A LEGEND'S TRAGIC END

IN A SHOCKING MYSTERY, THE OSCAR WINNER AND HIS WIFE ARE FOUND DEAD AT HOME. AS POLICE INVESTIGATE, HOLLYWOOD MOURNS

- TOM GLIATTO

Gene Hackman 1930-2025

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, Calif., 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.”

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 911.

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.