Mystery grew over the death of Gene Hackman‘s wife Betsy last night after a doctor revealed she had called his private clinic 24 hours after police claim she died.
The Santa Fe medical examiner claimed a post-mortem examination showed Betsy died of hantavirus, a rare rat-borne respiratory disease, on February 11 – a full week before her Oscar-winning husband died of heart failure combined with Alzheimer’s disease.
But last night Dr Josiah Child, a former emergency care specialist who now runs Cloudberry Health in Santa Fe, New Mexico, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Mrs Hackman didn’t die on February 11 because she called my clinic on February 12.
‘She’d called me a couple of weeks before her death to ask about getting an echocardiogram [heart scan] for her husband. She was not a patient of mine, but one of my patients recommended Cloudberry to her. She made an appointment for herself for February 12. It was for something unrelated to anything respiratory.’
He added that two days before she was due to see him, she cancelled her appointment, saying her husband was not well.
Dr Child said: ‘She called back on the morning of February 12 and spoke to one of our doctors who told her to come in that afternoon.
‘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.’
The doctor’s revelation that Mrs Hackman could have been alive for at least a day longer than the coroner has claimed casts further mystery over her death.
The 65-year-old was found on the bathroom floor of the couple’s isolated Santa Fe home surrounded by pills with her husband on the floor of a utility room 20ft away.
Hellbound and Down 