Canada’s rosy-cheeked Black Widow killer is back on the streets

Rosy-cheeked and bespectacled, 80-year-old Melissa Ann Shepard has a type: elderly widowers who are lonely and looking for love.

That’s what is making police in Canada nervous.

Authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have warned residents about the octogenarian, dubbed the black widow by local media for the string of former partners who fell victim to her.

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She was released from a federal women’s prison on 18 March, after serving a sentence of nearly three years for spiking her new partner’s coffee with tranquillisers.

Fred Weeks was 75 years old, recently widowed and living in the same quiet retirement community in Nova Scotia when Shepard knocked on his door in 2013 and told him she was lonely. She had heard he was lonely too, she said.

A wedding in Weeks’s living room soon followed and the newlyweds jaunted off on a ferry ride to Newfoundland for their honeymoon.

It was there that court documents described Shepard slipping into what seemed to be a pattern of romance, deception and benzodiazepine, spiking Weeks’s coffee with heavy doses of sedatives throughout the journey. Days into the trip, Weeks needed to be rolled off the ferry in a wheelchair.