State medical investigators estimated Arakawa died on Feb. 11, but she appeared to have contacted the clinic the next day, a sheriff's official said.

A doctor challenged the timeline of Betsy Arakawa’s death, after officials determined she died Feb. 11, one week before her and husband Gene Hackman’s deaths in their Santa Fe, New Mexico home.

Earlier this month, Dr Heather Jarrell, Chief Medical Examiner at the Office of the Medical Investigator in Santa Fe, announced that 65-year-old Arakawa’s cause of death was hantavirus — a rare illness contracted via contact with rodents like rats and mice.