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Police in Cape Breton charge ‘Internet Black Widow’ with attempted murder

SYDNEY, N.S. – A 77-year-old woman infamously known as the “Internet Black Widow” has been charged with attempted murder after her husband suddenly became ill while staying at a Cape Breton inn, police said Tuesday.

Melissa Ann Weeks of New Glasgow, N.S., was charged after the accused’s 75-year-old husband was taken to hospital in Sydney, N.S., after a fall on the weekend.

The Cape Breton Regional Police arrested a woman Monday at around noon following an investigation into the health of the New Glasgow man, who they say has since been treated and released.

Weeks, who is also charged with administering a noxious thing, appeared Tuesday in Sydney provincial court. She was remanded into custody until Friday for a bail hearing.

Weeks was sentenced in 2005 to five years in prison on seven counts of theft from a man in Florida she had met online. Investigators in that case said she stole about US$20,000 from Alexander Strategos.

She was also convicted of manslaughter in the death of her husband, Gordon Stewart, who she had drugged and run over twice with a car in 1991 outside Halifax. She served two years of a six-year sentence for that crime.

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