Charles Papa Kwabena Ebo Quansah was born in 1964 and worked as a mechanic and spare parts dealer, living in the Adenta neighbourhood of Accra. The Ghanaian press called him the Accra Strangler.
He had a record before any of the killings. He was jailed for rape in 1986, served the sentence, was jailed again for a second rape in 1987, three years at Nsawam, and imprisoned once more for robbery in 1996.
From 1993 women were found strangled across Accra and Kumasi, most of them night traders and market women, most left in the open and many sexually assaulted and posed. The count attributed to one man reached thirty-four. The killings ran through Dansoman, Mataheko, Adenta and Kumasi, and the police had no experience of investigating a case of this kind.
The investigation was eventually assisted by the FBI, which trained Ghanaian officers in geographic profiling and in systematic neighbourhood canvassing. It was the canvassing that produced him: one name came up repeatedly across the first four canvasses, of a man witnesses had seen near where victims were last seen. He had already been under surveillance.
He was arrested in February 2000 over the death of his girlfriend in Kumasi, Joyce Boateng, who had been strangled in the same manner as the Accra victims. In custody he was charged with the murder of Akua Serwaa, strangled on January 19, 1996 and found the next morning by a watchman near the Kumasi Sports Stadium, and he confessed to a number of the Accra killings.
How many he confessed to is itself disputed. Under a polygraph administered with FBI assistance he admitted eight; the CID's own catalogue of his admissions was four in Kumasi and two each in Dansoman and Adenta. The polygraph evidence was later contested in Ghana on the ground that the police had no machine of their own, the FBI having taken theirs away. The CID director general, David Asante-Apeatu, took the view that Quansah was capable of all of the killings and that his accounts shifted.
A seven-member jury convicted him unanimously in August 2001 of the murder of Akua Serwaa and he was sentenced to hang. Sources written afterwards variously describe him as convicted of one, eight, nine or thirty-four murders, and the figure of nine comes from that reporting rather than from a court record this entry can point to.
He appealed, calling the conviction a grave miscarriage of justice and arguing that the judge had misdirected the jury over a defence witness. In 2003 he spoke to the press and denied all of the killings, including the nine, and said he had been tortured in custody. The appeal appears never to have been heard: the docket and court records could not be found afterwards, and the Legal Aid Board never paid the lawyer instructed to bring it.
Ghana has not carried out an execution since 1993, so the death sentence has not been performed and he has remained in prison at Nsawam. Two further killings in the same period were attributed to other men, one of them an imitator, which is part of why the figure of thirty-four has never been safe.