A haunting coda: The 7 days Gene Hackman’s wife could no longer care for him

SANTA FE, New Mexico – Before Gene Hackman, 95, faded from public view in his adopted home town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the locals would see the ageing movie star on the golf course, in his truck or walking his beloved dogs in the enchanted western American city, amid the mesquite, juniper and pinyon pine.

His wife Betsy Arakawa was often alongside him. There was much about his life that she managed. She set up the golf games with his friends. She policed his diet, given the heart trouble that had dogged him for decades. She diluted his wine with soda water. She typed and edited the novels he wrote by hand.

She also apparently took on the role of sole caregiver as he endured the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Thirty years his junior, she must have planned to see him to his end, in their home.

And so it was all the more jarring on March 7, when the authorities in New Mexico revealed more dark turns in the mystery of how the couple died in February in their four-bedroom house, hidden by trees at the end of a luxurious cul-de-sac east of the city.

Officials said the couple died of natural causes,

he of heart disease and she of a rare viral infection. But it was Arakawa – the caregiver, lover and protector – who died first, perhaps on Feb 11, leaving Hackman, with advanced Alzheimer’s, alone in the house for days. He is believed to have died a week later, on Feb 18.

Their decomposing bodies were not discovered for yet another eight days, when a maintenance worker called a security guard to the house after no one came to the door. Emergency workers found Arakawa, 65, on the floor of a bathroom near a medicine bottle and spilt pills. Zinna, one of their three dogs, was dead in a crate in a closet. The body of Hackman was discovered in a mud room, with slippers and a cane.

New Mexico’s chief medical examiner said on March 7 that Alzheimer’s was a contributing factor in Hackman’s death. Arakawa died of hantavirus, which is contracted through exposure to excrement from rodents, often the deer mouse in New Mexico.

The exact details of what happened in the house over the course of that week may never be known. Friends and neighbours said the couple had increasingly receded into the private confines of their hillside house since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the timeline presented on March 7 raises the terrifying possibility that Hackman, a US Marine veteran and actor of consummate precision and control, had spent days in the presence of his fallen wife, too disoriented or feeble to call for help – trapped in the home that had been his reward for a life toiling in the limelight.

Hackman was drawn to Santa Fe in the late 1980s, shortly after his divorce from his first wife Faye Maltese. He had already earned a Best Actor Oscar for his starring role in the action thriller, The French Connection (1971). Another Oscar, as a supporting actor in the western, Unforgiven (1992), would come later.

His father, who abandoned the family when Hackman was 13, was a pressman for the local newspaper. His mother was a waitress.

The Oscar-winning actor had a bohemian streak, however, and he liked Santa Fe’s stunning natural landscape and the artists the landscape inspired. He would become one of them, spending much of the second half of his life painting, sculpting and writing fiction in Santa Fe, far from the trophy homes of Beverly Hills, California, that many celebrities of his calibre inhabit.

Arakawa was a classical pianist, born in Hawaii. She met Hackman in Los Angeles at a fitness centre where she had a part-time job. He had forgotten his entry card, and she refused to let him in, according to Mr Rodney Hatfield, a friend. They married in 1991. Friends said the relationship seemed natural, despite the age difference.

“That part never came to mind because they seemed equal in so many ways,” said a friend, Ms Susan Contreras. “She was a personality unto herself.”

The life they settled into in Santa Fe was both charmed and strikingly normal. Architectural Digest featured an earlier hilltop house they owned outside town, built to their specifications in an elegant south-western style.

Hackman joined the board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, one of the city’s storied cultural gems. They invested in a restaurant, Jinja, which displayed Hackman’s paintings and named a house mai tai cocktail in his honour.

But others remembered a man who often seemed to fit the mould of the everyman he so often played on-screen. Ms Helen Dufreche, a former neighbour, recalled meeting Hackman for the first time about a decade ago. He was wearing a baseball cap and had pulled up alongside her in a truck to compliment her dachshunds.

“What cute puppies,” he said.

Mr Tom Allin, a long-time friend of Hackman’s, said Arakawa had always served as something of a gatekeeper for her famous husband.

Over a 20-year friendship with Hackman, Mr Allin never recalled speaking to him over the phone or e-mailing him. He would always set up golf games or visits through Arakawa. Uninterested in technology, Hackman did not have a cellphone that Mr Allin knew about.

“She was very protective of him,” Mr Allin said, adding that Hackman seemed happy to have his wife run things.

He recalled Hackman saying he would have been dead long ago without his wife taking care of him and ensuring he ate healthily.

In January 2020, just before the pandemic, Mr Allin said he saw his friend for his 90th birthday in Islamorada, Florida. He recalls Arakawa mixing soda water into his wine. “She really looked after him,” he said.

He also said he could sense that Hackman was declining. The couple had a tradition that Hackman would cook dinner each year for Arakawa’s birthday. In 2023, she came home expecting a meal, Mr Allin recalled, but Hackman had forgotten their ritual.

Like many older Americans, Hackman retreated indoors during the Covid-19 crisis to stay safe. In recent years, neighbours in Santa Fe Summit, the gated community where the couple lived, said they had seen no sign of the couple, except for their trash cans on the side of the road, waiting to be picked up.

During the news conference on March 7, Sheriff Adan Mendoza of Santa Fe County said investigators had determined that on Feb 9, Arakawa had picked up Zinna from a veterinarian after the dog underwent a procedure, which could explain why Zinna was being kept in a crate.

On Feb 11, perhaps hours before she died, Arakawa e-mailed her massage therapist in the morning and then went to a grocery store in the afternoon. She was also captured on surveillance video making a brief stop at a pharmacy.

Sheriff Mendoza said he believed she wore a mask that day while in public, which she often did to avoid bringing any illnesses back to her husband, friends said.

Arakawa stopped by a local pet food store later that afternoon and then returned to her neighbourhood, he added. She did not respond to any e-mails after that day.

Asked whether the couple had anyone taking care of Hackman, Sheriff Mendoza said: “At this point, there’s no indication that there was a caretaker at the home.”

Mr James Everett, who lived part-time in the neighbourhood for about five years, said in an interview last week that he found it unusual that the couple did not have any caretakers, given Hackman’s age.

“I know when my dad was 95, 96, 97, 98, we had a live-in cook and maid for him,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t have them.”

Another neighbour, Mr Robert Cecil, wondered whether the couple’s desire for privacy was, in the end, a “weakness” that contributed to the horror that befell them.

Mr Hatfield, Hackman’s long-time friend, said Hackman loved Santa Fe because it allowed him to live a life that was not always that of a star. “I know that Gene did not like the role of celebrity,” he said. “It was pretty obvious.”

Another friend, Mr Stuart Ashman, said solitude was often the goal for people who moved to Santa Fe. “People come here as a way to hide out,” he said. “They certainly did.” NYTIMES