{"id":93603,"date":"2025-03-02T20:43:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T04:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=93603"},"modified":"2025-03-02T20:43:02","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T04:43:02","slug":"gene-hackman-wife-and-dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2025\/03\/02\/gene-hackman-wife-and-dog\/","title":{"rendered":"Gene Hackman, Wife and Dog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The big story of last week was the death of <strong>Gene Hackman <\/strong>and his wife <strong>Betsy Arakawa<\/strong>&#8230;and their dog.&nbsp; Everybody seems to forget about the dog, as if it died in any less curious a way.&nbsp; Gene and his wife lived in a gated community in Santa Fe.&nbsp; What we know as of this writing is that maintenance workers called 911 saying that while gardening, they looked in the window and could see two unconscious people who appeared to be \u201cdecomposing\u201d (that\u2019s one helluva vantage point).&nbsp; Police let themselves in through an unsecured front door.&nbsp; Fun fact \u2013 the Santa Fe Sheriff\u2019s office also investigated the set of <strong><em>Rust<\/em><\/strong>, and we know what a crackjack job they did on that!&nbsp; Police found Hackman in the \u201cmud room\u201d (note to readers not familiar with this term \u2013 typically a room between the back door and the kitchen where one would remove muddy footwear and clothing).&nbsp; They found Betsy on the floor of the bathroom surrounded by pills, with a (living) dog lying by her side.&nbsp; Another dog was found dead in a crate inside the bathroom closet.&nbsp; And a third dog was running around outside.&nbsp; And the police didn\u2019t find anything suspicious?<\/p>\n<p>Then Gene\u2019s daughter <strong>Leslie <\/strong>chimed in.&nbsp; \u201cDespite his age, he was in very good physical condition.&nbsp; He liked to do Pilates and yoga, and he was continuing to do that several times a week.&nbsp; So he was in good health.\u201d&nbsp; She later added that his death was \u201cnot terribly shocking because he was 95.\u201d&nbsp; OK, Leslie, but at the same time as his wife?&nbsp; And the dog?&nbsp; Turns out, Leslie hadn\u2019t talked to Dad for \u201cseveral months\u201d.&nbsp; Good kid.&nbsp; Police say there\u2019s no sign of carbon monoxide poisoning.&nbsp; When they ran a test on Hackman\u2019s pacemaker, they discovered the last activity was on February 17<sup>th<\/sup>.&nbsp; So that\u2019s a couple weeks earlier.&nbsp; Both husband and wife\u2019s bodies have been downgraded from \u201csigns of decomposition\u201d to \u201cmummification\u201d \u2013 like they were found in Luxor near <strong>King Tut<\/strong>!&nbsp; And the most pressing question of all \u2013 would the <em>Academy <\/em>re-edit the \u201cIn Memoriam\u201d package to include Hackman?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The big story of last week was the death of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa&#8230;and their dog.&nbsp; Everybody seems to forget about the dog, as if it died in any less curious a way.&nbsp; Gene and his wife lived in a gated community in Santa Fe.&nbsp; What we know as of this writing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93613,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93603\/revisions\/93613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}