Close friends of Hollywood star Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa have revealed details about the couple’s final weeks before their mummified bodies were discovered.
Hackman and Arakawa’s remains were found by a caretaker in their $3.8million Santa Fe home on Wednesday February 26.
The famous couple are believed to have been dead for almost two weeks and local police remain baffled by the incident with an official cause of death yet to be announced.
Known for being notoriously reclusive, no red flags were raised by family and friends before the worker made his grisly discovery.
Speaking to the New York Post, longtime friends of the couple revealed that it wasn’t uncommon for Hackman and his wife to go radio silent for extended periods of time.
Author Daniel Lenihan, 79, said it had been ‘years’ since he last saw the French Connection and his wife Barbare Lenihan – who also owned a home decor store with Arakawa – said she last saw Hackman about a year ago.
The 75-year-old had not seen Arakawa since earlier this year but had communicated over email in recent weeks.
‘People loved to be around them,’ she said. ‘We used to spend a lot of time at their house but it’d been a while since they were comfortable having others over.’
Mrs Lenihan added that the couple had become more ‘insular’ in recent years and it had become tougher to have people around at their mansion.
However their sudden death has still come as a shock to her which has left her ‘deeply saddened’.
Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said it had so far proven to be a ‘challenge’ to determine the events that lead up to the pair’s final moments almost a week after their bodies were discovered.
The last signal from the 95-year-old Oscar-winning actor’s pacemaker was from February 17 according to a pathologist, Sheriff Mendoza told a press conference.
‘It is a good assumption that was his last day of life,’ He told reporters.
Sheriff Mendoza said tests on Hackman and Arakawa, 64, for carbon monoxide poisoning proved negative.
He said it was not clear who died first after the two were discovered dead in separate rooms on Wednesday.
The sheriff again ruled out foul play.
The caretaker at their gated community discovered the couple and one of their dogs dead on Wednesday when he looked into the home through a window, according to his call to emergency services.
Sheriff’s deputies found Hackman in the kitchen. Arakawa and their dog were found in a bathroom, with scattered pills from an open prescription bottle on the bathroom counter.
Both appeared to have suddenly fallen to the floor and neither showed signs of blunt force trauma.
One door was found ajar at the back of the house. Two of the couple’s surviving dogs had used it to move in and out of the house, Sheriff Mendoza said.
He added that a toxicology report on pills in the bathroom and other medications in the house had been ordered calling it ‘something of concern.’
‘That’s obviously very important evidence at the scene,’ Sheriff Mendoza told NBC News, adding that the report could take three months or longer.
One theory put forward by a former FBI agent is that the couple could have died from food poisoning.
‘Toxicology – there could have been some other type of poisoning, possibly food? They’ll go through their trash, fridge … this is stuff the police can do in the meantime while gathering evidence,’ former FBI agent Bill Daly told Fox News.
‘There are a number of possibilities.’
Hackman, a former Marine known for his raspy voice, appeared in more than 80 films, as well as on television and the stage during a lengthy career that started in the early 1960s.
He earned his first Oscar nomination for his breakout role as the brother of bank robber Clyde Barrow in 1967’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’
He then won an Oscar for best actor in 1972 for his portrayal of detective Popeye Doyle in ‘The French Connection,’ and in 1993 won an Oscar for best supporting actor for ‘Unforgiven.’
The couple had lived in Santa Fe since the 1980s and were active in the city’s art community and culinary scene.
In recent years, Hackman and his pianist wife were seen less often in town as his health deteriorated.
The couple were also known for their love of dogs who they reportedly ‘treated like their children’.
‘Gene was what I would call a confirmed German Shepherd aficionado. I could not imagine him without a Shepherd,’ Steff Smith, the founder of the Southwest German Shepherd Society in Phoenix, Arizona told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
‘He was also a major softy. I recall him shedding tears upon meeting the first dog he adopted from us.’
Hackman and Arakawa ended up adopting two dogs from the shelter in the early 2000s and remained longtime supporters and friends of the non-profit, according to Ms Smith.
Ms Smith first met the couple in 2005, when they were looking for a new friend for Hackman’s German Shepherd, Duke, who the actor famously adopted as a stray while he was filming The Replacements in 1999.
Ms Smith arranged for a meet-up at a park in order to assess Duke’s interaction with Maisie, a young female German Shepherd, who quickly became a member of the Hackman family.
