A former police officer and a neighbor announced on
Wednesday that a Georgia grandmother who is now the widow of five attempted to
hire them to murder her fourth husband more than twenty years ago.
Ex police officer Allen Lawrence informed the Associated
Press that he had warned North
Carolina authorities repetitively for two months
before Harold Gentry was shot dead in 1986 that Betty Gentry, now bearing the
name of Neumar, wished for her husband to die.
Betty Neumar was obsessed with money and intended to collect
her spouse’s $20,000 life insurance, according to an accusation released on
Tuesday.
The woman, aged 76, is indicted on three counts of
solicitation to commit first-degree murder. She was initially arrested and
charged in May with only one solicitation count, but officials now report that
she tried to hire three different people to murder Gentry in the six weeks
before his bullet-perforated body was discovered in his rural North Carolina
residence. After she was detained, authorities in Georgia,
Ohio and Florida have begun to reconsider the deaths
of her first child and four of the five men she married.
Betty Neumar is imprisoned in Stanly County
jail on a $500,000 bond.
The indictment charges Neumar of attempting to hire Allen
Lawrence and two women, Debbie Parker and Kathy Eudy, to take the life of her
husband. Debbie Parker is Lawrence’s
sister-in-law and both women were living in the same neighborhood as Betty
Neumar.
Three years after Harold Gentry’s death, Betty married her
fifth husband. John Neumar passed away in October, and investigators in Georgia are
trying to find out whether his death, officially registered as sepsis, a
bacterial infection of the body’s blood and tissues, might have been caused by
something else, such as arsenic poisoning.