Nobody Suspected Her for 22 Years. Until Police Uncovered 5 Dead Husbands

Nobody Suspected Her for 22 Years. Until Police Uncovered 5 Dead Husbands

Betty Neumar married five men and buried all five of them. Three were shot dead decades apart in three different states. Only one of those deaths was ever officially investigated as a homicide. That one was her fourth husband, Harold Gentry, found dead inside their own home with nothing stolen but a life insurance policy taken out months before. His brother spent the next 22 years trying to force someone to look closer. What he eventually uncovered didn’t just reopen one case—it exposed a woman who’d been hiding in plain sight for half a century.

Betty LaFont Johnson was 18 years old when she married a mechanic named Clarence Malone in Ironton, Ohio, in November 1950. The marriage lasted less than two years; Betty later described it as abusive, and they divorced in 1951. Their son, Gary, was born that March. For nearly two decades afterward, Clarence Malone’s life had nothing to do with hers, at least on paper. He remarried and rebuilt an auto shop in Medina, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland. She remarried, too, more than once, changing her name along the way. Then, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1970, someone shot Malone once in the back of the head outside his shop. Nothing was stolen, and no suspect was ever named. Investigators treated it as an isolated homicide in a small Ohio town because, as far as anyone could tell, that’s exactly what it was. Nineteen years had passed since Betty last carried his name, and no one thought to ask where she had been.

By 1970, she was already three husbands deep. Her second marriage to a man named James Flynn began not long after she left Malone. They had a daughter, Peggy, and Flynn adopted Betty’s son from her first marriage. On paper, it looked like a clean start. It ended in 1955 in New York when Flynn died. What actually happened to him depends on who is telling the story. Betty told people he froze to death in a truck; others who knew the family said he was shot on a pier. No autopsy was ever performed, and no official cause of death was ever settled beyond a certificate. Whichever version was true, only one person was in a position to know for certain, and no one asked her to be honest.

By the time Betty married her third husband, a Navy petty officer named Richard Sills, two of her previous husbands were already dead—one shot outside his own business, one gone under a story that changed depending on the day. Not a single investigator in any state had connected them to each other or to her. There was a reason for that: Betty wasn’t just changing husbands; she was changing names. Over the following decades, investigators would eventually document as many as 28 aliases tied to her—different names, different driver’s licenses, different bank accounts. In 1970, to police in Ohio, Betty Neumar didn’t exist yet, nor did the pattern.

Richard Sills was a U.S. Navy petty officer, and by the mid-1960s, he believed he’d built something steady with Betty. They lived together in a mobile home in Big Coppitt Key, Florida, with her children from her earlier marriages. He was the third man to marry her, with no way of knowing he wouldn’t be the last, or that two men before him were already dead. He was found in their bedroom with a gunshot wound. Betty told police they’d been arguing alone when he pulled out a .22 caliber pistol and shot himself. There were no other witnesses, no autopsy was performed, and within hours, the death was ruled a suicide and the case was closed.

Decades later, a Navy medical examiner reviewed surviving military documentation of that night and found something that didn’t sit right: records suggested Sills may have been shot twice, not once—one bullet through the heart and a second that may have struck his liver. No one asked at the time how a man supposedly shooting himself once ended up with evidence of two wounds, because no autopsy existed to answer it. Even the timeline itself was never fully settled, as some records placed his death in 1965 while others placed it in 1967.

Sills’ son, Michael, was too young at the time to understand what had happened to his father. He would spend years as an adult trying to get someone to look at those Navy records again. In 2009, Monroe County investigators in Florida finally agreed to take a second look. They planned to exhume Sills’ body from an Ocala cemetery for an autopsy, but then discovered it wouldn’t matter: Florida law placed a statute of limitations on prosecuting anything short of first-degree murder, and decades had already passed. The lead investigator put it plainly: they didn’t believe it was premeditated because the couple had been arguing when he died. The exhumation never happened. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service Cold Case Squad reviewed the surviving military documents anyway and confirmed Neumar had received life insurance money following his death, though investigators never disclosed how much.

By the time Betty buried her third husband, she had already outlived a mechanic, a man who either froze or was shot on a pier, and now a sailor—ruled a suicide on her word alone with no forensic evidence to confirm or contradict a single detail of what she told police that night. She was 35 years old, with one marriage left before the one that would finally catch up with her: to a retired Army veteran named Harold Gentry in a small town in North Carolina.

Harold Gentry spent 21 years in the U.S. Army before he met Betty. By the time they married on January 19, 1968, in Charlton County, Georgia, he was a career soldier close to retirement, and she was already on her fourth name. They eventually settled in Norwood, North Carolina, a small town in Stanly County. They had a daughter together. Neighbors knew Gentry as a retired veteran, while Betty ran her household and later described the marriage as stormy. It lasted 18 years.

On July 14, 1986, Harold Gentry was found shot multiple times inside their home. The scene was staged to look like a burglary gone wrong, but nothing had been stolen and there were no signs of forced entry—no broken window, no forced door, nothing missing. Betty was in Georgia at the time. Investigators had a body, a staged scene, and almost nothing else. They also discovered a detail: months before Gentry’s death, a roughly $20,000 life insurance policy had been taken out in his name, listing Betty as the beneficiary. She collected the payout not long after he was buried.

There was one more thing investigators had and chose not to use. Before Gentry died, a man had already come forward claiming Betty had approached him to kill her husband. Police at the time dismissed the tip as unreliable, seeing no reason to believe a 50-something churchgoing grandmother was capable of soliciting a murder. With no forced entry, no witnesses, and a dismissed warning that nobody revisited, the case went cold almost immediately. Harold Gentry’s file sat in a cabinet in Stanly County, one more unsolved rural homicide, while the woman who collected his insurance money went on to marry a fifth husband in a different state entirely.

Harold Gentry had a brother named Al, and Al Gentry spent the next 22 years trying to get law enforcement to reopen the case. He asked as sheriffs changed, and asked again as files sat closed in old cabinets. What kept Al Gentry going was the detail that never left him: that his brother’s death had been quietly written off, while Betty Neumar had gone on to marry a fifth husband, build a life in a different state, and become a churchgoing grandmother to everyone else. By his own account, the toll was real. Reflecting years later on what the fight cost him, he said the stress had worn him down, but he had to keep going because his brother no longer had a voice of his own.

That question wouldn’t be answered by more asking; it would be answered by an unrelated death in a different state more than 20 years later. John Neumar died in October 2007 in Augusta, Georgia, at 79 years old. His official cause of death was sepsis, a blood infection, but his children believed something else entirely. Betty had married John Neumar in 1991, moving to Augusta, Georgia, where she built a public reputation as a devoted grandmother, running beauty shops, attending church, and raising money for local charities. Behind that image, financial records told a messier story: years into the marriage, she and John Neumar owed roughly $200,000 across 43 credit cards, eventually filing for bankruptcy. His children also noticed that visits grew rarer and calls grew shorter, feeling they were gradually pushed out of their father’s life while Betty controlled more of his affairs.

They suspected Betty had poisoned him, but by the time they raised that suspicion, Betty had him cremated within days, before an autopsy could be performed. His children learned about his death from an obituary. An anonymous tip reached authorities in Richmond County, Georgia, suggesting Betty may have poisoned him. Investigators searched the couple’s home, exhumed John Neumar’s ashes, and sent them for toxicology testing specifically looking for arsenic. They found no poison and no forensic evidence of foul play. By August 2008, that investigation formally closed with no charges.

However, while Georgia investigators were looking into John Neumar’s death, they started asking basic background questions about his wife. The answers didn’t add up to one woman—they added up to 28. Investigators found Betty had operated under as many as 28 different aliases across her life, with different names, bank accounts, driver’s licenses, and passports. Pulling on that thread uncovered four other dead husbands: Clarence Malone, James Flynn, Richard Sills, and Harold Gentry.

Word of what Georgia investigators found made its way to Stanly County, North Carolina. On May 21, 2008, investigators arrested 76-year-old Betty Neumar at her home in Augusta, Georgia, charging her with solicitation to commit first-degree murder in the death of Harold Gentry. It wasn’t new forensic evidence that led to her arrest, but three individuals—a former police officer, a neighbor, and a third man—who separately stated that in the six weeks before Harold Gentry was shot, Betty had approached them asking them to kill him.

She was extradited to North Carolina in June 2008 and held without bond in the Stanly County jail. On July 22, 2008, a grand jury indicted her on three counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Prosecutors pointed to the roughly $20,000 life insurance policy taken out on Harold Gentry’s life months before he died as the motive. At her bond hearing, prosecutors laid out her 28 aliases and argued she was a flight risk, leading the judge to deny her request for a lower bond. Al Gentry was in that courtroom, stating afterward that seeing her there was a relief after two decades of effort.

Eventually, Betty Neumar’s bond was reduced to $300,000, which she posted on October 16, 2008. She moved in with family near Fort Polk, Louisiana, to await trial, which was set for February 2011. In 2009, while awaiting trial, the BBC aired a documentary examining her case titled Black Widow Granny. On camera, Betty denied everything, presenting her life as a string of unfortunate coincidences and stating, “I cannot control when somebody dies. That’s God’s work.”

Starting in 2009, the proceedings faced continuous delays due to Neumar’s health, including a cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery. She missed multiple scheduled court dates in 2010. By February 2011, the trial was postponed again as her health deteriorated further.

On June 13, 2011, Betty Neumar died in a hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana, at age 79 from cancer, weeks before her rescheduled trial. Two of the three witnesses whose statements formed the basis of her indictment had also passed away prior to her death. With the key witnesses and the defendant deceased, the charges were formally dismissed without a trial, verdict, or conviction.

Four of the five deaths connected to Betty Neumar remain officially unsolved. As Al Gentry remarked when the legal proceedings concluded, she took those secrets to the grave.