Ethan Wayne, Friends Aid Victim : Woman Apparently Kidnaped, Dumped Over Cliff Above Bay

A 19-year-old woman who apparently had been kidnaped Sunday near her Costa Mesa home, tied up and dumped over a cliff in Upper Newport Bay was rescued Monday by Ethan Wayne, the 27-year-old son of late actor John Wayne, and two of Ethan’s friends.

The woman, who has not yet been identified, was unconscious and still partially bound when Wayne and two women companions found her lying about 100 feet from the water in a ravine near the cliffs of the Dover Shore area of Newport Beach. Wayne, a television actor who has a waterfront home on the Upper Bay, was piloting his boat when one of the women spotted what appeared to be a body on shore.

“It turned out to be a woman who had been dumped from the cliffs about 15 feet above where she came to rest,” Wayne said. “It’s a remote area; you can’t drive to those cliffs by car.”

Wayne called authorities from his boat telephone, and Newport Beach police and paramedics took the woman to nearby Hoag Hospital. Wayne said the woman suffered cuts and scratches and was groggy from drugs she said she was forced to take.

Police in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa released few details about the incident.

“Right now we have not been able to corroborate any facts in this investigation,” a Costa Mesa police spokesman said.

“I don’t have the woman’s identity,” said Newport Beach Police Officer Robert Oakley, a spokesman for that department. “She was found in a crevice. She was hurt and bruised from the fall. She said she was drugged, tied up and thrown over the cliff.”

The young woman told Wayne and his friends that three men pulled her into a car at about 4:30 p.m. as she was walking to her job at a convenience store in Costa Mesa, Wayne said.

Wayne and actresses Lisa Alder, 27, of Corona del Mar and Kim Whitaker, 27, of Los Angeles had left Wayne’s waterfront home in Newport Beach about 1 p.m. in his 27-foot inboard motorboat named Searcher.

“We were just going for a ride and a picnic,” Wayne said. “We’d gone out into the bay and about a half mile away from my dock. Lisa was looking at the shore and said she thought she saw a body.”

Alder said: “All I could see were two legs in blue jeans and white tennies. She was in a gully. So I told Ethan, ‘Circle the boat around,’ and we circled around and yelled trying to get the person’s attention because we thought it might be somebody who’d fallen asleep.”

Wayne said he took the boat ashore “and Lisa jumped out and climbed up to where the woman was. I called the Coast Guard, and they notified the Harbor Patrol and the police.”

Alder said the young woman was on her back and unconscious. “I patted her hand and she opened her eyes and started talking,” Alder said.

“She was sounding really groggy. She tried to sit up, but she said she was dizzy and laid back down. I checked the back of her head to see if she was bleeding, and she was not, but she had cuts and scrapes.”

Whitaker brought some water from the boat to the woman.

“She told us she had been going to work at a 7-Eleven store in Costa Mesa and that three men she didn’t know approached her,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker said the woman did not tell them her full name but gave a first name of Tracy and said she lived with her mother in Costa Mesa. The woman also was not clear about where the abduction took place, Whitaker said.

“There was a rope tied around her left wrist,” Alder said. “It looked like she had been tied together but had broken free.”

The woman “had no idea how long she had been lying there,” Alder said. “She had no concept of time when we talked with her.”

The woman was wearing a sweat shirt, Alder and Whitaker said, but the area she was lying in is windy and cold at night. Police and hospital authorities did not disclose the woman’s condition.

The site is north of the Coast Highway bridge over Newport Bay and west of Newport Dunes Aquatic Park.

Ethan Wayne is the son of John Wayne and his third wife, Pilar, who also lives in Newport Beach. He has been in several television productions, most recently including the daily television drama, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” in which he played the role of Storm Logan.

Staff writer Ann Conway and photographer Richard Koehler contributed to this story.