How Did Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Die? As Police Try to Unravel the Mystery, Insiders Detail Their Final Days (Exclusive)

• Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy were both found dead in their Santa Fe home on Wednesday, Feb. 26.
• Since then, authorities have been investigating due to what they have said are suspicious circumstances.
• While Hackman’s Hollywood peers pay tribute to the legend, friends and insiders give PEOPLE a glimpse of what his life was like with Betsy before they died.

In the years after he became a Hollywood star, Gene Hackman indulged a taste for renovation projects — his 10th house, the successor to showcases in Montecito and Carmel, was on 12 secluded acres on a piñon-covered hilltop outside Santa Fe.

He’d had the ceilings raised to soaring heights, helped demolish walls himself and created multiple buildings on the compound. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he told Architectural Digest in 1990. “I guess I like the process, and when it’s over, it’s over.”

But this would be his final home: After he retired in 2004, he lived here with his second wife, Betsy, a classically trained pianist whom he’d married in 1991.

They also died here, husband and wife, aged 95 and 65, under circumstances that were shocking and chillingly mysterious. Their bodies were discovered Feb. 26 when, according to Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza, a pest-control worker came to the house and found it strange that no one answered. He contacted a neighborhood security officer, who saw the bodies through a window and called 9-1-1.

Officers arrived to find Hackman’s and Betsy’s corpses in separate rooms — his near the kitchen, sunglasses and cane on the floor; hers in a bathroom, where prescription pills were scattered on a counter. (Police later collected blood-pressure and thyroid medications from the home, along with Tylenol.)

One of their dogs, a German shepherd, was discovered dead 10 to 15 feet from Betsy, in a kennel crate in a closet. Two other dogs were alive, one near Betsy, the other outside (a family friend later took them in). The front door was unlocked and a back door sufficiently ajar to let the dogs come and go.

In an affidavit to obtain a search warrant of the property, Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office Det. Roy Arndt reported that one officer had described Betsy’s body as “bloated,” with “mummification” in her hands and feet; Hackman’s body was in a “similar” state.

His pacemaker data later indicated that he had been dead since Feb. 17 — nine days before the bodies were found. The affidavit stated that there was no indication that either had suffered blunt-instrument trauma, or that anything had been removed from the house or disturbed. Authorities also found “no obvious signs of a gas leak,” according to the affidavit, and both tested negative for carbon monoxide poisoning.

Mendoza said on NBC’s Today Feb. 28 that he was “pretty confident” no foul play occurred, but he wasn’t ruling it out. He said the results of the couple’s autopsies would provide more clues to the ongoing investigation, but a full report could take several weeks. “I hope [for] a little bit of patience on the family’s part, on everybody’s part,” Mendoza said, “so we can have some answers.”

The tragedy brought forth an outpouring of tributes to Hackman, including touching words at the Academy Awards from Morgan Freeman, his costar in Unforgiven and Under Suspicion. Hackman “was a generous performer,” said Freeman, “and a man whose gifts elevated everyone’s work.”

A two-time Oscar winner, Hackman was the rare star who could also be considered an actor’s actor, delivering indelible performances in a wide range of roles: a tough cop busting a heroin-smuggling ring in The French Connection; a minister trapped in an overturned cruise liner in The Poseidon Adventure; the Man of Steel’s nemesis Lex Luthor in three Superman movies.

“Loved you in everything!” posted Viola Davis. Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Hackman in what the actor considered one of his most challenging performances — a drab, introverted surveillance expert in The Conversation — called him “magnificent in his work and complexity.”

To his three children, though, “he was always just Dad and Grandpa,” said Leslie, 58, and Elizabeth, 62, his daughters with ex-wife Faye Maltese, who died in 2017. (He’s also survived by a son, Christopher, 64, and granddaughter Annie.)

A solidly built 6’2″ — he called himself “a lummox” — Hackman nearly always presented himself as a kind of everyman, measured in his speech and gesture, not heartthrob-handsome but virile. He projected a gruff, no-nonsense gravitas.

“He was a tough nut,” Bill Murray, his costar in the A-list ensemble film The Royal Tenenbaums, told the Associated Press after Hackman’s death.

Hackman admitted that he tended to be moody and “introspective to the point of disturbing.” Much of that, he suggested, was rooted in an unhappy childhood.

Growing up in Danville, Ill., he dreamed of being an actor and found encouragement from his mother, Anna Lyda, a waitress. But his father, Eugene, a pressman for the local paper, abandoned the family when Hackman was 13.

Watching him drive off, Hackman told PEOPLE in 1975, “I knew by the way he waved at me that it was a real adios.” Decades later Anna Lyda, an alcoholic, was drunk in bed when a cigarette ignited the mattress and burned her to death.

Hackman often drew on these painful memories when roles required a darker shading. “Dysfunctional families,” he told The New York Times, “have sired a lot of pretty good actors.”

As a kid, though, Hackman was too shy to even audition for high school productions. Instead he dropped out and spent almost five years in the Marines. He finally began to pursue his dream when he was 26 and already married to Faye, a  bank secretary. Studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, he became friends with fellow student Dustin Hoffman.

They bonded as outsiders (and would later costar in the legal thriller Runaway Jury), but Hackman was asked to leave after a year. “The director graded us,” Hoffman told PEOPLE in 1975. “The lowest anybody ever got before was 3, and Gene wound up with 1.4.”

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Hackman moved to New York City and scraped by while searching for stage roles. The low point came when he was working as a doorman, and a Marine he’d known breezed by him. “He never looked at me,” Hackman told PEOPLE, “but he said out of the side of his mouth, ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch.’ ”

That humiliation was the spur he needed to push himself harder, and within a few years he was on Broadway and appearing in small TV roles. Then he moved on to film: He was in his mid-30s when he landed his Oscar-nominated breakout role as Buck, brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, in the landmark 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

He became a genuine leading man four years later with his Oscar-winning performance as Popeye Doyle, a hard-boiled cop with a porkpie hat, in The French Connection. From then on he worked at a feverish pace while raising his family in a Beverly Hills mansion and commanding huge salaries.

Often exasperated by the distractions from acting that came with major movie roles, he still preferred characters like the troubled private eye he played in 1975’s Night Moves (a flop) — and thought he’d destroyed his career by agreeing to play Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve’s Superman. To his surprise, that rare comic turn was loved by both critics and audiences.

His last credit was for the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport. Having appeared in more than 70 movies, he was worn down and ready to quit, especially after a doctor cautioned him about stressing his heart. That advice, he said in 2009, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

By then he was married to the former Betsy Arakawa, whom he’d met in L.A. when she was working at a fitness center. They seemed happy living out their lives in Santa Fe. “Gene was as proud of Betsy as she was of him,” says Barbara Lenihan, a neighbor and friend of the couple. Their property had a building that included both a painting studio for Hackman and a piano studio for Betsy, Barbara says: “He would request that she would play a couple songs for us, and she was excellent.”

Lenihan’s son Aaron calls them “one the tightest couples I’ve ever seen—really, really close to each other. They were both incredibly kind.”

The couple were active in the community, dining out and shopping at Whole Foods. Betsy was cofounder of Pandora’s, a local home-decor store, and helped Hackman shape his manuscripts for the popular historical novels he cowrote with Barbara’s husband, Daniel Lenihan. To relax, Hackman and Betsy “would drive super far out in the middle of nowhere,” says photographer Mark Kreusch, “and have little picnics.”

In the past year Hackman had kept to his home more, and his health had been slipping, the Lenihans say. He gave up riding his bike, but his wife had encouraged him to stay active with yoga and puzzles. Betsy herself, says Barbara, seemed “in perfect health.”

No matter how this tragic case officially concludes, Hackman’s legacy will endure. He long ago made it clear that he was content to be remembered simply as “a decent actor.” As decent actors go, he was the greatest.