Released from prison, deadly con artist seems to be back to her old tricks.
by Stephen Kimber
The question that truly, biblically passeth all understanding is — why?
Why would a 77-year-old senior citizen with five last names, a 40-year criminal history as long as both your arms and one of your legs, with two dead husbands — one of whom she was convicted of killing and the other seriously suspected — a woman who is now barely two years past the end of her last five-year prison sentence for stealing $20,000 from a Florida man she met online, whose predictable modus operandi involved wooing, winning and then drugging her lonely victims before vacuuming up their assets, whose crimes became so notorious she was nicknamed the Internet Black Widow… why would Melissa Ann “Millie” Weeks — also known as Shepard, Stewart, Russell and Friedrich — even imagine she could get away with it again?
Insert the obligatory boilerplate paragraph here: none of these latest charges against the recently remarried Weeks — who now stands accused of trying to kill husband number whatever — has been proven in court.
But having said that, it’s worth rummaging through what police discovered when they searched her New Glasgow home earlier this month.
Millie had conveniently kept — and police confiscated — a copy of a 2005 CBC Fifth Estate documentary about the “self-made widow.”
Let’s start with that tub of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. The attempted murder weapon? Followers of Weeks' story will know one of her few surviving exes claimed his health began to deteriorate soon after the solicitous Millie began feeding him ice cream in bed at night. Doctors eventually discovered dollops of benzodiazepine — a tranquilizer he’d neither been prescribed nor known he was taking — in his system. That same drug was also found in toxic quantities in the body of the husband she ran over — twice — with a car.
Investigators this time found 12 dozen lorazepam and 26 temazepam tablets — equally stupefying medications — along with three empty, de-labeled pill bottles and more prescriptions from five different doctors.
If police needed tips on what to look for, Millie had conveniently kept — and police confiscated — a copy of a 2005 CBC Fifth Estate documentary about the “self-made widow.”
“How long can this go on?” the show’s host, Linden MacIntyre, asks Millie at one point.
“It can’t,” Millie, then in jail in Florida, replies. “It just can’t.”
Perhaps it did. But why would Millie even imagine she could get away with it all one more time again? That’s the question.
About Stephen Kimber
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax. He is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster.
His writing has appeared in almost all major Canadian publications including Canadian Geographic, Financial Post Magazine, Maclean's, En Route, Chatelaine, Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post. He has written one novel — Reparations — and six non-fiction books. Website: http://www.stephenkimber.com.
One Response to “Nova Scotia’s Internet Black Widow”
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She is going to have to change her Modus Operandi. Can old d*gs can learn new tricks?