CHARLOTTE, N.C. --- Authorities said Tuesday they will re-examine the shooting death of a man in the Florida Keys more than four decades ago, after learning he was the third of five husbands to Betty Neumar, a widow charged in the death of one of them.

"We're absolutely going to look into this," Monroe County, Fla., sheriff's Lt. Nancy Alvarez said. "We want to make sure she wasn't involved in his death."

When Richard Sills was found dead in his apartment in 1965, his wife told police they were arguing when he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head. Authorities quickly closed the case, saying he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Ms. Neumar, now 76, was charged last month in North Carolina with solicitation of murder in the July 1986 death of her fourth husband, Harold Gentry.

Investigators in Stanly County, Mr. Gentry's home, are urging authorities elsewhere to investigate deaths of the other husbands, including one in Augusta who died of an infection that could indicate he was poisoned.

Lt. Alvarez said Florida investigators planned to look at medical records and other evidence to see how Mr. Sills' case was handled.

"It's going to be a timely process, but we're on it," she said.

Ms. Neumar, who lives in Augusta, is being held on $500,000 bond in the Stanly County jail. A telephone message left for her attorney, Charles Parnell, wasn't returned Tuesday. Her daughter with Harold Gentry, who also lives in Augusta, has declined to comment.

Not much is known about Ms. Neumar's relationship with Mr. Sills or her first two husbands, who died in Ohio, investigators say.

But some details of her early life are beginning to emerge. The AP found records showing she was born in 1931 in Ironton, Ohio, and graduated high school in the late 1940s. Her first husband was Clarence Malone, who died in 1952. Her second husband, James Flynn, who was born in New York, died two years later. She had two children from those early marriages, but a son died in 1985.

At some point, Ms. Neumar moved to Jacksonville, Fla., where she began cutting hair, according to Florida records. In 1964, she married Mr. Sills and moved into an apartment in Big Coppitt outside Key West.

After Mr. Sills' death, Ms. Neumar met Mr. Gentry in Florida. The couple married in the late 1960s in Georgia, and after he retired from the Army, they moved to the town of Norwood, about an hour east of Charlotte.

Mr. Gentry was found shot to death inside the couple's home July 14, 1986. Three years later, his widow married her fifth husband, John Neumar. He died in October, and authorities in Augusta are investigating whether his death -- officially listed as listed as sepsis, bacterial infection of the body's blood and tissues -- might have another cause, such as arsenic poisoning.