PORTLAND – Prosecutors will ask a grand jury to indict Kimberly Spampinato on murder charges after her husband, who she is alleged to have doused with gasoline and set afire earlier this month, died over the weekend.

Officials said Tuesday Christopher Spampinato died this weekend at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was taken there after police, responding to a report of a fire at the couple’s apartment on Harbor Road in Wells on Jan. 8, found him outside with serious burns to about 85 percent of his body.

At the time, Kimberly Spampinato was at the Wells police office a few hundred yards, where she was arrested. She was initially charged with arson and violating conditions of her bail for a prior allegation of assault against her husband.

At an initial court appearance on Jan. 9, Kimberly Spampinato, 42, was told the charges included attempted murder. The complaint said she doused Christopher Spampinato with gasoline and lit him on fire as he slept using a lighter and rolled-up newspapers.

Prosecutors are “optimistic” a grand jury will indict Kimberly Spampinato with murder, said Kate Simmons, a spokeswoman for the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

Simmons said she didn’t know when a grand jury will be seated in the case, but anticipated it would be in the next few weeks. In the meantime, Simmons said, Kimberly Spampinato will be held in York County Jail on the charge of violating bail conditions, which included the requirement that she not be arrested.

If the bail violation is ever revoked, Simmons said, a district court judge set Kimberly Spampinato’s bail at $750,000 cash.

Amy McGarry, Kimberly Spampinato’s lawyer, said the trial for the original assault charge, which was made in October, is tentatively set for next week, but she didn’t know if Christopher Spampinato’s death would change that. Kimberly Spampinato is accused of assaulting her husband while she was in a hospital in York. McGarry has called that incident a “misunderstanding.”

Steve McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said an autopsy was conducted Tuesday in Massachusetts because that was where Christoper Spampinato died. He said there were no results as of Tuesday afternoon, but the medical examiner in Massachusetts would pass his findings onto investigators in Maine.

Those investigators, McCausland said, are expected to meet with prosecutors in the attorney general’s office later this week.

The case is now officially a homicide, McCausland said, and is Maine’s first of 2009. The state had 31 murders last year, the most since there were 40 in 1989.