Gene Hackman

Timeline

1. Sep 1994
   The GeBe Revocable Trust is created.
2. Jun 7, 2005
   Hackman executes his will and the Gene Hackman Living Trust, naming Arakawa as sole beneficiary, personal representative and successor trustee. Arakawa's will, also from 2005, contains a 90-day survivorship requirement.
3. Sep 2019
   Michael G. Sutin, the first alternate personal representative under both wills, dies.
4. Feb 11–12, 2025
   Betsy Arakawa dies of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome at 65. Accounts differ by a day on the date.
5. Feb 18, 2025
   Gene Hackman dies at 95 of cardiovascular disease with Alzheimer's a significant contributing factor — roughly seven days after his wife, and 83 days short of her will's 90-day survivorship requirement.
6. Feb 26, 2025
   Both are found at their Santa Fe home.
7. Mar 6, 2025
   Julia L. Peters, the second alternate, is appointed personal representative. Notice is mailed to Hackman's three children the next day.
8. Mar 20, 2025
   Judge Maria Sanchez-Gagne appoints Avalon Trust, LLC as temporary successor trustee, the designated successor having predeceased with no alternate named.
9. Aug 2026
   Eighteen months on, the administration remains open. The trusts, and therefore the beneficiaries, have not been made public.

What actually went wrong

• The survivorship number was never revisited. A 90-day clause signed in 2005 by a 75-year-old and a 45-year-old meant something different in 2025, when the couple were 95 and 65 and living in the same house. The clause did not change. The risk profile did.
• Both plans named the same person to do everything. Sole beneficiary, personal representative and successor trustee, in both directions. Perfectly normal — and it means a single week can vacate every office in both estates at once.
• The first alternate had been dead for five years. Sutin died in September 2019 and the documents were not updated. The plan survived on its second alternate.
• No alternate successor trustee at all. Arakawa was named successor trustee with nobody behind her, so a judge had to appoint one in March 2025.
• Twenty years without a review. Nothing about the 2005 documents was wrong when signed. They simply had not been read against the couple's actual circumstances since the Bush administration.

Would it have gone that way in Florida?

Same outcome — and in Florida the survivorship clause matters more, not less, because Florida gives you no statutory cushion at all.

Florida's rule is Fla. Stat. §732.601, the Simultaneous Death Law, and the first thing to know about it is what it is not.

Many states have adopted the Uniform Probate Code's version, which imposes a flat 120-hour survival requirement: survive by less than five days and you are treated as having predeceased, automatically, whether or not any document says so. Florida did not. Florida kept the older Uniform Simultaneous Death Act formulation, and it turns on evidence rather than on a clock. Under §732.601(1), where title to property or its devolution depends on priority of death and there is insufficient evidence that the persons died otherwise than simultaneously, the property of each is disposed of as if that person survived.

Read that carefully, because the consequence is counter-intuitive. In Florida, if you can prove an order of deaths, the order controls — by any margin. Five days. Five hours. Five minutes, if the evidence establishes it. Florida supplies no minimum survival period. The medical investigator's findings in the Hackman case, establishing dates about a week apart, would have settled the question here outright: she died first, he survived her, full stop.

The statute fills in the other common situations. §732.601(2) splits property among successive beneficiaries where the order among them cannot be established. §732.601(3) divides jointly held property and property held as tenants by the entirety half as if one survived and half as if the other did. §732.601(4) provides that where an insured and a life or accident policy beneficiary die together and the order cannot be established, the proceeds are distributed as if the insured survived the beneficiary — so the money goes down the insured's contingent chain rather than into a dead beneficiary's estate.

And the whole section opens with five words that decide the Hackman case: unless a contrary intention appears in the governing instrument. A survivorship clause is a contrary intention. It overrides the default. In Florida that clause is not decoration duplicating a statutory rule — it is the only survival period you will ever have. Arakawa's 90-day clause would do precisely the same work in Florida that it did in New Mexico.

So why 30, 60, 90 or 120 days, and never a year? Three reasons, and they are worth knowing before you pick a number. First, avoiding a double administration: without a clause, assets pass into the second spouse's estate and are probated twice within months, at two sets of costs. Second, direction of flow: in a blended family — Hackman's exact situation — a short survival can route a first spouse's assets through the second spouse and out to the second spouse's relatives rather than to the first spouse's children. Third, and the reason the outer limit is what it is: the federal marital deduction. Under IRC §2056(b)(3), a survivorship condition does not spoil the deduction only if the period does not exceed six months and the spouse in fact survives it. Draft twelve months and you can lose the marital deduction on a nine-figure estate. Six months is the ceiling; 30 to 120 days is where careful drafters live.

The Florida structural points are the same as New Mexico's, and Florida law supplies each of them. §732.513 expressly authorises the pour-over devise to the trustee of a trust identified in the will — which is why the trust, and the beneficiaries, stay private while the will becomes a public record. §736.0704 fills a vacancy in trusteeship: first from the trust's own terms, then by unanimous agreement of the qualified beneficiaries, and only then by the court. Naming an alternate keeps you out of the second and third steps entirely.

The honest caveat: none of this reaches a Florida homestead, which follows its own rules under Fla. Const. Art. X, §4 and Fla. Stat. §732.4015 whenever a spouse or minor child survives, no matter what the trust says.

The practical instruction, in three lines. Read your survivorship clause and know the number in it — and if you and your spouse live in the same house, travel together, and are past 70, ask whether that number still reflects what you want. Name three fiduciaries deep, ending with an institution that cannot predecease you. And re-read the whole plan every five years, because in this case the documents were not defective. They were simply twenty years old.

What people ask us about this.

Further reading

Third-party sites. Not ours, not endorsed, not kept current by us — just the places worth going next.

Sources

1. Gene Hackman had a will, but the public may never find out who inherits his $80M fortune — The Conversation, 2025
2. Who will inherit Gene Hackman's estate? — Keystone Law, 2025
3. Who will be handed Gene Hackman's estate uncertain as wills of actor and wife are revealed — The Hollywood Reporter, Mar 2025
4. Betsy Arakawa — death date, cause, and the Santa Fe timeline — Wikipedia
5. The tragic deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa: a timeline — ABC News, 2025
6. Records show Gene Hackman's wife researched symptoms of illness days before her death — NPR, Apr 16 2025
7. Fla. Stat. §732.601 — Simultaneous Death Law — The Florida Senate
8. Fla. Stat. §732.513 — Devises to trustee — The Florida Senate
9. 26 U.S.C. §2056(b)(3) — Interest of spouse conditional on survival for a limited period — Cornell Legal Information Institute

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Nearly every case in this archive turned on something ordinary — an unwitnessed page, a stale beneficiary line, a document nobody could find. Those are cheap to fix while you're alive and expensive to fix afterward.