties to the Mob.”

The initial idea for a book – and a stroke of genius for an accomplished prosecutor to author – was to amass all the evidence and statements gathered over 40 years through police investigations, depositions and testimonies, do further interviews, unveil additional information and seek better explanations to autopsy photos that showed multiple unexplained bruises on Wood’s body (in what was allegedly only a drowning), put it all together and present it all in the form of a “fictional” trial.

But publishers rebuffed. Too monetarily dangerous. Too potentially libelous without an actual trial having ever occurred and no charges ever filed.

So Perroni went back and wrote a second manuscript, then a third.

Of the team Perroni formed for the investigation, one was Jan Morris, of Bloomington, a high school pal of Perroni who volunteered “to help out” … and, oh, what a ride of a lifetime.

Morris traveled the country over 2 1/2 years, one day having lunch off Catalina Island with the man (now 90) who discovered Wood’s body in the Pacific, to another afternoon with Wood’s sister, Lana, (who has always believed the death was “much more” than a simple drowning), to another trip to Durham/Raleigh, North Carolina, to interview those who were around back when Wood and Walken made the movie “Brainstorm,” just before Wood’s drowning.

“I took along a friend on that trip,” says Morris. “I don’t know if I’d felt safe if I’d have gone alone.”

For Perroni, one of the more humorous moments of the five years coincidentally came in downtown Bloomington, at a book signing a couple weeks ago. That’s when, while sitting at a table in the lobby of the Monroe Centre signing copies, he looked up to see a face from long ago, Miss Henricks -- that’s Kay Henricks -- his former high school English teacher who‘d come to get her own signed copy and, while highly complimentary of Perroni, also said she “never dreamed he’d ever become a writer.”

“I instantly apologized to her!” muses Perroni. “I said I was sorry for all the times I didn’t hand in homework or was a goof-off in class.”

And so it goes for Peroni, as all these years later his own life comes full circle, too.

The book, filled with photos, evidentiary documents and crime-scene drawings, is a compelling read, especially for “who-dun-it?” fans, with the last chapter being a summation – an excoriating closing argument that fully points fingers at Wagner – but in objectivity also ends with Perroni writing, as if he was addressing a jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, now it’s time for you to decide ...”

For Perroni, who grew up on Bloomington’s west side near the rail tracks, it’s all about lifelong passions – first for Wood, and then for what he says he’s always harbored from a bit of a hardscrabble childhood – a strong belief in finding truth. That also led to his career.

Thus, any profits from the book, he says, will go to Natalie Wood memorials.

One thing is for certain – 60 years later, it’s a long way from a pleasant afternoon at the Normal Theater and 124 minutes of any “splendor in the grass.”

That movie, an Oscar winner, had a Hollywood ending.

Perroni’s latest life adventure is, coincidentally, fully on Hollywood. But this story has anything but a pleasant Hollywood ending.

Bill Flick is at flick@a5.com.