Saturday, April 07, 2012

Black Widow - Melissa Ann Friedrich

Fasinating expose of a trio of "cons". 
[Unfortunately, this CBC video can only be watched from Canadian sourced IP locations.]

The second segment (about 15:00 m:s) features a Canadian woman who preyed on lonely, elderly men - and who she then often married.   The clue for one U.S family who were concerned about their elderly father's newest girlfriend was when they ran a Google search on the women's name - Melissa Ann Stewart.

They found she had been jailed for murder of her new husband - after she claimed he violently raped her.  She served 2 years in jail and then became a "cause celeb" for Women's DV advocates in 1994.  This was the year of frenzied feminist fear-mongering that culminated in VAWA in the U.S.



The other two segments describe two other high-profile mysteries featuring "Mr Nobody" - an odd European man who attempted to have the Canadian government provide him an identity as he claimed not to have one and 2 brothers who claimed to be "the Bush Boys" - brought up wild in the B.C bush.

Apart from the obvious deadly villainy of the "Black Widow" - the other two stories featuring the young men were essentially elaborate hoaxes - with a great deal of naive complicity by bleeding heart liberals, credulous news media who frequently provided "headline" coverage (most often it seemed the CBC was most eager to promote these stories in an attempt to discredit heartless, flinty-eyed bureaucrats!) and assorted supplicants of various PC sacred cows (Human Rights lawyers and DV Advocates).

I feel that what this "Fifth Estate" program really discloses is that people make many compromises with reality in order to function in their lives and sometimes they get way out of hand.  While obviously dangerous if taken to extremes as it was in these cases, I am still not sure they are criminal - otherwise jails would be overflowing.

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