New evidence in the Gene Hackman case shows that his wife placed a phone call after police say she was already dead.
The shocking discovery has led cops to admit that they need to adjust their timeline of how Hackman and his wife both died at their Santa Fa home.
The twist came Monday when a Santa Fe doctor said that Betsy Arakawa called his office on February 12. That would have been impossible according to the initial story told by police, who said Arakawa died on February 11.
It is believed that Hackman was unaware of his wife's demise before he died about a week later from a heart condition, with Alzheimer's as a contributing factor.
Dr. Josiah Child of Cloudberry Health in New Mexico told the Daily Mail that Arakawa had called two weeks prior to her own death about getting her husband's heart checked out.
“Mrs. Hackman didn’t die on February 11 because she called my clinic on February 12,” Child told the Daily Mail this week. “She’d called me a couple of weeks before her death to ask about getting an echocardiogram [heart scan] for her husband.”
Child said Arakawa did not present any breathing problems when she called about an unrelated medical issue on February 12 - contradicting the medical examiner's conclusion that she died from a rare respiratory illness carried by rats, hantavirus.
Arakawa had cancelled a February 12 appointment two days earlier, saying her husband wasn't feeling well. She called the clinic again on the morning of February 12 and they told her to come in that afternoon.
The clinic tried calling Arakawa back twice, but she didn't respond.
“We made her an appointment but she never showed up. She did not show any symptoms of respiratory distress. The appointment wasn’t for anything related to hantavirus. We tried calling her a couple of times with no reply," Child said.
After Child's bombshell interview, Santa Fe police independently confirmed through cellphone data that Arakawa was still alive on Feb. 12.
“We can now confirm that Mrs. Hackman’s phone was utilized on the morning of February 12 to call a medical center in Santa Fe, Cloudberry Health,” the sheriff’s office told Today in a statement.
Arakawa's rapid decline has baffled some medical specialists, who say it's highly unusual for a respiratory infection to kill so suddenly.
"Respiratory failure is not sudden – it is something that worsens over several days," a Los Angeles doctor told the Daily Mail.
"Most people get admitted to the ER [emergency room] because they are having trouble breathing. It's exceedingly rare for a seemingly healthy 65-year-old to drop dead of it. In fact, no one's heard of such a thing."
