Don’t be fooled by this photo: This black widow will take your breath away...literally

Now police have waed men to be on high alert after Canadian woman Melissa Ann Shepard was released on parole last week.

Police in the Canadian city of Halifax fear 80-year-old Shepard could strike again. Elderly men looking for love are particularly at risk.

Shepard, who according to the BBC has a long history of criminal offences, was freed under strict conditions after "completing a sentence for serious assaults against her intimate partners”.

Police fear she may try and offend again.

Melissa Ann Shepard, known as the inteet Black Widow, arrives at court in Dartmouth, Canada.

"A high risk offender is residing in our community,” they said. And they cautioned: "Shepard has been assessed as being a high risk to reoffend.”

Under the conditions of her release, Shepard cannot access the inteet — that"s where she found her prey — and is not allowed to contact past victims or their families.

In fact, she is not even allowed to "enter into any romantic relationship, cohabitation, common-law relationship, or marriage until that person has been identified by a member of the police agency where she resides” and informed of her criminal past, according to police.

Shepard was arrested in 2012 after trying to poison her last husband, Fred Weeks, aged 75, whom she had married just two weeks earlier.

Speaking to The Canadian Press, Weeks said he wanted nothing to do with her.

"She"s too smooth an actor,” he said. "She kept me in the dark for a long time, telling me her stories ... Everything was a lie that she told me.”

Shepard had previously spent several years in prison for manslaughter, theft and forgery, in Canada as well as in the United States.

She was convicted for having drugged her ex-husband Gordon Stewart, before running him over with her car in 1991.

Sentenced to six years in prison, she was released early and moved to the US state of Florida, where she met a man by the name of Robert Friedrich.

The two married in 2000. Friedrich"s health then began to deteriorate — and the funds on his bank account diminished. He died of a heart attack in 2002.

Shortly thereafter, Shepard met 73-year-old Alex Strategos online.

The day they moved in together, he was hospitalised for injuries he sustained, including to his head. Similar incidents took place seven times over the course of two months.

Shepard was imprisoned in Florida after a little-known drug was found in Strategos"s system. Strategos also saw his bank account emptied out.

Released after five years, in 2009, Shepard was deported to Canada.

Joualist Barb McKenna, who met Shepard soon after she was released from prison in 1994, told the BBC Shepard "could charm the bark off a tree”.

"She"s very slick,” she said.

"You would confront her and she could immediately think up a response to it … even though it was an obvious lie.”