Hello, everyone and welcome to police off the cuff real crime stories.

I'm your host, retired NYPD Sergeant Bill Cannon, a 27-year veteran of the NYPD.

You know, sad news coming out of Santa Fe, New Mexico,

the actor Gene Hackman and his wife,

Betsy Arakawa, were found dead inside their home.

Preliminary reports were they were looking at an accidental perhaps death.

They were thinking of carbon monoxide poisoning.

But there are actually five causes of death, five ways death can be determined.

Homicide, suicide, accidental, natural, and undetermined.

I would submit to you this death right now is undetermined. And there are a lot of people

are jumping to as foul play. Any good homicide investigator knows that every death that you respond to,

you treat as a homicide until facts and circumstances and evidence indicate otherwise.

So they're throwing out this word. It's suspicious. We need to wait and really see what are the reasons people are saying potentially that this is this foul play involved. Yes, they were at a high level of decomposition, which indicates they could be dead for a week or more.

Don't forget the air in Santa Fe, New Mexico is extremely dry, undetermined what the temperature

was in the house, all of those things, will be determining factors. However,

you have to, as I said, you have to always investigate a suspicious death, if it is at all suspicious.

There is no signs on the bodies of any blunt trauma, of any foul play whatsoever that can be determined at the scene.

Now, there is death protocol at the scene of a death scene.

And medical legal investigators do their checklist at the scene, which includes examining, doing a cursory examination of body,

taking the body's temperature, and doing an examination of the body.

But the real thorough examination is not conducted until the bodies get to the medical examiner's office

and x-rays and autopsies that take. until the bodies get to the medical examiner's office.

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