Police in the US are investigating whether a 76-year-old grandmother, charged with having hired a hitman to murder an ex-husband, may also have been responsible for killing four other husbands.
The grandmother, Betty Neumar, who has already been dubbed the Black Widow by the media, is in jail in North Carolina after being extradited from her home state, Georgia.
Sheriff Rick Burris, of Stanley county, North Carolina, disclosed yesterday that one of the alleged hitmen had approached the police before the death of one of her husbands, Harold Gentry, to inform them that she had been trying to recruit a killer, but the police failed to take him seriously. The alleged hitman told police he had been offered cash and a pick-up truck.
Neumar, a resident of Augusta, Georgia, has been charged with solicitation to commit murder, with bail set at $500,000 (£250,000). She lived in Albemarle, North Carolina, at the time of her husband's death in 1986.
The case had been under investigation since then. "She was a suspect for a long time but we didn't have enough evidence. Now we do," Burris said.
Gentry's brother, Al, told the Associated Press he had suspected her almost from the time his brother's body was found with gunshot wounds inside their home. Neumar, who had not been at home on the day of the slaying, turned up to see the house cordoned off by the police and the first thing she said was that she had been in Augusta the previous night.
"If she had gotten out of that car with tears in her eyes and asked me why would anybody kill Harold, I would never have suspected her at all," he said. "That's where she slipped up."
It was only after her arrest that police realised that she had been married five times, and each time the marriage had ended in the death of her husband.
The North Carolina police have notified their counterparts elsewhere in the country where Neumar is believed to have lived when she married.
Police in Georgia have opened their own investigation into the death of her husband John Neumar, who died in October. They searched her home in Augusta a fortnight ago, removing his cremated remains.
A police investigator, Lieutenant Scott Peebles, said the cause of Neumar's death was listed as sepsis. His remains would be tested to see if there were any factors that might have contributed to his death, such as arsenic.
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