The deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa, described as “suspicious” by police, are a mystery . When two maintenance workers found the bodies yesterday afternoon, the Hollywood legend and his wife had been dead for some time .
He is in a room of the Santa Fe villa near the kitchen, she is in the bathroom, lying on the floor among the pills that fell from an open medicine bottle on the counter .
A mystery, in short, a case "suspicious enough" to deserve further investigation . With the star of French Connection and Mississippi Burning , one of the family's three German shepherds was found dead in a bathroom closet . Another was running in the garden, the third was a bodyguard for Betsy Arakawa, a talented pianist.
"The autopsy will tell us more," Sheriff Adan Mendoza told the New York Times, speaking of an "untypical" situation. Roland Lowe Begay and Jesse Kesler, the family's two collaborators, who had not seen them for two weeks, had found the front door open with no signs that it had been forced open.
Betsy, 63, “must have been dead for some time because her body was already decomposing, her hands and feet mummified ,” the police report reads. Hackman, 95, was found in a similar condition in a bedroom off the kitchen, with his cane and a pair of sunglasses next to him.
According to the police, there were no obvious signs of a gas leak as alleged by Elizabeth Hackman, one of Gene's three children with his first wife Fay Maltese, but the local gas company is assisting in the investigation. No trauma was found on the bodies, nor a note that could suggest a double suicide .
The character
Two Oscars (for The French Connection and Unforgiven ), four Golden Globes, two Baftas, but also five adventure novels, four of which after he stopped acting in 2004 for health reasons, Hackman was considered by many to be Spencer Tracy's heir for having given a voice and face to the man on the street but also for having been an actor par excellence, gruff and reluctant to accept fame .
