Arakawa, already dead, was splayed on a bathroom floor of the Santa Fe home she shared with Hackman, who didn’t make any calls or otherwise ask for help for the seven days he outlived his wife.
SANTA FE, N.M. – One of the last times anyone saw Betsy Arakawa in public, she was strolling through the aisles of a CVS Pharmacy in Santa Fe, her face covered by a mask, likely because of the virus ravaging her lungs.
Within hours, she was dead.
Security cameras captured Arakawa’s image during her visit to the pharmacy on Feb. 11, the last day she is believed to have been alive. The longtime wife and main caregiver of actor Gene Hackman, Arakawa had busied herself with errands that day: sending an email, stopping at the pharmacy, doing some grocery shopping.
Most notable was what she didn’t do. She failed to swing by Gruda Veterinary Hospital in southwest Santa Fe to pick up the prescription dog food and medication she had ordered for one of her three dogs, Zinna, Bear and Nikita.
Arakawa had been taking her dogs to that vet for years and never once missed a food or meds pickup. The following week, sometime after Feb. 17, Gruda’s staff tried calling Arakawa on her cellphone to remind her the food was ready. No one picked up.
“She was devoted to those dogs,” Robert Gruda, the hospital’s owner, told USA TODAY in an interview. “She was consistent, predictable. We knew something was wrong when she didn’t pick up the food on time.”
Unbeknownst to Gruda and his staff, Arakawa, 65, was already dead, splayed on a bathroom floor of the Santa Fe home she shared with Hackman, seized by a rare but potentially lethal disease spread by rodents.
Death timeline of Gene Hackman, wife
Gene Hackman and his wife died a week apart and from entirely different causes. No foul play is suspected in the deaths.
Hackman, 95, racked by advanced Alzheimer’s disease, lived another week after his wife died, then died in a mudroom on the other side of the house, a cane and sunglasses nearby. What exactly did Hackman do during that time? Did he even know his wife was dead? Was he aware that one of the couple’s dogs, Zinna, a 12-year-old Australian Kelpie mix, had also died while locked in a crate in the home?
News of the couple’s twin deaths has rattled and baffled the Santa Fe community, where they were at once pillars and reclusive. On Friday, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza and other officials held a news conference to reveal details on the causes and dates of their deaths.
Yet, more questions remain. How and why, for example, did Arakawa, by all accounts a youthful, energetic woman, contract the hantavirus and die so suddenly?
“I’m more confused and really devastated even more,” Santa Fe restaurateur Doug Lanham, a close friend of the couple and Hackman’s former business partner, said after the news conference. “How do you connect all these dots?”
‘An excellent dog owner, excellent caretaker’
Arakawa began bringing her dogs to the Gruda Veterinary Hospital several years ago and quickly became a favorite at the animal hospital. She reliably brought the dogs to appointments and chatted with staff and Gruda. She regularly called Zinna by her full name, Zinfandel, and confided to Gruda that she was named after Hackman’s favorite wine varietal.
“She was an excellent dog owner, excellent caretaker to those dogs,” he said. “She really doted on them.”
One of the last times the hospital staff saw Arakawa was in late January, when she came in to pick up Zinna, who had had “major surgery,” Gruda said. She was her typical, alert self, he said.
The staff instructed her to confine Zinna to a crate, to keep her from running around and undoing the effects of the surgery, Gruda said.
“She was friendly, dutiful,” he said of Arakawa. “That’s how we make a living, with owners that care for their animals and see us consistently.”
Timeline: The deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife: What we know
By this time, even the couple’s closest friends were seeing them less and less around town. Lanham, who used to golf regularly with Hackman and dine with the couple, hadn’t seen them in more than five years.
A few weeks after picking up Zinna from the hospital, on Feb. 11, Arakawa began her day by exchanging emails with a massage therapist around 11:21 a.m., according to Mendoza, the sheriff. She later shopped at a Sprouts Farmer Market grocery store between 3:30 and 4:15 p.m., then visited a CVS Pharmacy. Surveillance footage showed her wearing a mask, he said.
Arakawa returned home around 5:15 p.m. and used a remote to open the gate at Santa Fe Summit, the gated community in the foothills just outside of Santa Fe where the couple had lived for decades.
She made it inside the sprawling, 9,000-square-foot home. But by now, the hantavirus was clawing its way into her lungs. Her hours were numbered.
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A rare but deadly rodent disease
First discovered in 1993, the hantavirus began spreading from the Southwest to across the U.S. Humans contract it by breathing in aerosolized urine, feces or saliva from a rodent – in New Mexico, the tiny deer mouse is usually the culprit.
Cases are rare. As of 2024, New Mexico had seen only 136 infections over the past 50 years, with just five of those in Santa Fe County, according to Erin Phipps, the state public health veterinarian. Dogs don’t get the disease, and the strain found in the U.S. can’t spread from human to human, she said.
Symptoms are akin to getting the flu: body aches, fever, abdominal pain. But the disease could quickly turn deadly. After incubation the virus for anywhere from three to four weeks and up to eight weeks, an infected person’s lungs will begin to fill with fluids that escape through capillaries, triggering coughing and shortness of breath, said Greg Mertz, professor emeritus of internal medicine and former chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of New Mexico.
Hantavirus has a staggering mortality rate of between 35% and 50%, according to health officials.
“Unfortunately, it could progress to cardiogenic shock over a period of a few hours,” he said. “Even in a hospital, most deaths occur within the first day.”
During cardiogenic shock, the heart stops pumping adequate blood supply to the organs. Blood pressure plummets and the patient lapses into cardiac arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat. From there, it’s very difficult to save an infected person, Mertz said.
The virus is difficult to detect, as many of the symptoms are akin to the flu, he said. There is no medicine to combat it and, once it spreads, it’s hard to stop it from overwhelming the body.
Mertz said he was treating a patient once with hantavirus at University of New Mexico Hospital. The patient was sitting on a hospital bed and began complaining about feeling ill. Their blood pressure dropped and they went into shock, he said. Within 20 minutes, the patient was dead.
“It’s a pretty horrific progression,” Mertz said. “There aren’t a lot of diseases with higher mortality rates.”
Deadly disease: Gene Hackman’s wife died from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. What to know about disease
‘Come over here! Come over here!’
Around 1:43 p.m. on Feb. 26, a maintenance man who had done work on the Hackman home for years visited the property and found the front door ajar. He peeked through a window and saw Arakawa lying on the floor. He then notified another maintenance man who works for the subdivision, who called 9-1-1.
Paramedics with the Santa Fe Fire Department arrived at the scene, pushed open the front door and saw Arakawa lying on the nearby bathroom floor, Chief Brian Moya said. She looked deceased, so they retreated back outside and radioed the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office for backup, as per protocol.
Backed by several sheriff’s deputies, the two paramedics and three other Santa Fe firefighters inspected Arakawa’s body, which had noticeable signs of decomposition. A bottle of prescription thyroid medication was on the bathroom counter, loose pills spread across the countertop.
The first responders then fanned out through the sprawling four-bedroom home, meticulously checking bedrooms, hallways, bathrooms and closets for other people or signs of foul play, Moya said. Thirty minutes passed without a sign of anyone else.
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As they searched, one of the couple’s dogs kept running up to them, barking and running off in a different direction, he said. At first, paramedics thought the dog wanted to play. Then, they realized it wanted them to follow.
“They realized (the dog) was trying to say, ‘Hey, come over here! Come over here!’” Moya said.
The dog led them to a mudroom in the far end of the home, next to the kitchen. It then sat next to the body of Hackman, who was crumpled on the floor. Sunglasses and a cane laid nearby. His hands were blackened and showed signs of decomposition, Moya said. A back door was propped open, allowing the dogs to go in and out of the home.
Firefighters went through the home and two detached structures on the property with handheld six-gas monitors, measuring oxygen levels and looking for signs of harmful gases, such as carbon monoxide. The readings were nothing out of the norm, Moya said. The gas company later did its own inspection and also found no harmful levels of gases.
The two workers who first alerted police to the home told investigators they rarely saw the owners while conducting maintenance around the house, according to a search warrant affidavit. They said they mostly communicated via phone calls or text and primarily with Arakawa.
First responders noted how clean and organized the home appeared, Moya said. “It was very neat, organized with no clutter,” he said.
The two surviving dogs, Bear and Nikita, were rounded up and transported to a local pet day-care facility. Hackman’s and Arakawa’s bodies were taken to the state Office of the Medical Investigator at the University of New Mexico for autopsies.
Finally, some answers
At 2 p.m. Friday, outside the sheriff’s office in Santa Fe, Heather Jarrell stepped before the cameras. For over a week, media from all over the world had descended upon the New Mexico capital, all looking for answers to the same question: How did Hackman and Arakawa die?
Jarrell, New Mexico’s chief medical examiner, had led the queries into the couple’s deaths from her lab in Albuquerque. Finally, she had some answers.
How did he die? Gene Hackman cause of death released
Hackman’s heart showed signs of previous heart attacks, a pacemaker and multiple heart surgeries, as well as a scarred kidney due to chronic high blood pressure. Hackman’s cause of death was cardiovascular disease. He also had advanced Alzheimer’s disease, she said, which contributed to his death.
In other, less-experienced medical examiners’ offices, Arakawa’s cause of death may have gone undetected. But Jarrell and her staff knew enough to recognize the microscopic evidence revealed in the patient’s lungs. Arakawa tested negative for COVID-19 and influenza but positive for the hantavirus, Jarrell said. Cause of death: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
Her lungs had crashed as the virus branched through her body.
As Jarrell examined the patients, she received a phone call from one of Hackman’s doctors.
His pacemaker, the doctor said, had shown activity as recently as Feb. 17.
After further inspecting the device, Jarrell and investigators noticed Hackman’s heart also showed an atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeat, the following day, on Feb. 18. That’s likely when he died, Jarrell said.
Mendoza said authorities are still waiting on more data from two cellphones collected at the home, as well as results from a necropsy on Zinna. But the medical examiner’s information answered a lot of the questions they had, he said.
Hackman was in the house for seven days after Arakawa died. There were no cameras inside the house to record his movements.
In that time, he didn’t make any phone calls or otherwise ask for help, authorities said. He hadn’t eaten but had somehow managed to stay hydrated.
Clouded by Alzheimer’s and struggling with a scarred heart, he was alone while his wife and main caregiver was dead on the bathroom floor near the front of the home.
It’s likely, authorities said, Hackman never knew his wife was already gone.
Contributing: Javier Zarracina, USA TODAY
Follow Jervis on X: @MrRJervis.
