I grew up poor and I know what that is as the mobile home I grew up in had one. It’s also called the laundry room with an exterior door. The converted school bus I also lived in had one, but we called it the front door (the main door as compared to the “back door” aka emergency door at the back).
You walk in and take off your mud covered boots. And as others have said, it’s nice to have a place to sit down to do so. Nothing fancy about this.
My WAG - she fell or had an emergency situation in the bathroom (where she died) - he heard the commotion from the ‘mud room’ and had a heart attack on his way to her (where he died).
I actually remember him mainly from a largely-forgotten early 1990s movie called “Class Action”, which was about a lawsuit where father and daughter lawyers, long estranged, are on opposite ends of a, you guessed it, class action suit. It was basically a TV movie put into the theaters, but I enjoyed it.
It seems like the more we know about this, the stranger the story becomes. Either it’s going to have a bizarre explanation, or something very straightforward. MHO.
She was from Cameroon, about 10 years older than me, and she called me “boss” everytime we met. I wasn’t her boss, so I asked her once why she said this and she replied that it was a term of respect in her home country, and that the equivalent for a woman was “Mama”. After that, I started calling her “Mama”, of course.
The look on our clients’ faces when they heard us was priceless (I very much do not look like I’m from Sub-Saharan Africa).
[/hijack]
What it now looks like is that Hackman fell and died - as very old people do - and his wife took too many pills in a state of anguish. The poor dog died of thirst.
Or Ms Arakawa died first (she was not a young person either) and Mr Hackman, in the throes of dementia, wandered around until he succumbed from dehydration or a fall. That would explain why no one saved the poor dog.
One of them died, and the other committed suicide.
He had a heart attack or a fall. She went to the bathroom to get his heart medicine. She had a fall.
She had a fall. He wanted to go get help from the neighbors. He had a heart attack or a fall in the mud room.
I have seen one report claim that the police found pills spilled on a countertop in the bathroom, but none on the floor. Speculation that the dog may have eaten the pills on the floor, and accidentally poisoned itself.
Falling is a big risk factor as one gets older (ask me how I know!). And though it may not be immediately fatal, it can have fatal consequences down the road, such as from a fractured hip or a concussion.
I’m thinking maybe the two surviving dogs killed Hackman and his wife, all to distract authorities from their real target, the third dog. The canine pair then (sloppily) tried to make each death look like an accident. Can’t deny they are the least likely suspects.
Not impossible, but fairly unlikely - cars run cleaner than they did, and it sounds like the couple were in different places in the house. The CO would have needed to permeate the entire house to a sufficient concentration to cause death, and this would require a very well-sealed house and a car with a full gas tank.
My husband’s uncle committed suicide by sitting in a closed garage with the engine running. This was in the early 1970s. My nephew tried the same thing, around 2010, and failed.
I think the latest reports are that it was NOT carbon monoxide poisoning, though it’s not an unreasonable first guess.