Bad Luck or Black Widow? The Curious Case of Betty Neumar
Married and widowed five times under mysterious circumstances Betty Neumar was arrested at seventy-six for hiring a hitman to kill her fourth husband
Dubbed in the media as the “Black Widow Granny,” Betty Neumar’s arrest sparked a media frenzy. She looked like a harmless, little grandma, but as investigators began to unravel Betty’s life, with every stone unturned, it brought more questions than answers. She had been married at least five times, had used twenty-eight aliases throughout her life, and had numerous credit cards and passports with various names.
Each of her husbands died under mysterious circumstances, usually a gunshot wound, and either Betty had the worst luck in the history of time, or she may have been the one to orchestrate that bad luck.
She was born Betty Johnson in 1931, in Ironton, Ohio. Her early life was anything but glamorous, she had been born into great poverty, and like many other young women in such circumstances, her best chance to get out of poverty was to marry well. She graduated high school in 1949 and married her high school sweetheart, Clarence Malone, in 1950. He was a mechanic. Though the marriage was short-lived, in court documents, Betty claimed that Malone…
