An 80-year-old woman dubbed Canada’s “Black Widow” has been arrested after breaching the conditions of her release by using the internet at a library in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

A police spokeswoman said Melissa Ann Shepard was arrested on Monday. Shepard gained notoriety for killing and poisoning several men who were her intimate partners and has a lengthy history of offences.

The arrest comes less than a month after Shepard was released from prison. She served just under three years for spiking newlywed husband Fred Weeks’s coffee with tranquillisers in 2012. Weeks survived after falling ill during a trip to Newfoundland.

Shepard served two years in prison in the early 1990s for the manslaughter of her second husband, Gordon Stewart, whom she drugged and ran over twice with a car.