Gene Hackman’s wife Betsy Arakawa had reportedly been followed on two occasions in the months leading up to her death.
Arakawa, 65, and her Oscar-winning husband, 95, were found dead at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico in February. The following month, Dr. Heather Jarrell, Chief Medical Examiner at the Office of the Medical Investigator, revealed at a press conference that the couple had both died from natural causes.
In new police bodycam footage obtained by Fox News Digital, Arakawa’s hairstylist Christopher can be heard telling law enforcement that she told him about the incidents.
"She mentioned to me that there was a man that had parked outside of their gate and followed them," he told law enforcement.
"On two separate occasions. One occasion is when they went to White Rock. They went and had lunch there and the guy followed them from parked [outside of their gated community], followed them all the way to White Rock."
"She said, 'Christopher, I'm surprised that security didn't [know] how he got there… because when we left, I noticed that this car had followed us from the residence to White Rock.'"
The hairstylist said Betsy recalled the man had "pulled out a folder of photos of her husband and wanted him to sign them."
"And I said, we were sitting here and I said, 'That's so weird because Santa Fe's not a place of paparazzi and stuff.’ She said… she approached him and said, ‘I told him he needed to have more respect.’"
On a second occasion, the same man followed the couple again and offered them a bottle of wine. Arakawa told Christopher that she and Hackman had refused the gift.
"I said, 'Oh my gosh, Betsy, that's crazy. You should not have approached this person. This makes me nervous,'" the hairstylist added. "He knew what [they] drove. That's the scary part."
According to medical investigators, Arakawa’s cause of death was hantavirus — a rare illness contracted via contact with rodents like rats and mice.
Meanwhile, Hackman’s death was tied to heart disease with Alzheimer’s disease contributing. “He was in a very poor state of health. He had significant heart disease, and I think ultimately that’s what resulted in his death,” Jarrell said.
Authorities are relatively confident that Hackman died on February 18 due to activity recorded on his pacemaker. Arakawa was last seen in public on February 11 and it was initially believed she could have died that evening.
However, on March 17 it emerged that she made a phone call to Cloudberry Health, a local medical concierge service that allows patients to speak to credentialed doctors, on the morning of February 12.
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