Investigators are having a hard time nailing down the timeline of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa‘s deaths, as the couple could have died anywhere from “several days” to “a couple of weeks.”
“It’s very difficult to put a timeline together even with the help of the office of the medical investigator,” Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said on the “Today” show Friday.
“Just based on their body and other evidence on the body, it looked — it appears [that they were deceased for] several days, even up to a couple of weeks.”
Mendoza noted there was “no indication that anybody was moving” throughout the house, so it’s “very hard to determine if they both passed at the same time or how close they passed together.”
Hackman, Arakawa and one of their dogs were found dead inside their New Mexico home on Wednesday. He was 95 and she was 64.
A search warrant obtained by TMZ showed that Arakawa was on the ground with pills scattered in a nearby countertop. Gene, meanwhile, was in another room near the kitchen. He appeared to have fallen.
Board Certified Forensic Pathologist Priya Banerjee tells Page Six exclusively there it is too early to determine a cause of death, as there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to consider.
“The medical examiner doesn’t have this universal authority. The medical examiner can investigate the scene in conjunction with the body but the body is all we have. The rest of it, like, talking to neighbors, looking at evidence, that’s a police job,” she says. “It’s all in parallel.”
However, Mendoza told “Today,” “I think the autopsy report is going to be key to this investigator.”
Arakawa’s body, in particular, was found in a state of decomposition with “mummification in her hands and feet” and “bloating in her face.”
Dr. Banerjee tells Page Six that the temperature of the house could have been a factor in how fast her body decomposed, noting that New Mexico has very dry, desert-like weather.
Hackman and Arakawa’s family previously suspected their loved one’s causes of death to be carbon monoxide poisoning, but the search warrant showed the fire department and a gas company found no evidence of a carbon monoxide leak.
Santa Fe Fire Chief Brian Moya told “Today” Friday, “That was a home with natural gas in it, so it could have [played a factor in their deaths].
“There’s a lot of unanswered [questions] there,” he then pointed out.
“When we arrived, we made sure our people as well as the sheriff were safe, and there was nothing that we found. We also went back again yesterday to do another round of searches … and we didn’t find anything as well.”
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