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Investigators say police should re-examine cases involving other husbands
Published on Sunday, Jun 29, 2008
From staff and wire reports
A former Ohio woman who has been widowed five times has been charged with solicitation of murder in the death of her fourth husband in North Carolina.
Investigators there are urging authorities in other communities where her husbands or ex-husbands died, including Medina County, to re-examine the deaths.
Betty Neumar, 76, who now lives in Augusta, Ga., is charged in the July 1986 shooting death of her fourth husband, Harold Gentry, in North Carolina. He was found shot inside the couple's home.
She is being held in lieu of $500,000 bond in the Stanly County, N.C., jail.
Neumar's first husband, Charles Malone, was shot to death in November 1970 in Brunswick in Medina County. The case was declared a homicide, but it remains unsolved. Police said there were no signs of robbery.
Malone, 40, who had split from Neumar about 20 years earlier, died from a shotgun blast that struck him while he worked on his car in front of the Collision Body Shop on Pearl Road, according to three Beacon Journal stories from 1970.
Brunswick and Medina County investigators were not available for comment Saturday.
Authorities in Georgia and Florida already have said they are re-examining deaths there.
Fifth husband John Neumar
died in October in Augusta. Authorities are investigating whether his death — officially listed as sepsis, bacterial infections of the body's blood and tissues — might have another cause, such as arsenic poisoning.
Her third husband, Richard Sills, was found dead in his apartment in the Florida Keys in 1965. Neumar told police they were alone in a room arguing when he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head. Authorities concluded he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
However, the Monroe County (Fla.) Sheriff's Office said it is looking at the case again after learning about Neumar's charges in North Carolina.
She also was married to James Flynn, who was born in New York. He died in 1954. The circumstances surrounding their marriage and his death are unknown.
Putting it all together
Police are still trying to piece together Neumar's life in Ohio, Florida and Georgia — states where she was married — and talking to friends and family members.
The Associated Press found records showing she was born in 1931 in Ironton, Ohio, and graduated high school in South Point, Ohio, in the late 1940s.
Records show her marriage to Malone was rocky.
Shortly after their wedding on Nov. 25, 1950, they moved in with her parents in Ironton. She was 18; he was 19 and working for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.
But on Dec. 15, 1951, she filed a court complaint claiming her husband had abused her. She asked a judge to order him to stop ''going about or upon the premises'' where they lived, and to stop ''disposing'' of her property. It's unclear what happened to that complaint or when the marriage broke up. There's no record of their divorce being filed in Lawrence County.
Family members of Gentry and John Neumar said she told them she was married only once and that her first husband died of cancer.
''She said she nursed him the whole time,'' said Al Gentry, Harold Gentry's brother.
After Malone and Betty Neumar split, he remarried twice and opened a body shop in Brunswick.
Malone's youngest brother, Robert, has told the Ironton Tribune that he doesn't believe Neumar was involved in his brother's death.
''She did not kill my brother,'' Robert Malone told the newspaper.
''He always walked on the edge. He was in the trucking business and got some cross ways with some people. He got murdered.''
After Neumar's marriage to Malone dissolved in the early 1950s, she married Flynn. Police say she had two children by the early marriages, including a son with Malone.
Leaving Ohio
At some point, Neumar moved to Jacksonville, Fla., where she began cutting hair, according to Florida records. On her cosmetology license from 1961, she used the name Betty Flynn.
She worked in beauty shops in the early 1960s. In 1964, she married Sills and moved into an apartment in Big Coppitt near Key West.
After Sills' death, Neumar met Gentry in Florida. The couple married in the late 1960s in Georgia, and after he retired from the Army, they moved to the town of Norwood, about an hour east of Charlotte.
She married John Neumar three years after Gentry's death.
Harold Gentry's brother had begged investigators for two decades to take another look at the case, but his requests were ignored. It was finally reopened last year after he asked newly elected Sheriff Rick Burris to look into it.
Former police officer Donnie Mullis has told the AP that an informant talked to him a few weeks before Gentry was killed, saying then-Betty Gentry offered him money to do the job. Mullis said he passed along the information to his two superiors, but they ignored the tip.
Stanly County Sheriff's Detective Scott Williams has said his office is looking into why no one took the informant's tip seriously.
Neumar's attorney, Charles Parnell, did not return calls seeking comment Friday.
From staff and wire reports
Get the full article here.
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