Gene Hackman’s Pacemaker Holds Clues in Mysterious Death Investigation

in the early hours of Thursday February 27th 2025 Mr Hackman and Miss erawa were transported to the office of the medical investigator an autopsy was performed initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual the manner and cause of death has not been determined a mystery still unsolved in the desert more clues continue to trickle in surrounding the Deaths of Hollywood star Jean Hackman his wife and their dog we're learning today that Hackman's pacemaker could be the biggest piece of evidence investigators have in figuring out what went wrong we're on the case presented by law

and crime I'm Chris [Music] Stewart the sheriff in Santa Fe New Mexico said it could take weeks until we get final autopsy results and Toxicology test results to determine the cause of death for acting Legend Jean Hackman wife and their dog and as we wait the questions are only mounting one of the big questions that could hold a lot of answers has to do with the 95-year-old Hackman's pacemaker this is what the sheriff said about that pacemaker on Friday during a news conference both individuals tested negative for carbon monoxide an initial interrogation was conducted of

Mr Hackman's pacemaker this revealed that his last event was recorded on February 17th 2025 I was advised that a more thorough investigation will be completed so this means Hackman died 9 days before his body was found many pacemakers do have the ability to relay information to doctors but for Hackman's to not have recorded a heart rate for more than a week apparently his did not alert those outside his home that something had gone wrong the other big batch of information we have is from a search warrant that deputies used to gain access access to Hackman's

home here are the items that deputies took from Hackman's home as evidence last week two green cellular devices thyroid medication dilm medication which is a calcium blocker that's used for high blood pressure Tylenol records from my quest which is how patients schedule blood tests things like that through Quest Diagnostics and a 2025 monthly planner now as police are trying to piece together a timeline leading up to the deaths of Hackman and his wife Betsy arakawa it's unclear how those items could paint the picture of what happened and what life looked like in the days leading

up to their deaths the sheriff didn't give information on whether there were events in that planner beyond the day the two were found dead and said that they planned to look through the cell phones and text messages to try and build that timeline we know through initial reports that arakawa was found in a bathroom with a prescription bottle and pills spread on the counter but the sheriff refused used to go into more detail on Friday about those medications listen to this there are names on prescription bottles do we know any idea as to who was

taking any of those medications yeah in due to Hippa I I I I don't want to release uh who the medication was uh prescribed to or what the medication is I I think that's uh I think there's a hip of concern there so I won't release that information do you know the nature of the pills that were found by what were those pills there what were they like I think I just answered that question I think I stated I'm not going to release the the actual medication or who it was prescribed to doe to hip

up but again as we just said we do know what those medications were per the search warrant that was released to the media the sheriff said there are no surveillance videos from the house and he said that Hackman and his wife they were very private people Hackman had two daughters and a son and in a statement to people his two daughters Leslie and Elizabeth and his granddaughter Annie said quote it is with great sadness that we announced the passing of our father Jean Hackman and his wife Betsy he was loved and admired by millions around

the world for His Brilliant acting career but to us he was always Dad and Grandpa we will miss him sorely and are devastated by the loss end quote in a interview with the Daily Mail Hackman's daughter Leslie said that she and her dad were close but she admitted that she hadn't spoken to him in a couple of months Hackman's son Christopher who's now in his 60s has not spoken to the Press yet since since the death of his father Hackman's three children were from his first marriage to a woman named Fay malti that was a

marriage that lasted from 1956 until they divorced in 1986 she died in 2017 Hackman had been married to Betsy arakawa since 1991 she was a classical pianist who according to a 1989 New York Times magazine article met her future husband while she was working part-time at an LA Fitness center before we get back to today's episode what do so many of the stories that we cover here on Law and crime have in common it shows that life's unpredictable and having a great attorney matters and that's where we bring in our partner and sponsor Morgan and

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file a claim head over to forthepeople.com slot and you can get your claim started today also head down into the comments section of this video you can see we have a link pinned in the comments police say both Hackman and arakawa's bodies were found decomposed with arakawa's hands and feet showing signs of mummification which means they were dead for several days before they were found one of the people who found them on Wednesday last week was a man named Jesse Kessler he was a contractor in Santa Fe who says he's worked for Hackman on his

home for 16 years now he wouldn't describe specifically what he saw when he arrived at Hackman's home but he did release this statement to Fox News digital quote Jean and Betsy thank you for the 16 plus years of opportunity friendship and Trust Jean Hackman thank you for Lending a hand on projects over the years I could not believe at the time I was actually working side by side with a legend thank you for treating my sons and employees so well and as equals when on the job you were just one of the guys thank you

for all the stories which I will always remember and will cherish forever Betsy Hackman thank you for the years of friendship generosity opportunity and Trust Thank You for Your Love of dogs including my own thank you for all the advice and consoling thank you for being such a beautiful person you both will always be near and dear to my heart and greatly missed love you both please a Kessler was the first to arrive at the home on Wednesday and then called neighborhood security please say one dog was found dead but two more were alive on

the property police have also ruled out the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning as a cause of death Hackman's daughter also said that she felt like her dad was in good shape though he was 95 years old and arakawa had a positive influence on his health and fitness joining us now to talk more about the possibilities of what this autopsy could uncover and and what we know at this point in this case as professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University in Alabama Joseph Scott Morgan thank you for taking the time to be with us today um

I'm sure this is fascinating in your world like what we know and what we don't um one question that I thought about over the weekend was related to the pacemaker um that Jean Hackman had that apparently showed its last event nine days prior to him being discovered in your experience I know you're not a a cardiologist wouldn't a pacemaker send information typically to a doctor where if it stopped working that someone in the outside world outside of his home would know that that there was a problem uh yeah yeah it normally does and it all

depends on what type of Technology you're talking about um you know and it's certainly something that um in postmortem context that can be examined and that means after an autopsy has been performed and the pacemaker is removed but yeah uh with the technology that we have nowadays uh that is a possibility you know and I guess probably one of the the lingering questions would be uh first off what type of Technology was it that governed um uh this uh beside them and then uh if it was something that was in a more modern context uh

why didn't anybody alert to it because it's pretty significant and you're talking many days down range since you had any kind of recorded life signs um that this thing would have been given off we we've already had that validated you know the me has already stated that pretty plainly for uh on Friday the the Santa Fe county sheriff said the pr minary autopsy results weren't able to determine the cause of death what yeah is different between how a preliminary autopsy is conducted and the type of information you can grab to then the the final autopsy

result that we presume would be able to give us a cause of death that that may come weeks from now yeah well let's look at it this way uh first off you're fighting a couple of battles here uh first off anatomically uh and much has been stated about this is um that both sets of remains are in um somewhat of a state of decomposition and to what extent um each individual remain was decomposed we don't really know my suspicion is at least uh it sounds as though Miss arawa's remains may have been down a bit

longer they keep using terms uh like mummified which is something you don't hear a lot uh we talk about about it in uh medical legal um context many times and it's certainly not something that is anything like mumification in ancient Egypt it's it's a term that we use I prefer actually the term desiccation which means a drying out and uh this is being demonstrated in the standard locations by the way they did mention hands and feet having a mummified appearance and then they talked about not to get too far off in the weeds because this

is really grotesque but they talk about bloating which which is a consequence of decomposition um they didn't really talk as much particularly in that initial search warrant about Mr Hackman status so um they said I think and forgive me I'm doing this off the top of my head but um that he was similar but I don't know how how much similar there's there's a very fine line here uh she's in a she was found actually in a bathroom whereas he's found out in a mudro and Believe It or Not There are going to be temperature

differences in both of those locations more than likely um and exposure perhaps uh to some of the other elements surrounding the home uh both within and without um it's a it's a fascinating kind of pairing you don't get a lot of in my field at least or in my in my experience you don't get a lot of these simultaneous deaths unless they are some type of trauma event or some type of uh agent that the individuals have been exposed to it's it's kind of a rare event where you have two cases of potentially natural death

now back to your point I'm sorry I went kind of far fi there but um the first thing that you're fighting here is decompositional changes and what can you appreciate at autopsy sometimes it's not quite as clear because of the changes that have taken place to the tissue um and then you still don't have um the microscopic results on the tissue so the stage after the autopsy where samples of all of the organ tissues are taken uh they'll be examined microscopically and that means that they're put on the slides they're stained um and you're looking

for different manifestations you know in uh depending upon what organ system you're talking about the brain heart the lungs uh you know for instance in the heart you're going to look for changes that might be consider consistent with what's referred to as a myocardial infarction which where The myocardium or the heart muscle dies as a result of a blockage it's classic Heart Attack sometimes you can appreciate that uh even with decomposed bodies and obviously with the brain you're looking for evidence of uh perhaps a cerebral vascular accident otherwise known as a stroke uh and that'll

take some time for those tissues to be prepared so that the pathologist can examine them and then be beyond that what makes this truly incomplete is the fact that you don't have talks results yet and so talks takes some time and you know over all my years of covering you know death investigations um it's variable depending upon the tempo which a particular office works at I've seen talks results come back say within two weeks and I've seen them take up to seven months before and I I don't want folks to think that I'm conflating um

the tox results that is what's going on in their system relative to drugs that may have been on board and I'm talking about therapeutic drugs you know um conflict that with the carbon monoxide finding which they stated from autopsy was not present those are two separate things and two separate different types of testing um you can actually see carbon monoxide changes literally manifested physically for your eyes there's certain things that we look for that they're actually quite striking when you're at an autopsy where somebody has been exposed to carbon monoxide you take that and combine

it with what the authorities said scene where there was uh you know they tested for leaks both the fire department and the utilities people checked and they didn't see any evidence of that it's interesting because you talk about the mummification part of it and it's really been reported that it was notable on her and then for Jean Hackman it was wasn't at least it hasn't been tied to him as much that his body was decomposing which um you're the expert I'm not but seven days nine days that after death you would assume that that decomposition

would happen so it is possible that she may have died first if the mummification is more clear on her than it would be on Jee hack yeah and I I've I've put some thought into this you know over uh these uh many days since this has happened and you know one of the things that we work in or that we work with in medical legal death investigation is to try to understand sequencing of events whether it's uh you know one or two people or multitude of people you you try to understand uh sequencing and and

time time is you know for us in our field one of the biggest questions that police officers often have for us is how long okay and it's a reasonable question and many times you know you're just going to have the evidence that's laid before you with the bodies it's not like you know uh where you're going to have a definitive time but some of the things that you can look for are going to be these external changes with human remains and I've thought about this uh a variety of different scenarios what could have happened we

do know that to a certain degree uh Mr Hackman was infirmed I think he was still ambulatory uh we had have images of him you know working or walking with a cane he's kind of uh what's referred to as kyotic which means that he's he's bent over kind of hunched over like this but he's still ambulatory um there have been some reports that he was participating in yoga and pilates and these sorts things and I don't necessarily know how the authorities are going to validate that but one of the themes that has run through that

is that uh missar Kawa was behind that that she saw the value in that for Mr Hackman you know to keep him limber keep him moving so if she is the caretaker and she had some kind of major medical event you know we have these pills that are spilled about in the bathroom and the heater that's been knocked over I still don't know and I don't know that anyone knows what those meds were specific to her now there were meds that were collected that seen was she having some kind of event was it a cardiac

event was it a cerebral event and maybe she said ly passed well if she is his caretaker and he is dependent upon her um then that puts us into a different sphere at that point in time is he kind of wandering about the house wondering you know how does he solve this problem what does he do and over a period of time you know he finally gives way and and passes on um I found it quite fascinating the position of Mr Hackman's body is in the mudro he has uh his sweatpants he's fully clothed he's

got I think a long sleeve blue t-shirt his Cane his slippers and oh by the way um he's got his sunglasses that are lying right right by his head and i' I've talked with I've talked to colleagues about this you know and we were you know kind of kicking this around and thinking well was he trying to get somewhere for help you know perhaps going you because with a mud room that's an exit exit point or an entry point for a home generally on the backside was he trying to get out the door to go

somewhere I don't know was he oriented to time and space did he have any anything going on uh that would have incapacitated his ability to communicate those sorts of things and there's still a lot of unknowns here as well as should I mean you know we we don't know everything about their lives and I don't know that we ever will but it seems as though that they had this in a very healthy way a codependent relationship with him being very dependent upon Betsy yeah and I to talk about the medicine a bit because the sheriff

would not go into details about who the particular meds were prescribed to and what the specific ones were on the counter but we do know from a search warrant that there were three types of medication that were taken by deputies um one was a blood pressure kind of calcium blocker medicine another was a thyroid medication and then some Tylenol um certainly that paints a picture of some of the health issues uh in the house that that happened with people as they get older but um I think about you know as we try to think about

what could happen like if somebody was to overdose can is that possible with any of these medications uh yeah I suppose it is uh you know overdosing is generally possible with just about everything right U but um depending upon what that Med was it was spread about the the one Med that you mentioned which is uh you had stated it's a blood pressure med it's I'm probably Mis uh mispronouncing it uh as I've said it on on YouTube multiple times dilm I think it was something along those lines it's like a calcium calcium blocker um

medication for blood pressure yeah for blood pressure and here's the most important part I think for Angina so if you think about if you've ever been around anybody that takes nitroglycerin tablets you know where it goes subl lingal beneath the beneath the tongue and they're having chest pains um you know it's not the same as uh Nitro tablet but it is used also in addition to uh blood pressure um uh maintenance is also used for the purposes if you're experiencing angina you have like chronic angina so and what is angina is chest pain specifically you

know it's this kind of and some people kind of have um kind of a persistent angana you know particularly if they're blood pressure spikes and they have high blood pressure and it's not maintained they'll always go around with you know this kind of pain in their chest and of course when you're having uh you know classic what they refer to as a heart attack or an MI uh it intensifies significantly sometimes people won't feel it at all but obviously they this is a diagnosis that's been made they did collect from my understanding I don't have

the warrant in front of me but there was also a medical record program or something like this my yeah yeah my kind yeah and it kind of monitors what's going on I think the key here um and if the police have ruled that please keep in mind that in these kinds of cases if the police have ruled out that this is uh something that is not Sinister it's not criminal this investigation is going to migrate from them to the state me okay and the stateum and their investigators will have to get in contact with the

attending physicians now real key here I believe is to find out when Miss Arawa and Mr Hackman last had physician visits uh were they working on tele Med uh where they're just talking you know over the computer to you know some physician that's off somewhere or were they actually going to uh going to a physician's office and being examined you know where they're putting a blood pressure cuff on them and checking their blood sugar and all those other things that come along I'd really be fascinated to know that uh and there was kind of a

little hint about this um I don't really know what to take away from this but it has been stated I believe that U as a result of covid uh Miss Arawa made the choice to isolate them now I don't know if that isolation has continued I don't necessarily think that it had because Miss Arawa was involved I think that she had opened a business with a friend in uh in Santa Fe uh did they still get out and about the way they had in the past or were they still just kind of at home and

if they're just at home then did they have any kind of home health care that was coming by to check on them you got to keep in mind you know Jean hackins is 95 years old um you know he would need some type of Care at some level it's just how extens was that and what were specifically what were his diagnosis you know had he had any kind of heart problems in the past well if you're talking about a pacemaker yeah there's a problem with the heart rhythm um was he being treated for um you

know as as terrible as this is uh dementia and that would explain you know this kind of lag in time uh I don't know if he was treated for it or not but had that been going on so this is these are people and specifically Mr Hackman that would need to be seen by a physician U you know more frequently than not I I think about the dog too which is the this it's like the third wheel to all of this is you know if there was some event for him and a medical event for

her but then it's like this dog passes away um and we don't know how old the dog was I've heard you know and who hasn't heard theories over the last couple of days where if the dog was in a closet maybe the do didn't have access to food um and and that could have been the cause of death how long typically does it take to do an autopsy on an animal uh not long at all um you know probably the same length uh you know as uh you know as humans uh and you would need

somebody skilled in veterinary medicine and they've got you know they've got a great veterinary school uh there in um in in New Mexico and they would do what's referred to on on a dog as a uh a necropsy and these people are skilled at it you know they can look for you know different things I I've heard you know I've heard the thing about the closet I've also heard that this animal had been in a carrier and look man yeah and if he's you know if he's locked up in there and again this is so

horrible because I I love talks I have to admit and I know Mr Hackman did too particularly had an affinity for Shepherds and um if that dog was in that kennel and the dog didn't have water um water is the key here you know within two to three days that dog could pass on and it would be you know quite a horrific death uh but again you would have to establish that by doing an examination on the dog by a veterinarian that could give you an indication because you know there's there's signs that you can

see you know for instance I mentioned dehydration there's things that that you can actually look for there things that you can actually look for with uh with dehydration that you can see grossly at autopsy or necropsy when the the animal's body is open you can appreciate those sorts of things and of course there's testing uh uh Chemical Testing that can be conducted on a blood draw as well and I hope that they I hope that they went went to that length relative to uh to this animal because you know look for for every unanswered question

question there will be more questions it's best to go ahead in my experience at least to clear all these up when you have all of the stuff at your disposal from Jump Street and for you just as we've followed this story and it seems like it just has built up day by day where the news comes out and you're you know Jee Hackman's one of the great actors of all time and and and then there's the the phras you know doc they say no signs of Foul Play but then the question becomes like well then

what is it and and that just seems to be a question that's been getting bigger how uncommon is this type of situation like for you in all your years how often have you seen something like this where at this point it just doesn't seem like we have answers uh it's not uncommon and uh again this comes back to not just the exam that uh the pathologist did the other day uh but everything that is still you know kind of hanging out there relative to histological testing the tissue that I'd mentioned or or uh not testing

but examination once those slides are fixed and also the toxicology the toxicology will go to the state lab and one of the I think that one of the things that people lose sight of is that yes Mr Hackman is an international Superstar and as far as I'm concerned next to Robert Duval my two favorite actors by the way I'm heartbroken over those um but they're citizens and there a whole line of people that have been autopsied and their blood work and their urine and everything else that we that we get at autopsy has gone as

well so unless there is some person that steps up and says we're going to move this to the front of line we'll have to wait until those samples are tested and there's nothing underhanded or Sinister about it it's just that it's the nature of government and the way government works when you're talking about testing samples um and you know uh it's been well documented over the years that crime labs are really backed up uh and they're backed up in many cases because of a lot of DUI blood draws that you know that supersedes many things

and you know even in my experience uh you know DUI blood draws will literally Trump homicide cases because there's so many of them and so it really gets clogged up and I'm saying all of this just so that people kind of understand why it takes so long and and you want them to be thorough they're going to run we have what's referred to as a standard panel uh which are major drugs of abuse that's done for everybody and then you look for therapeutic drugs that are prescribed you know by The Physician okay so in addition

to that we have these other drugs that were mentioned in this legal document and we have these this open vial of medication that's spread on the counter um so all of that will those drugs will be specifically tested for so that you can get you know levels and uh when it comes to medication you literally have what it refer to as therapeutic levels and you have toxic levels and that applies to just about any kind of of drug that's out there even aspirin or camenen or you know whatever it is that you want to you

want to talk about um they all have therapeutic levels and they have toxic levels and so you have to examine that in that context and then on top of it you have this issue of of uh these these bodies have been down for a while and so that's that can to a certain degree it can um create problem it's not going to be anything that they can't overcome but it just it further exacerbates the situation yeah it's it's fascinating to talk about obviously the the loss of life and is sad and you think of their

families and and so many people just are interested to to hear how this happened and and to see this story play out Joseph Scott Morgan it's always great to have you on Long crime thank you for your perspective we appreciate it no worries thank you guys the sheriff says it could take weeks if not longer for the final autopsy and Toxicology test results to come back but we'll continue to follow this story as those questions continue to be asked for on the case presented by law and crime I'm Chris Stewart we'll see you next time

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