Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Internet Black Widow

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

She married them fast, drugged their food, and emptied their bank accounts. Then they died. Melissa Ann Shepard did it for decades, moving between Canada and Florida, leaving a trail of dead and disabled husbands behind her. The drug was always the same. The pattern was always the same. And no one could stop her until one man survived long enough to tell someone what was in his coffee. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the Internet Black Widow from her first kill to her last arrest, and the question that haunted every investigation: was she a murderer, or just a thief who didn't care if her victims lived or died?Head over to our Murder True Crime Stories YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MurderTrueCrimeStoriesJoin Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get both parts to every Murder: True Crime Stories case released at once ad-free.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @murdertruecrimestories

Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy. Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crimehouse Plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of murder true crime stories and the rest of the crime house shows ad free and released early. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com. you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. This is Crime House. Every man Melissa Ann Shepard ever went after thought she was an angel, white-haired, soft-spoken. The kind of woman who shows up at your back door with a basket and a

smile asks if you're lonely and tells you God sent her. By the time any of them realized what she actually was. It was already too late. She ran over one husband and left him for dead. She cremated another before an autopsy could be conducted. She put a third in a wheelchair and then in her late 70s, she found a fourth and almost killed him before she got caught. She did all of it under five different names, all of it after she'd already done time. And up until the very end, every single one of her victims still thought she was an angel. They didn't know she was actually a devil in disguise. This is the case of Melissa Ann Shepard, the internet black widow. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, ad-free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode. episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head.

The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions in every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for murder, true crime stories, and be sure to like and subscribe. Today's story is about a 90-year-old Canadian woman who's still considered too dangerous to use the internet. Her name is Melissa Ann Shepherd. And for most of her adult life, she used charm, religion, and a sweet little smile to find lonely men. And then she ruined them. But there's one question that hangs over her whole story.

It's the one her own lawyer raised at her final sentencing. Was she actually trying to kill these men? Or was she just trying to keep them weak long enough to drain their bank? bank accounts. I have been turning this case over for a while now. And honestly, I don't think there's a clear answer. After you listen, let me know what you think. All that and more coming up. Melissa Ann Shepard was born Melissa Ann Russell on May 16th, 1935, in a small fishing and logging settlement called Burnt Church in northeastern New Brunswick. Burnt Church sits right next to a MiGMA First nation reserve and just the kind of place where jobs have always been scarce, but especially during

the Great Depression when Melissa was born. Public records of Melissa's childhood are thin, and we don't know much about her parents or her siblings, if she had any. What we know is that she grew up poor and that when she was 20 years old, she met a man named Russell Shepard. Russell was from Montague, a small town on Prince Edward Island, just across the water from where Melissa had grown up. They got married in 1955. Melissa took his last name, moved to Prince Edward Island, and the two of them started a family there. While accounts the next couple of decades were normal, stable, Melissa was a wife and a mother, nothing unusual. But somewhere in the 1970s, something changed. In 1977, when Melissa was in her early 40s, she was convicted of fraud. Her first sentence,

was 11 months, and when she got out, she just kept going. Bad checks, forged signatures, impersonating people to cash their money. Between 1977 and 1991, she racked up more than 30 separate fraud convictions across multiple Canadian provinces. Those convictions added up to roughly five years in prison total spread out over those 14 years. So Melissa was in and out of the system. Russell stuck around through some of it, but eventually their marriage fell apart. In 1988, Melissa was 52 years old. Her marriage to Russell was over. Her kids were grown and out of the house.

She'd been drifting between Canadian provinces. Then one day, she answered a personal ad in a lonely hearts column. That's how she met Gordon Stewart. Gordon was 41 years old. He was a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces from Prince Edward Island with two kids at home. His wife had recently died. He was working, paying bills and trying to hold things together for his kids. But by every account, he was deeply lonely.

He also had a steady armed forces pension and about $50,000 in savings. Not a fortune. but in 1988, that was enough money to make a serious difference in somebody's life. He and Melissa went on a blind date. Things moved fast. Within a year or so, Gordon and Melissa were planning a wedding. They flew to Las Vegas and got married in 1990. Apparently, while Melissa was still legally married to Russell Shepard,

that's a crime. It's called bigamy. But Melissa had been forging paperwork for over a decade by then. she probably wasn't worried about it. At some point after their Vegas honeymoon, she officially divorced Russell. And once Gordon's ring was on her finger and the paperwork was filed, she had access to everything he owned,

including that $50,000. The money started to disappear pretty quickly, but that wasn't the only thing going wrong. Gordon started to start to disappear. feeling sick. He'd get dizzy. He'd pass out. He'd come around with no memory of how he got there. Gordon had a history of drinking, so he figured the alcohol was finally catching up with him. But that's not what was actually happening. And maybe deep down, Gordon knew it. Because at some point, he sat down and wrote a letter. In it, he laid out everything, how Melissa had been cheating on him.

how she'd been lying to him over and over, how she'd been emptying his bank accounts. He left it somewhere in his belongings where someone would eventually find it. Clearly, he knew something was coming. He just didn't know what. In late April 1991, Gordon Stewart's body was found on a remote stretch of road outside Halifax. He had tire marks across him. hours after she'd left him there, Melissa walked into a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Station. This is what she told them.

According to Melissa, Gordon had been drinking that night. He'd attacked her in the car. He'd assaulted her, pulled her onto a logging road, and sexually assaulted her. When he stepped out of the car for a moment, she scrambled into the driver's seat and threw it in reverse to escape. She heard a thump and thought she'd hit a log, so she backed up again. And that's when she realized it wasn't a log, it was Gordon. According to Melissa, she had run over her own husband twice by accident while fleeing for her life. The police listened.

Then they started checking her story, and almost nothing she said held up. A toxicology report came back. Gordon had a near-lethal amount of benzodiazepine in his bloodstream, specifically Valium and Restoral, two sedatives. He also had a significant amount of alcohol in his system. A man with that much in his bloodstream would have been struggling just to stay upright. There's no way he was overpowering anyone. And that lined up with another detail. there was no physical evidence of a sexual assault. And then officers searching Gordon's things found the letter, the one he'd written before he died.

Prosecutors believed they had a case for second-degree murder. The motive was clear. Money. Gordon's armed forces pension would transfer to his widow after his death. So would the savings. So would anything else in his name. Melissa's trial was held in Halifax. Nova Scotia in the spring of 1992.

Melissa was 57 years old. The Crown laid out the evidence. The drugs, the alcohol, the letter, the missing money. But premeditated murder is hard to prove. The jury looked at the same evidence and saw a story they couldn't entirely rule out. Maybe Gordon really had been violent that night. Maybe Melissa really had panicked. They couldn't convince themselves beyond a reasonable doubt that she'd planned to kill him.

So they found her guilty of the lesser charge manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to six years in prison. She got out on parole after two. And when Melissa walked out of jail in 1994, she didn't disappear quietly. She did the opposite. She made herself famous. She started telling her story. to anyone who would listen.

She said she was a survivor of domestic violence. She said she'd been forced to defend herself against an abusive husband. She positioned herself as a voice for battered women. And people believed her. Canadian media picked up the story. She got interviewed by Peter Zoski, one of the most prominent broadcasters in Canada at the time.

She appeared in a documentary called When Women Kill. She traveled around the country giving speeches. She even received a government grant to help other women who'd survived abuse. For about six years, she was the face of a cause. And the cause itself was and is real. Domestic violence is real. The women who survive it deserve advocates. And nobody should have looked at Melissa Ann Shepard and assumed she was lying just because she'd done time for manslaughter.

but there was a wrinkle in the story she was telling. Remember that letter Gordon had written before he died, the one laying out how Melissa had been cheating on him, lying to him, and draining his accounts? The Crown had read it in open court at her trial. So when Melissa walked out of prison and started telling audiences across Canada that her husband had been the abusive one,

she was only telling them half the story. Some people noticed. A journalist named Barbara McKenna at the Charlottetown Guardian wrote an article publicly doubting Melissa's claims. Melissa sued her. Well, that's not the kind of move of real survivor of abuse usually makes. It's combative. It's expensive. It's designed to scare other reporters off the story.

And it didn't work. McKenna stood by her reporting and decades later, she'd still be, one of the journalists' editors called when they wanted to understand who Melissa Ann Shepard really was. And the lawsuit had told people something. They started looking at Melissa differently. By the late 1990s, the media had moved on. The speaking grants had dried up. Melissa was in her mid-60s. The spotlight was gone, and she was running out of people in Canada who hadn't heard her story. So she left Canada. By the late 1990s, she'd resurfaced in Florida, a state full of retirees, widowers, and people who'd come there specifically to stop being asked questions about their past.

She fit right in, and the man who would become her third husband had no idea what was coming. In the spring of 2000, Melissa Ann Shepard, now in her mid-60s, turned up at a Christian retreat in Florida. At this point, she was going by Melissa Stewart, taking the last name of the husband she'd killed. She'd been cycling through aliases for years. At the retreat, she crossed paths with an 83-year-old widower named Robert Friedrich. Robert was from Bradenton, Florida, a retiree and a devout Christian. friends and family said he was a kind, gentleman who was still grieving the death of his first wife. Robert also had a life savings of around $400,000, about $700,000 in today's money sitting in his accounts.

The day after they met, Melissa sent him a letter. In it, she told him, quote, God wants us to be married. Robert proposed three days later. They were married within a month. From the outside, the marriage looked like a fairy tale. Melissa whisked Robert away on a five-month honeymoon, and they traveled, they took a luxury cruise around the Caribbean, they lived like newlyweds. All of it came out of Robert's account. And by the time the honeymoon ended and they came back to Bradenton,

he was a different man. He started getting sick. He'd be fine for a while, and then he'd faint. He'd slur his wife. words, he'd be confused. He was in and out of the hospital, and doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. But his kids noticed something. When Robert was at home with Melissa, he was a mess. But when he visited them, when he was away from her, he was the same guy he'd always been. Sharp, funny, active, the Robert they recognized. It didn't take his sons long to figure out something was off.

And soon, one of them called Florida's elder abuse hotline. An investigator did a welfare check at the house. He didn't find anything alarming enough to take action, but before he left, he recommended that Robert get 24-7 nursing care, just to be safe. Melissa refused, and when the agency pushed, she threatened to sue them, so they backed off. Robert's sons were stuck in the worst kind of family situation.

Their dad was an adult. He was making his own choices. Legally, they couldn't overrule him unless he was declared incompetent. But every time they tried to intervene, Melissa was there to push back. She made them look like the bad guys. She told Robert his own children were trying to break up his marriage. Around this time, Robert's financial advisor noticed his accounts were being drained way faster than they should have been. He called Robert's son Dennis, but by then there was nothing Dennis could do.

He got a voicemail from Melissa. According to Dennis, the message went something like this. I have something to share with you this morning. Your father is going to change his will. You guys are getting nothing. a big fat zero. So try that on for size and have a nice day. That told Robert's family everything they needed to know.

They just didn't know what to do with it. By late 2002, two years into the marriage, Robert was a shadow of the man he'd been. He'd been sick for months, in and out of the hospital, slipping further with every visit. Then one morning, Melissa picked up the phone and called Robert's doctor. She told him she'd found her husband unresponsive at home. The doctor signed his death certificate over the phone.

He listed the cause as cardiac arrest. He never went to the house. He never physically examined the body. Robert was 85 years old. Melissa had him cremated quickly before any autopsy was conducted. His sons filed a criminal complaint accusing her of overdosing their father on his prescription medication. Manatee County investigators looked into it, but without a body, without a talk screen, without an autopsy, there was nothing to test. Because of that, investigators

couldn't substantiate foul play. No charges were ever filed against Melissa in connection with Robert's death. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Melissa had already drained roughly $400,000, from Robert's accounts during the marriage. Almost all of his liquid savings were gone before he died. And what was left of his estate, tens of thousands of dollars in remaining assets, went to her since she was now the sole beneficiary of his will. By 2004, Melissa was 69 years old and back in Prince Edward Island.

She was also using a different set of names. Melissa Friedrich, Millie Friedrich, sometimes others, and she discovered something new. The internet, specifically online dating. In late 2004, Melissa set up a profile on a website called American Singles Dating.com. She started messaging older men in the United States. Eventually, she connected with a 73-year-old retired accountant in Pinellas Park, Florida, named Alex Stratigos. Alex was originally from Pittsburgh. He was divorced, not widowed, but the same loneliness was there.

He was looking for a partner. They message back and forth for a while. Then Melissa made the long drive from Canada down to Florida to meet him in person. They went out for dinner. Alex would later describe Melissa as a classy lady. and in a phrase that would hit a lot harder in hindsight, a fine actress. At the end of the night, he asked where she was staying. She said she didn't have a place yet.

Alex offered to put her up. She moved in that night. A few hours later, Alex got up to use the bathroom. He felt dizzy. He stumbled, hit his head, and passed out. Melissa called 911. This was a pattern. We know it was a pattern, but Alex didn't know that. The paramedics who took him to the hospital didn't know that. His son, Dean, didn't know that. What Dean did know was this. His dad had just brought home a woman he'd met on the internet. Within hours, she'd moved in, and now his dad was unconscious on the way to the hospital. In Dean's own words, he thought it was a little bit too much too quickly. but his dad was a grown man.

His dad liked Melissa, so Dean held back. That hesitation is something a lot of adult children of older parents will understand. You don't want to be the kid who makes the scene. You don't want to humiliate your father in front of his new girlfriend. You tell yourself you're being paranoid. You tell yourself it'll be fine. In Alex's case, it wasn't. Over the next two months, Alex was hospitalized eight separate times.

He kept falling. He kept passing out. He kept getting weaker. Doctors couldn't pin down what was causing it. Eventually, he was so debilitated that he ended up in a nursing home at Melissa's suggestion. And while he was in that nursing home, Melissa convinced him to sign over power of attorney. That gave her access to all of it. His bank accounts, his condo, his car, everything.

Alex's friend Judy Frock got worried. She had friends in law enforcement, and when she told them what was happening, they spelled out exactly what Melissa could do with that document. She could sell his house out from under him while he was lying in a hospital bed. Judy got Dean in touch with the Pinellas Park Police Department. The case landed with Detective Sergeant Mike Lynch.

Lynch started pulling on the thread. The first thing he found was Melissa's bank activity. She had drained roughly $18,000 from Alex's accounts, nearly everything he had. And the second thing Lynch found was Melissa's criminal record. 30-plus fraud convictions in Canada. A manslaughter conviction for running over her own husband, multiple aliases, a trail of dead and dying men going back a decade and a half. Lynch realized he wasn't just investigating some minor fraud case with a sweet old lady.

By this point, Dean had gone to the hospital and asked to see his dad's medical records. Buried in those records was the toxicology screen. Alex had benzodiazepine in his system, the same class of drug that had killed. Gordon Stewart. Now Lynch had a pattern. He brought Melissa in for questioning while other officers searched Alex's condo. They found bags of pills. They also figured out how Melissa had been dosing him. Every night she'd been serving Alex ice cream and every night she'd been crushing benzos into it. On her computer, they found something else, too. Messages to several other. older men. She already had her next victims lined up. What gets me is the timing. While she was

drugging Alex Stratagos and putting him in the hospital eight times in two months, she was also chatting up backup options online. She wasn't winding down. She was already setting up the man after Alex. But she'd run out of time. On January 6, 2005, the Pinellas Park Police, Police arrested 70-year-old Melissa Ann Shepard on charges of exploitation of the elderly, grand theft, and forgery. She eventually pleaded guilty to seven of those charges. A Florida judge sentenced her to five years in prison. She served four.

In April of 2009, she was deported back to Canada. She'd been convicted in two countries. She'd done time on both sides of the border. The RCMP, New York. her face. The Pinellas Park Police knew her face. She was almost 75 years old. Most people in her position would have admitted defeat by then. But Melissa Ann Shepard wasn't most people. The press had a name for her. The internet black widow. And she wasn't done spinning her web. Melissa came back to Canada in April of 2009. There was no special supervision. There was no public.

warning, she moved into a retirement community in Nova Scotia. And in 2012, when Melissa was 77 years old, a new neighbor moved in down the hall from her. His name was Fred Weeks. Fred Weeks was 75 years old. He was from Stellerton, Nova Scotia, a small community in Picto County. His wife had just died the year before. They'd been married for 54 years. 54 years. I'll take that in for a second. His whole adult life from his early 20s on had been spent

with the same woman. And then suddenly she was gone. He was, by his own admission, very lonely. Not long after he moved in, Fred heard a knock at his back door. It was the apple-cheeked, white-haired woman from down the way. She was standing there with a basket and a smile, and she wanted to know if he was lonely too, because she was. She'd heard he'd just lost his wife. That was how Fred met Melissa. He'd later tell a CBC reporter that she was very nice to talk to and was always talking like she was religious.

Then he laughed and added, that was the first lie. But that was hindsight. At the time all Fred saw was a kind, soft-spoken woman who seemed genuinely interested in him. It was a whirlwind. Within a few months of meeting, they were planning a wedding. On September 28, 2012, they held a civil ceremony in his living room. The few people who attended said the couple looked happy. They had no idea who the bride really was.

Neither did the groom. Three days after the wedding, the newlyweds drove down to North Sydney on Cape Breton to catch a ferry to Newfoundland. Newfoundland was supposed to be the honeymoon. On the ferry over, Fred started to feel off. Forgetful, hazy, by the time they got to Newfoundland, he was having trouble driving. He couldn't remember how to start the car. He couldn't tie his own shoes. By the end of their stay, he needed a wheelchair just to move around.

He didn't know what was wrong. He was an active, 75-year-old man, sharp as ever. And over the span of a few days, he was falling apart. They took the ferry back to Cape Breton and checked into a bed and breakfast in North Sydney. That night, Fred vomited for hours. He was so loud that the owner of the B&B came up to ask if everything was okay. Melissa answered the door and told the owner they were both sick. But only Fred was sick.

The next morning, Fred fell out of bed and slammed against the hardwood floor. He needed an ambulance. The B&B's owner offered to call one immediately. Melissa told her she'd take care of it after she finished her breakfast. She eventually took him to the hospital herself. When she got there, she told the staff that she was Fred's only family. She didn't mention that he had adult children. She told them that he had a history of memory issues, which he didn't.

Hospital staff started running tests. Fred's blood came back with near-lethal levels of benzodiazepine. The same family of sedatives that were found in Gordon Stewart's system and the same ones that hospitalized Alex Stratagos eight times. Only this time, instead of ice cream, it had been in Fred's coffee. Hospital staff called the police. The police ran Melissa's name through their system, and what they found ended any chance.

had of slipping through the cracks. On October 2nd, 2012, 77-year-old Melissa Ann Shepard was arrested at her home in Picto County. When officers searched the house, they found a stash of pills. Mostly Larazepam and Tamazepam, both benzodiazepines. They found prescriptions in her name from five different doctors, and they found several sets of fake ID made out to different names. She was charged with attempted murder. But the charge ran into the same problem prosecutors had hit in 1992 with Gordon Stewart. Proving Melissa actually meant to kill Fred was harder than proving she had drugged him. Because of that, the Crown ultimately accepted a guilty plea to a lesser charge,

administering a noxious substance with intent to endanger life, plus failing to provide the necessaries of life to her husband. At her sentencing in June 2013, Chief Justice Joseph Philip Kennedy looked at the courtroom and said, quote, people who have contact with this lady should be careful. He sentenced her to three and a half years in prison. That sentence was extraordinarily light. The maximum she could have received was 14 years. But because she was 77 and because she'd entered a guilty plea, the judge took mercy. Now, here's the thing. Melissa's own defense lawyer said something the prosecution had been wrestling with for over 20 years.

He said that he genuinely didn't think his client was trying to murder anyone. He believed she was guilty of drugging her partners, absolutely, but he thought her goal was to keep them weak long enough to change wills, sign over assets, and drain accounts. Not kill them. Pinellas Park's detective Mike Lynch disagreed. In a 2016 interview, he said he thought it was one of two things. Either Melissa was trying to keep her victims weak enough to keep stealing from them, or she was trying to kill them outright.

And with Alex Stratagos, Lynch believed her plan had been to, quote, ultimately finish him off. What's strange is that Melissa herself, in a 2012 interview with CBC's The Fifth Estate, didn't deny the drugging, she said, quote, I can't say that I didn't personally give him benzodiazepines. If he had them in his system, we already knew, he knew, and I knew, that our relationship was not going to continue. That's not a confession to murder, but it's not a denial either. Whatever her actual intent was, the result was the same. One man, died on a roadside. Another died at home with no autopsy conducted. Two more ended up in wheelchairs. Melissa served her full sentence on the Fred Weeks case. She got out of the Nova Institution for

women on March 18, 2016 at the age of 80. Halifax Regional Police took the unusual step of issuing a public warning. They told the community that a high-risk offender was being released back into the area. They also placed 22 conditions on her release. She had to report any new romantic relationships to the police so the men involved could be warned. She had to inform police of any change in her appearance or living situation, and she was banned from using the internet, point blank. Just over three weeks later, on April 11, 2016, a community response officer spotted Melissa at the Halifax Central Library, she was sitting at a public computer online. She was arrested and charged with breaching her release conditions.

But on December 22nd, 2016, the Nova Scotia Crown dropped the charges. They said they didn't think they had a reasonable prospect of conviction. Instead, Melissa agreed to sign a two-year peace bond with 21 conditions, including a continued internet ban and a requirement to report any new relationships. At the time, both of her surviving victims publicly disagreed with the decision. Fred Weeks told a reporter that, quote, Some guys better watch out.

Speaking to CBC in March of 2016, Alex Stratigo said, quote, I don't think she should be out at all. She did it before. She'll do it again. In another interview, years after the case, Alex told reporters he didn't regret meeting Melissa. Even briefly, she'd brought some happiness into his life. That was the part that got the detectives.

Even the men who knew what she'd done couldn't stop missing the version of her they'd first met. As of this recording, Melissa Ann Shepard is 90 years old. She still lives in Nova Scotia. She acknowledges running Gordon Stewart over, but says it was an accident. She insists Robert Friedrich died of natural causes, and she has never offered a real explanation

for what happened to Alex Stratagos or Fred Weeks. Both of those men have since died. Fred Weeks passed away in January of 2017, less than a year after speaking to that reporter. He was 80 years old. Alex Stratagos passed away in September of 2020 at the age of 89. Melissa has outlived them both. When the Washington Post did a long piece on Melissa in 2016,

the reporter landed on a line I keep coming back to. He said that out of all of Melissa's husbands, the only one who hadn't been, quote, a victim of a methodical practice ruse was Russell Shepard, the first one. He was the man Melissa married when she was 20 years old before any of this started, before the fraud convictions, before Gordon, before Florida, the version of Melissa that Russell met was the only version that didn't have an angle.

Everyone after him was a target. What makes this case so hard to shake isn't just the body count. It's that for 30 years, four police forces in two countries kept missing the same woman. Part of that was timing. Part of it was geography. She kept hopping borders, switching names, slipping through cracks in jurisdictions that didn't talk to each other. But part of it was just her appearance. She looked like somebody's grandma.

She looked like the sweet woman from down the hall. And every single one of her victims had something in common. They'd all lost someone. They'd all been alone. They were all in the part of life where the world stops paying you much attention. That's not an accident. That's who she chose. People talk about predators online, and they usually picture some shadowy figure on the other side of a screen.

And they don't picture a 70-year-old woman in a print blouse who shows up at your back door with a basket and asks if you like some company. But that's exactly what she was. And the saddest part is that what these men were looking for, what Fred Weeks was looking for when he opened that back door, was the thing she pretended to offer. Just someone to sit with. Just somebody to talk to. Just a little less quiet in the house. She found them because she knew what they needed. And then she made sure they paid for it.

Thanks so much for listening. Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. your feedback truly makes a difference.

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