One morning in December, Betsy Arakawa helped her elderly husband Gene Hackman into their truck and set off for White Rock, a small town 45 minutes from their hilltop home near Santa Fe.

As they turned onto the main road, she noticed something peculiar: a car waiting near the entrance of Santa Fe Summit, the gated community where they lived, had shifted into gear and was following them.

The vehicle stayed in her rear-view mirror through several junctions and two sets of traffic lights before trailing them across a long and scenic mountain pass. And when Betsy pulled up next to a park, where they intended to have a picnic and exercise their three dogs, a man emerged.

There followed a short confrontation. The stranger, who was brandishing a folder full of photos of Gene, began aggressively asking the Hollywood legend for autographs. But Betsy was having no such thing.

Anxious to protect her frail and somewhat confused spouse, who had in recent months been suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s, she politely but firmly instructed the interloper to leave, saying he ‘needed to have more respect’.

The strange man obliged. But it wasn’t the last time their paths would cross. Disturbingly, he did the exact same thing again a few weeks later – this time following the Hackmans to a town called Pecos, half an hour’s drive east of New Mexico’s capital, where he attempted to present them with a bottle of wine and once more asked for an autograph.

The last known picture of devoted Gene Hackman and Betsy, last year

The tragic couple with one of their beloved dogs

After four decades at the side of her husband, a global superstar who appeared in 80 movies and won two Oscars from five nominations, Betsy had grown used to fending off occasional unwanted approaches from fans.

Yet the fact this particular individual had taken to lurking outside their rural home left her understandably shaken.

Indeed, she felt sufficiently distressed to share details with her hair stylist Christopher Torrez, who saw her for a ‘cut and colour’ later that day.

He told the Mail that Betsy appeared ‘frazzled’ by the mystery stalker, who drove a car with number plates from the neighbouring state of Texas.

‘He [the man] knew what car they [the Hackmans] drove. That’s the scary part,’ he said. ‘This has not sat well with me. They don’t look like celebrities. They look like normal, everyday people. And it’s creepy that someone would do that; somebody would follow them in a car.’

Torres, who I met this week at his salon Styled at 7K, is one of several key witnesses who spoke to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in late February following Betsy and Gene’s sudden, highly unusual deaths.

He told a detective how Betsy had described the man as ‘Asian or Japanese’ in appearance, adding: ‘She’s a very tough woman, but this seemed just weird to her. Creepy.’

The detective interviewing Torres listened intently. His department, which oversees a prosperous and normally law-abiding city of 90,000 residents at the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, was desperate to solve a case that had attracted global media attention.

News of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa’s deaths first broke on February 26 when Jesse Kessler, a handyman and building contractor who’d worked regularly for them for roughly 16 years, grew concerned that they had not been in touch and decided to visit the property.

Peering through an open door, he spotted what appeared to be a body and immediately called 911.

First responders found Betsy, 65, lying on the floor of the bathroom. An open medicine bottle was nearby, with pills strewn across a countertop. After a brief search, her 95-year-old husband was discovered in the rambling home’s boot room, where he was lying next to his walking stick and sunglasses.

One of their three beloved dogs – a Kelpie mix named Zinna – was also dead, having apparently been locked inside a small cage.

Phone and email records suggested that Gene and Betsy’s last communication with the outside world had been on February 12.

The authorities described the bodies as being in a state of ‘partial mummification’, a relatively frequent occurrence due to the dry and dusty conditions in and around the city, which sits at an altitude of more than 2,000 metres.

In the orgy of speculation that followed the grim discovery, various explanations for their deaths began to do the rounds and several were being explored by police.

Initial lines of inquiry saw engineers from the New Mexico Gas Company called out to the couple’s property to see whether they might have been killed by a carbon monoxide leak. But although very small gas leaks were detected in the kitchen, they were insufficient to cause poisoning.

The prescription pills found next to Betsy’s body were sent off for analysis amid speculation that she might have taken her own life in some sort of suicide pact. Yet they appear to have instead been a type of antibiotic used in the management of flu.

Forensic teams then combed the property for evidence of a break-in or violent struggle. But although various doors and windows had been left open, there was no sign of forced entry and none of the couple’s valuable artworks or items of jewellery had been stolen.

After interviewing hairdresser Christopher Torres, who’d been located via phone records, some efforts were made to identify the mystery stalker, though trawling through CCTV footage promised to be a long and time-consuming process.

On March 7, nine days after the gruesome discovery, the police investigation was suddenly called off. Autopsy results had become available and they indicated that the couple’s unusual deaths had almost certainly been due to natural causes.

The news was delivered by New Mexico’s chief medical examiner, Heather Jarrell, who revealed at a press conference that Betsy had been killed by something called ‘hantavirus pulmonary symptom’. It’s a rare but highly unpleasant infection that spreads when someone breathes in a rodent’s urine, droppings or saliva.

Victims are typically farmers who sweep out dusty sheds or homeowners who clean out wardrobes or attics where mice or rats are living.

Initial symptoms are similar to flu but it can quickly lead to heart or lung failure.

Although only 30 cases are reported across the US in an average year, between 38 and 50 per cent of them prove fatal.

Betsy had last been seen in public on February 11, when she drove to Santa Fe to visit a grocery store and a branch of the pharmacy chain CVS.

Her last known phone or email conversation was the following day. Autopsy results led police to believe she died on or around

February 12. Hackman’s time of death was easier to pinpoint thanks to data from his pacemaker, which showed that he had passed away on February 18.

The official cause was heart disease, combined with complications from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. Tragically, it therefore seems that the Hollywood star spent the final six days of his life alone and unable to raise an alarm.

His dementia was such that he may very well have been unaware that his wife had perished.

Though Hackman’s stomach was empty, he was not suffering from dehydration, suggesting he retained the ability to fetch a drink. In the absence of Betsy, his only carer, he had also failed to take heart medications, which almost certainly contributed to his death.

In one further, awful twist it seems that Hackman was also unaware of the fate of the dog, Zinna, who had recently undergone major surgery and was being kept in a small locked cage during her recovery. She seems to have died from dehydration.

The grim news sparked an outpouring of soul-searching along with some deeply prurient coverage of Hackman’s domestic affairs. It was widely suggested that he spent his final years as a sort of recluse, sharing a gilded cage in the hills above Santa Fe with his much younger second wife, Betsy.

There were also reports that Hackman was estranged from his three grown-up children: daughters Elizabeth and Leslie and son Christopher.

The product of his first marriage to the late Faye Maltese, which ended in the 1980s, they were rumoured to have hired a hotshot lawyer named Andrew M. Katzenstein to claim a portion of his $80 million estate. Yet having spent a week in Santa Fe, where Hackman spent most of the past 30 years, a very different picture emerges.

Far from being weird recluses, it seems both Gene and Betsy were very active members of the local community, with a wide and loyal circle of friends.

They co-owned and helped run a variety of businesses, from restaurants to interior design stores, attended fundraisers for local charities, and were fixtures at the town’s ‘Fourth of July’ parties and other local events.

As for Gene’s children, they remained in regular contact, albeit largely via telephone as they lived in different states.

Christopher seems to have had an active role in helping run his father’s various investments, which included a string of commercial properties in both New Mexico and Hawaii, where Betsy grew up. He was even with Betsy’s mother, Yoshie Feaster, on the day that the couple’s bodies were discovered.

Talk of an ugly family rift is, I believe, deeply misguided.

While it’s true that Hackman was frequently absent during their childhood – a fault to which he would later publicly confess – relations with his offspring seem instead to have warmed considerably in recent decades.

And they thought highly of Betsy, who cared for their father until her dying day.

On the inheritance front, sources close to the children say they have been adequately provided for via trusts that Gene set up to safeguard his assets, and they dismiss talk of a legal challenge as nonsense (a spokesperson for lawyer Katzenstein denies involvement in any such case).

While their failure to ‘claim’ the couple’s bodies from the medical examiner’s office, a month after their death, made some headlines this week, I gather the time delay is not unusual and preparations for a family funeral are well under way.

The story of Gene Hackman’s final decades is, as it happens, a largely happy one.

Though he could be famously difficult and combative on set, he effectively retired from acting in 2004 and moved full time to Santa Fe, a picturesque, arty town filled with galleries, coffee shops, and – for the moment, at least – anti-Trump fly-posters.

Here, the Hollywood star’s life slowed down a gear. He devoted himself to laidback pursuits, such as golf, fly-fishing, painting and walking his dogs with Betsy. She managed his social affairs (Hackman refused to own a smartphone) and ran their home.

The couple had first met at the height of Hackman’s fame in the mid-1980s when Betsy, a professional concert pianist and former cheerleader who’d attended university in Los Angeles, was working part time in a gym.

Their initial encounter was somewhat confrontational – Hackman had forgotten his entry card to the gym and she refused to let him in. But, despite the 30-year age gap, romance not only ensued but endured for more than four decades.

When Hackman wasn’t working, the couple, who married in 1991, had divided their time between Montecito in California and Santa Fe, where they renovated a ranch-style home.

Speaking to Architectural Digest magazine about the project, Hackman said the local area ‘has a kind of magic about it’.

In the 1990s, around the time he won his second Oscar for the western Unforgiven (his first had been playing troubled New York cop Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in 1971 thriller The French Connection) they acquired the property in Santa Fe Summit

It’s a gated community of 55 large homes on a secluded hillside boasting stunning views of the local ski area.

It afforded more privacy than their first Santa Fe home, with manned security barriers at an external gate and a second barrier protecting Old Sunset Trail, the winding road where they lived. This became the place he retired to. Asked how he spent his time in the town, which has a vibrant art scene and is home to celebrities including Robert Redford, Shirley MacLaine, and Game Of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, Hackman told one interviewer: ‘I paint, I draw. Santa Fe has a world-class opera, a chamber orchestra. Culturally it’s pretty nice.’

In retirement, Hackman would attend art classes in town or spend days at the easel in his home studio.

He also co-wrote a couple of historical novels with Daniel Lenihan, a local archaeologist. Betsy, who helped proof-read the books, went into business with Lenihan’s wife Barbara, running an upmarket textiles store called Pandora’s, which remains in business to this day.

‘He [Hackman] was very proud of her,’ Barbara told reporters, recalling how he would sometimes ask Betsy to play one of the two grand pianos they kept in their home. ‘She was excellent, as good as they get.’

The Hackmans would also host old friends at their hilltop home.

Ivan Valdez, a local fly-fishing guide, told me how they became chums after one of the Hackman’s more famous house guests, an American football coach named Jack Del Rio, asked to be taken fishing during a visit.

‘I couldn’t say enough good things about him [Hackman]. He’s a kind soul with a big heart, and he knew how to cast a fly.’

Pride of place on the wall of Ivan’s shop is a photo from 2015 of Hackman with a huge rainbow trout caught at a place called Cow Creek Ranch in the nearby Pecos Wilderness.

Though Hackman was in his mid-80s by then, he looks like a man several decades younger.

One of the couple’s closest friends throughout this era was Doug Lanham, a local restaurateur with whom they co-owned a local chain of pan-Asian restaurants named Jinja, which are still decorated with dozens of Hackman’s stunning oil paintings.

Lanham had a tear in his eyes this week recalling the happy times they spent together, golfing at Hackman’s local club, Las Campanas, or hanging out in the restaurant where the Hollywood star would pose for souvenir photos for tuxedo-clad high school kids on prom night and generously foot the bill for diners celebrating special occasions, ‘because that’s Gene’.

Police arrive at the couple’s home last month, before making a grim discovery

Lanham showed me photos of Gene and Betsy hugging his dogs at a party, and of Hackman brandishing water pistols at a Fourth of July celebration in the 2010s. ‘Here’s an eightysomething guy, running around squirting people,’ he recalled.

At one point, Hackman filled the pistols with red wine (a wine enthusiast, his favourite grape was Zinfandel).

Another prank, a few years later, saw Hackman, who’d lost a golfing bet, decide to settle his bill by dumping $22 in one cent coins on Lanham’s desk alongside a lengthy letter protesting about the debt that was signed ‘Captain Hollywood’.

The Hackmans also loved a party, Lanham recalled. They would always attend local charity fundraisers, often donating one of Gene’s paintings as an auction prize.

And at Lanham’s wedding in 2007, the Hackmans spent hours leading a conga line on the dance floor.

This is not, self-evidently, the behaviour of an eccentric recluse. And even in his later years, the actor retained a pugnacious side. In the early 2000s, he got into a fist fight in Los Angeles following a traffic altercation. ‘Gene told me he ended up on his back, looked up and there, over his head, was a poster with his face on it, advertising some movie,’ said Lanham.

On another occasion, in 2012, he slapped a local homeless man who had shouted abuse at Betsy.

‘We’d talk about fights, and that sort of thing. Boy, he loved a fight,’ Lanham recalled.

‘One time, he told me how he liked to start one. He said that after you get in an argument, you put your hands up and go: “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” Then, when the other guy’s guard comes down, you just zero in on his nose and hit it. Wham!’

Like most of Hackman’s acquaintances, Lanham credits Betsy with keeping her husband fit and active into his 90s, despite heart problems and occasional back trouble caused by a bicycle accident in Florida in the 2010s.

‘They ate very healthy and fresh, and all the great food. And she was a protector when it came to his taking care of himself. She made sure he worked out. He did Pilates.’

Tom Allin, who played golf with them, has recalled that ‘she just really looked after him’, revealing that she diluted his wine with sparkling water when they were celebrating his 90th birthday back in 2020.

A few weeks after that happy occasion came an event that would, in a roundabout way, lead to Hackman’s tragic demise.

When Covid struck, he and Betsy decided – understandably, given his age and history of heart problems – to spend several months in isolation.

During that time, Hackman became extremely frail. A brush with the virus is believed to have significantly weakened his already dicky heart.

Even when the pandemic eased, life was never quite the same again.

Hackman continued to drive – slowly – and was photographed at the wheel visiting a drive-through fast-food restaurant in 2023.

But he never managed to return to the golf course or cast a fly at a trout.

Standing at an easel would trouble his back and he started to became easily confused, which made social events bothersome.

During his final months, as Alzheimer’s tightened its grip, Betsy had become a sort of full-time carer, moving Gene to a separate bedroom at one end of the property while she shared the other with their dogs.

A proud woman, who was highly protective of her husband, she refused to hire carers to assist her. And, following December’s disconcerting brush with the stalker, she became reluctant to take Gene out with her when she left the house to run errands.

Despite their wealth, the couple seem to have employed neither cleaners nor housekeepers to look after their rambling home.

While it’s impossible to tell whether this resulted in a rodent infestation that allowed the fatal ‘hantavirus’ to spread, it almost certainly led to the Hollywood legend’s grim demise.

For when Gene Hackman’s beloved Betsy was taken, there was – sadly – no one left to help.