The would-be Internet lover of a North Yorkshire man, who kept her dead housemate in a freezer for a year, has pleaded guilty to fraud and unlawful removal of a dead body.

Wynema Faye Shumate, 66, of South Carolina, was sentenced to a year in prison and 18 months' probation at a trial in the United States yesterday.

Police found the body last February in a freezer in the home she had hoped to share with Trevor Tasker, of Mill Lane, Carlton, near Selby.

Mr Tasker had flown to the States after a whirlwind email romance, but Shumate was not the attractive young lady he had been expecting, but a 65-year-old pensioner weighing in at 20 stones.

And when police called at Shumate's door investigating a theft, she panicked and disclosed to Mr Tasker there was a corpse in her freezer - the hacked up body of 70-year-old James O' Neil, a former lodger and Shumate's former employer.

It emerged that when Mr O'Neil died of natural causes, Shumate feared she had lost her "meal ticket", so she bought a freezer, put the body in it, and carried on drawing cash from his account.

Updated: 12:21 Thursday, February 08, 2001