CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) – To the outside world, Betty Neumar was a diminutive Georgia grandmother with a shock of white hair who operated beauty shops, attended church and raised money for charity. No one asked questions when her last husband died.

It wasn’t until North Carolina investigators in 2008 reopened a 25-year-old murder case that the dark secrets of her past began to unravel. Police discovered that Neumar, who grew up in Sheridan, had left behind a decades-long trail of five dead husbands in five states.

Any hope of answering lingering questions of her husbands’ deaths – or the missing pieces of her life – faded Monday upon word that the 79-year-old died of an illness in a Louisiana hospital.

“She took all those secrets to the grave,” said Al Gentry, who spent 25 years pressing North Carolina authorities in vain to re-examine the death of his brother, Harold Gentry, Neumar’s fourth husband.

Neumar died late Sunday or early Monday, her son-in-law Terry Sanders told The Associated Press.

“She was tough country girl and fought through a lot of pain,” said Sanders, who has been married 38 years to Neumar’s daughter, Peggy.

North Carolina authorities said they planned to look into her death. She was free on $300,000 bond on three counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder in the 1986 death of Harold Gentry. Her trial was postponed numerous times since her arrest in 2008.

“We’re going to make sure we examine the death certificate,” said Sheriff Rick Burris of Stanly County, N.C.

While investigating Gentry’s death, authorities discovered Neumar had been married five times since the 1950s and all but one union ended in her husband’s death. Investigators in three states reopened several of the cases but have since closed them.

For Al Gentry, Neumar’s death is bittersweet. He spent a good part of his adult life pushing law enforcement authorities to solve the case – and he says he knows who was respon sible: Neumar. The case was finally reopened in January 2008 after he asked Burris, then the newly elected sheriff, to look into it.

The mysteries in Neumar’s past may never be solved.

From the beginning, law enforcement authorities told The Associated Press they had struggled to piece together details of Neumar’s life because her story kept changing. But interviews, documents and court records provided an outline of her history in North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Georgia, the states where she was married.

She was born Betty Johnson in 1931 in Ironton, a hardscrabble southeastern Ohio town along the West Virginia border. She graduated from high school in 1949 and married Clarence Malone in November 1950. She told her friends she wanted to leave her hometown for a better life. It’s unclear when their marriage broke up. Their son, Gary, was born March 13, 1952.

Malone remarried twice. He was shot once in the back of the head outside his auto shop in a small town southwest of Cleveland in November 1970. His death was ruled a homicide, although police said there were no signs of robbery.

Gary was eventually adopted by Neumar’s second husband, James A. Flynn, although it’s unclear when she met or married him. She told investigators that he “died on a pier” somewhere in New York in the mid-1950s. She and Flynn had a daughter, Peggy.

In the mid-1960s, Neumar, who was a beautician in Jacksonville, Fla., married husband No. 3: Richard Sills, who was in the Navy. For the past two years, Sills’ son, Michael, has been urging police to reinvestigate his father’s death, which was ruled a suicide.

On April 18, 1967, police found his body in the bedroom of the couple’s mobile home in Big Coppitt Key, Fla. Neumar told police they were alone and arguing, when he pulled out a gun and shot himself.