Tests Show Carbon Monoxide Didn't Kill Hackman, Wife

New Mexico authorities investigating the deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa said Friday afternoon that the couple's remains tested negative for carbon monoxide. The cause of death in the case is still unknown, said Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza, the AP reports. The sheriff said he's still not ruling anything out in the deaths of the Oscar-winning actor and his wife. That includes foul play, though it's not seen as a strong possibility. "I think I'm pretty confident there is no foul play just based on the lack of evidence of foul play, but we of course are not ruling that out," Mendoza told the Today show on Friday. The couple was found dead in their Santa Fe home on Wednesday. A search warrant affidavit filed that day described circumstances "suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation." The fire department said there were no signs of a carbon monoxide leak or gas leak.

• Medications. The sheriff said information about pills found near Arakawa's body has been passed to the medical investigator's office, NBC News reports. "That's obviously very important evidence at the scene," he said. "So yes, we're looking at that specifically and other medications that were possibly in the residence. That is something of concern." Arakawa's body was found in a bathroom at the home and Hackman's was in a mudroom. With both, there were signs of a sudden fall, police said.

• Initial autopsy results. The sheriff's office said preliminary findings showed "no external trauma to either individual," and "there were no apparent signs of foul play," the Guardian reports. Mendoza said Friday that toxicology reports could take three months or longer. "It looks like they died of some kind of toxicity," Dr. Michael Baden, New York City's former chief medical examiner, tells Fox News. After the tests results were in, Dr. Philip Keen, the retired chief medical examiner in Maricopa County, Arizona, said it would be unlikely for a person who tests negative for carbon monoxide initially to later be found to have been poisoned by it.
• They could have been dead for weeks. "It's very difficult to put a timeline together, even with the help of the Office of the Medical Investigator, just based on their body and other evidence on the body," Mendoza said when asked on Today how long the couple had been dead for. "It appears, several days, possibly even up to a couple weeks." He said investigators are trying to determine when they last spoke to anybody, but it's "a challenge because they were very private individuals." The bodies were found by a maintenance worker, who made an emotional 911 call.
• Mummification. The bodies of the 95-year-old actor and his 65-year-old wife were partially decomposed with mummification in the hands and feet, according to the search warrant affidavit. Forensic scientist Joseph Scott Morgan at Jacksonville State University tells CNN that mummification, when a body dries out instead of decomposing, is unusual, but Santa Fe is "a very arid environment, and you only get mummification most of the time in very arid environments where you're absent any kind of significant humidity." Baden says the process can take a few days to a week.
• Their dog. Police initially said a dog at the property died in a kennel. They later clarified that the German shepherd was found dead in a crate not far from Arakawa's body, CNN reports. Two healthy dogs were found at the home.

(More Gene Hackman stories.)