Nova Scotia seniors home rocked by laundry list of crimes committed by ‘Internet black widow’

Forget everything you believed about seniors fearing technology.

Not only are golden-agers catching on to social media like pros, one of them has allegedly started using the world wide web to ensnare unsuspecting widowers into her strange and deadly orbit.

As CBC reports, 77-year-old Melissa Weeks, dubbed the "Internet Black Widow," was recently charged with attempting to poison her newest husband, Nova Scotia resident Fred Weeks.

The couple had been married for a matter of days when the 75-year-old man was rushed to the hospital in the throes of violent illness.

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While he survived and has since been released, doctors became suspicious of the source of his condition.

"Further investigation led police to believe the man's spouse could be responsible for his illness," said Desiree Vassallo, a spokeswoman for the Cape Breton Regional Police, in a statement.

The news has also rocked residents at the couple's quiet Westville, N.S. retirement community.

"How could you marry someone and hurt them before the week was up?" was the rhetorical question that Helen Fraser, the Weeks' bewildered neighbour, posed to a CBC reporter.

It's a question that might best be answered by the woman's disturbing past.

CBC has a laundry list of Weeks' past transgressions, including charges for forgery, fraud, misrepresentation and theft.

But those charges pale in comparison to her bodily-inflicted crimes against husband-kind.

Back in 1991, when she was known as Melissa Stewart, Weeks received six years in a PEI jail for manslaughter, after she drugged then-spouse Gordon Stewart and ran him over twice with a car.

Fresh out of the slammer, she met and married Robert Friedrich in 2000. The Nova Scotia man died of cardiac arrest in 2002, but his family noticed that a number of sudden health issues including fainting spells and slurred speech seemed to coincide with a mysteriously dwindling bank account.

Heading to Florida, Weeks connected with Alex Strategos on a website called AmericanSinglesDating.com.

The 81-year-old visited the ER eight times in two months and while a drug in his system was found to be the culprit, police fingered his new live-in lady friend with draining his finances and filtering them into her own bank account. She served five years in a Florida prison for that little exercise in grand theft.

"She's a nice woman, she treated me all right until she started giving me drugs," Strategos told CBC.

In light of these most recent accusations, the Weeks case shows just how vulnerable some seniors still are to financial scams. Though many are getting savvy to both foreign and local scammers trying to slice off a piece of their retirement pie, it's far more insidious when the scamming is coming from one of their own.

Particularly when that scammer is playing on matters of the heart.

So while Weeks' case is pending, Nova Scotia sons and daughters: lock up your elderly widowed dads.

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