When Trevor Tasker left his North Yorkshire home to marry his Internet sweetheart in America, he was expecting a pretty thirty-something.

He had fallen in love with Wynema Shumate after a whirlwind e-mail romance, and the pair had swapped photographs and intimate messages on the Web. But when he touched down in South Carolina, there to meet him was not the attractive young lady he had been expecting - but a 65-year-old pensioner weighing in at 20 stones.

That was not the only surprise in store for Trevor, 27, of Mill Lane, Carlton, near Selby.

When police called at Shumate's door investigating a theft, she panicked and disclosed to him her grisly secret - there was a corpse in her freezer. Trevor's bride-to-be had been looking after her former employer, James O'Neil, at her home in Charleston.

But when he died of natural causes in February last year, 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.

Police investigating his disappearance had checked his bank account and saw money was being taken out, and traced Shumate.

Trevor was today on his way back home after spending several days in a hotel at the Charleston County Sheriff's expense while the body thawed enough for an autopsy to be carried out.

"When he got off the plane and saw his beloved - she's large and unattractive at best - well, he nearly had a heart attack," Mitch Lucas, spokesman for Charleston County Sheriff's Office, told the Evening Press. Shumate has since been charged with the destruction or desecration of human remains, the unauthorised removal of a dead body and credit card fraud. Trevor was not available for comment at time of going to press.

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