A 42-year-old Waterloo man went on trial Tuesday, accused of stalking a woman he met through an online dating service.

Michael D. McClellan is charged with three felony counts of stalking, alleging he put the woman in fear of being sexually assaulted or killed. He is accused of stalking the woman between 2006 and 2008.

According to court documents, McClellan met the woman in 2004. After a yearlong romance and some time away from each other, the two became friends in the summer of 2006. They quit speaking to each other for unspecified reasons that August.

Then McClellan began calling that October, wanting to get back together, court documents said.

The first day he called 26 times. Then 88 times three days later. He called 23 times another day before showing up at her home, barging inside and pronouncing his love for her.

From Oct. 17, 2006, to Nov. 26, 2006, McClellan called the woman 499 times. He sent her 179 emails from Oct. 15 to June 1, 2007, according to court documents.

"I AM GOING NOWHEREEEEEEEEEEE UNDERSTAND?" read one of those emails. Another email was made to look like a newspaper article. It detailed the beating death of her then-new boyfriend, now her husband, who in the article was dumped in a parking lot and referred to as a wife beater, a child abuser and a "crying loser."

McClellan also is accused of hacking into the woman's email and sending inappropriate messages to her business contacts under the guise that he was she, court documents allege. He began sending emails to her boss at work, one of which contained a photo of her plus a photo of an unidentified woman lifting up her shirt.

The trial began Tuesday morning with jury selection, and is expected to last until Friday.

For more on this story, see Wednesday's print edition of The Journal Gazette or visit www.journalgazette.net after 3 a.m. Wednesday.