The story about Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa has thrown up new complications.

A private healthcare clinic in New Mexico has cast doubt on official findings about the timing of the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, claiming that she rang them on 12 February – the day after police say she died.
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Postmortem results indicated that Arakawa died of hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne respiratory disease, on 11 February, a week before her husband is believed to have died from heart disease. His pacemaker showed no activity after 18 February; he is also believed to have suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
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Dr Child cast further doubt on the official cause of death of his clinic’s prospective client, saying: “I am not a hantavirus expert but most patients who have that diagnosis die in hospital. It is surprising that Mrs Hackman spoke to my office on the phone on 10 February and again on 12 February and didn’t appear in respiratory distress.

A Los Angeles-based doctor told the Mail on Sunday: “Respiratory failure is not sudden – it is something that worsens over several days. 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.”

These discrepancies will likely be resolved in time but it does illustrate that it is difficult to precisely pinpoint the time and cause of death and TV shows and films often give a highly unrealistic impression. In those shows, the body is sent to the pathologist and within a day, the police are given the cause of death and a narrow window of time when it occurred. In reality, toxicology tests to see if the person was poisoned or had ingested drugs take quite a long time time to do. And the pathologists often have other cases to deal with. One can allow for some artistic leeway in this area since dramas cannot have detectives just sitting around for days or even weeks until they get the report on the cause of death.

Less excusable is providing absurdly narrow windows for time of death obtained from the condition of the body. In her somewhat macabre yet humorous book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach describes how forensic crime investigators use an open field where dead bodies are strewn all over the place under all kinds of conditions to study how they decompose. She describes walking gingerly among the corpses in various stages of decay and paints a picture of a gruesome scene and the appalling stench of putrefaction that envelopes you. The rate of decay can vary widely depending on a whole host of factors, such as the presence of insects, environment in which it was found, ambient temperature, and so on. The extent to which food has been digested can also provide an indication. The point is that there is a wide variability in establishing time of death from the state of the corpse.

You would think that writers of these dramas would give a nod to the complexity of such analyses but often they go to the other extreme. I saw a show where someone had been killed and thrown into a swimming pool. The body was later taken out and kept in a freezer for a day before then being taken and thrown into a lake. After another day, the body surfaced and was recovered by the police and sent to the forensic pathologist. In the show, the very next day the pathologist gave the time of death to within half an hour three days earlier! I laughed out loud at that point. If the plot needs such a narrow window of time to be solved, the writers need to think of another way to get it. This is just laziness.