Police Say Award-winning Actor Gene Hackman, Wife’s Deaths ‘Suspicious’

Academy Award-winning actor Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog have been found dead in different rooms of their home, in an incident police are now calling “suspicious.”

The bodies of the Hollywood giant, 95, and his classical pianist wife Betsy Arakawa, 63, along with that of a pet dog, were discovered at their property in New Mexico on Wednesday.

A search warrant said the deaths were “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation”, according to AFP.

Police initially reported there were no signs of foul play, but new information has revealed there was an open prescription bottle and pills scattered on a countertop near Arakawa in the couple’s Santa Fe home.

Hackman was found dead in a mudroom, while Arakawa was found in a bathroom next to a space heater, detectives said.

According to local media, police officers arrived at the couple’s home in a gated community to investigate the deaths of two elderly people and a dog.

It remains unclear whether police were responding to a report or if they were making a welfare check, local media said.

Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola has said he is mourning the “great artist” but is celebrating his “magnificent work”.

“The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola wrote in a post on Instagram.

“I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”

Hackman was an intense character actor who won Academy Awards for the violent 1971 drug saga The French Connection and the 1992 western Unforgiven.

The former marine appeared in more than 80 films, as well as on television and the stage during a lengthy career that started in the early 1960s.

Living outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was married twice and had three children.

Hackman married Arakawa in 1991.

(SOURCE – ABC News)