Charles Ebo Quansah is the man Ghana's police held responsible for a string of killings of women that frightened Accra and Kumasi through the late 1990s and into 2000. By the time he was arrested in 2001, the number of women killed was put at more than 30, and in later years the figure usually given was 34. Police said Quansah confessed to eight of the killings, a number later reported as nine. He was tried for one: the death of Akua Serwaa, a 24-year-old hairdresser, in Kumasi on January 19, 1996. On August 7, 2002, a seven-member jury in the High Court in Accra found him guilty of her murder, and Justice Agnes Dordzie sentenced him to death by hanging.
Quansah told the court he was innocent. He has said since that his statements to police were taken by force, and his lawyer filed an appeal within weeks of the verdict. Eight years later, the appeal had still not been heard, because the trial record could not be found in the registries of either the High Court or the Court of Appeal. The other killings in the series were never tried. Ghanaian politicians argued over them for most of a decade, and in 2010 a new president ordered the police to reopen the investigation.
The fullest public account of Quansah's background came from a police statement issued in Accra in May 2001, as reported on GhanaWeb. It described him as Charles Quansah, a 36-year-old driver mechanic from Komenda in Ghana's Central Region, also known as Paapa Kwabena Ebo; a second passage of the same statement gave the name as Paapa Kobina Ebo. A newspaper in 2010 gave his full name as Charles Papa Kwabena Ebo Quansah. A November 2002 report gave his age as 35, which does not fit the police figure of the year before.
According to the police statement, he had been jailed at James Fort Prison in Accra in 1986 for rape. After his release he committed another rape and was sent to Nsawam prison in 1987 for three years. When that sentence ended he settled in Ayigya, in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region. Around 1997 he moved to Dansoman, a suburb of Accra, and in September 2000 he moved again, to Adenta, on the city's northeastern side.
For several years before his arrest, the bodies of women were found in and around Accra. IRIN, the news service then run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported a series of protests over the deaths. In one report, hundreds of women marched in Accra against a spate of killings; the march included the First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, and members of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), and IRIN counted 18 unsolved killings of women in the capital over the previous 18 months.
The toll kept rising. A later IRIN report put the number of women killed at 30 over about three years, with at least six found that year and four of them in the previous two months. Women's groups accused the government of doing too little. At a news conference in Accra, the Inspector General of Police, Peter Nanfuri, refused to step down. "It would be a disgrace to resign," he said. "It will be cowardly and defeatist to do so." IRIN later reported, citing Joy FM, that he had been replaced by Owusu Poku, the director of passports, who became acting Inspector General. Another IRIN report, citing the daily Times, gave the number of women killed in the capital since 1997 as 36 after a 25-year-old woman was found dead in Accra.
The Enquirer, looking back in 2005, wrote that the killings had lasted about three years and that women in Accra had been afraid to go out after nine at night. Bodies had been found across the city, and the paper described Mataheko, in western Accra, as the worst-hit area. The paper also reported that the Interior Minister, Nii Okaija Adamafio, and the Inspector General, Nanfuri, had read out a list of suspects in Parliament. Quansah's name was not on it; another man was named as a key suspect.
The killings became political. They happened in the years before the December 2000 elections, in which the National Democratic Congress, the party of President Jerry Rawlings, lost power; John Kufuor's administration followed. An interior minister described by IRIN as newly appointed, Alhaji Malik Al-Hassan, said his ministry would give more attention to solving the killings. In a separate IRIN report, he gave Ghanaians two weeks to hand in unlicensed weapons, and said the government was considering asking the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation for help with violent crime, including the unsolved killings of more than 30 women in and around the capital over the previous three years.
On May 10, 2001, the Ghanaian Chronicle reported, as carried on GhanaWeb, that a team of FBI agents had arrived in Ghana to help the Ghana Police Service investigate the serial killings and to train officers. A release from the public affairs section of the United States embassy said the team included specialists in finding, collecting and preserving evidence at crime scenes and members of the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which deals with violent serial offenders. Trainers from the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program were to run a course for patrol officers, who are usually the first to reach a crime scene. The newspaper recalled that the FBI director, Louis J. Freeh, had promised help with the killings of women in Accra during a recent visit to Ghana.
Within a week, the police announced an arrest. In the statement reported on May 16, 2001, police said Charles Quansah had been under surveillance for some time and had been arrested in February 2001 at his home in Adenta. An Accra court had remanded him in custody. A special investigation team had been formed, with specialists in crime-scene management and interrogation, and the police said the FBI had given "Scientific Investigation Support" and that physical evidence had been sent to the FBI laboratory. The results were expected to confirm the evidence before the prosecution began.
According to the police, Quansah confessed on May 8, 2001, to killing eight of the more than 30 women who had died. The statement said the killings had happened between 1993 and 2001, mainly by strangulation, in Kumasi and in the Accra suburbs of Dansoman, Mataheko and Adenta. It also allowed that more than one person might have been responsible for the series.
The Daily Guide reported on May 17, 2001, as carried on GhanaWeb, that a woman who knew Quansah had brought her suspicions to the police and that he had told officers of the Bureau of National Investigations that he had killed eight women.
Other accounts of the arrest differ on the date. The Enquirer wrote in 2005 that Quansah was arrested in Adenta over the death of his girlfriend in July 2000. The Herald wrote in 2010 that he was arrested in June 2000 over the alleged killing of the same woman, and a Daily Guide report the same year, as carried by MyJoyOnline, said he was arrested in February 2000. The New Crusading Guide, in 2010, gave February 2001, matching the police statement. All of these accounts agree that, although he was first held over his girlfriend's death, the charge he faced was the murder of Akua Serwaa in Kumasi. He was not tried for his girlfriend's death.
Akua Serwaa was 24 and worked as a hairdresser in Kumasi. Her name is spelled Serwaa, Serwah and Serwa in different reports. Her sisters told the court that she left home on the evening of January 19, 1996, at about half past eight, with a friend, and did not come back. About five days later the sisters heard that a woman had been killed in Kumasi, went to the police, and identified her.
A barkeeper who had been her boyfriend told the jury that she and her friend came to see him at about ten that night. He was busy, so he set out food for them. Later she left on her own, he said, and did not answer when he called after her. Her friend stayed until he closed at half past five in the morning. When he went to Akua Serwaa's home, he was told she had not come back.
On the morning of January 20, 1996, her body was found in Kumasi and reported to the police. Detective Inspector Kwadwo Fordjour, then of the Buffalo Unit in Kumasi, took the report and had the scene photographed. The pathologist, Dr. O. T. Owusu, found that she had died of unnatural causes.
The prosecution's case, as summarized when the trial began, was that Quansah had befriended her in Kumasi in 1996 and strangled her. A November 2002 summary of the police case said the police had learned she had been at a restaurant the night before that belonged to Quansah, and that this led to his arrest. That account does not fit the barkeeper's testimony that he was her former boyfriend and was serving her that night.
On March 15, an Accra Community Tribunal committed Quansah for trial in the High Court, according to the report of the trial's opening in May 2002. The case came before Mrs. Justice Agnes Dordzie with a jury.
On May 7, 2002, Justice Dordzie suspended the trial. She said the media had interfered unfairly, and that members of the public calling in to radio programs had attacked defense counsel and taken sides in a way that put the trial and due process at risk. She said the trial would continue only if the National Media Commission and the Minister of Information and Presidential Affairs stepped in to bring the coverage into line with proper court reporting. Courts existed to punish criminals, she said, and the public should not comment on cases still before them.
Defense counsel Joseph O. Amui was making his first appearance that day. The Legal Aid Board had appointed him at the court's insistence. He thanked the court, and complained that calendars carrying photographs of his client were being sold in the market. The judge asked for a copy and adjourned the case to May 21.
The trial resumed with the swearing-in of a seven-member jury. Anthony Gyambiby, a Principal State Attorney, led the prosecution and said he would call 11 witnesses; five gave evidence on the first day. They were the man who reported finding her, Akua Serwaa's two sisters, her former boyfriend and Detective Inspector Fordjour, who by then was stationed at Tarkwa.
The prosecution relied on what police said Quansah had told them. The defense attacked how that evidence had been obtained. According to The Enquirer's account in 2005, Amui had a subpoena issued on July 9, 2002, signed for the Chief Justice, Edward K. Wiredu, ordering the CID Commissioner, Patrick K. Acheampong, to appear before Justice Dordzie on July 11 with a lie detector, earlier statements and a tape recording of the confession. Amui said he wanted any lie detector test run in open court, because Quansah believed one had been used on him by men he took to be FBI officers. Acheampong did not appear, and the judge did not hold him in contempt. Acheampong, by then Inspector General, later told the paper he did not recall the subpoena. A police spokesman, David Senanu Eklu, said the CID did not have a lie detector.
A defense witness who said he had been held in police cells with Quansah was the subject of a dispute that became one of the grounds of appeal. The court found that the date the witness gave for his time in the cells contradicted the rest of the evidence, and the jury was told to disregard his evidence.
On August 7, 2002, the jury found Quansah guilty of the murder of Akua Serwaa. The verdict was unanimous, according to a November 2002 report. Justice Dordzie sentenced him to death by hanging. "I am innocent," Quansah told the court. His Legal Aid Board lawyer said he would appeal, and Gyambiby called the verdict fair. Reports of the sentencing described Quansah as accused of killing eight women in Accra and Kumasi, but the conviction covered one death.
Amnesty International had noted earlier that year that Ghanaian courts were still passing death sentences, while no execution was known to have been carried out since 1993, and that the last hanging had taken place in 1968.
In February 2003 the Network Herald, reporting a separate set of killings in the Volta Region, wrote that the arrest and prosecution of Ebo Quansah the year before had brought a period of relief to women in Accra and elsewhere.
On September 6, 2002, Amui filed a notice of appeal. Its grounds were that the conviction was wrong in law, that the judge had misdirected the jury on the defense case and had wrongly told the jury to disregard the evidence of the third defense witness, and that the result was "a grave miscarriage of justice." Further grounds were to follow once the record of proceedings was ready. By November 2002 Quansah was in the condemned cells at Nsawam Medium Security Prison.
Three years later, The Enquirer found Amui still waiting. He told the paper his client bore marks of torture and that Quansah said police had beaten him, that the confession had been taken under duress, that Quansah was not insane and that the judge had ignored the torture claims. He also said the trial had been prejudiced by media coverage comparing Quansah with another high-profile defendant of the time, and that the Legal Aid Board had still not paid him. Quansah, the paper said, was calling for a judicial inquiry into his trial. Nana Oye Lithur told The Enquirer that ignoring a subpoena was a serious offense against the court and that Quansah should appeal if he had a genuine case.
In September 2007, when the police showed a documentary on state television about how they had caught him, his counsel threatened to bring contempt proceedings against the police and some media houses for prejudicing the appeal. David Asante-Apeatu, the outgoing director of the Criminal Investigations Department, who had led the documentary, said it was meant to teach the public about safety and that he was not aware of any pending appeal.
In November 2010 The Herald reported, as carried on GhanaWeb, that the docket and trial record in Republic v. Charles Quansah could not be found in either the High Court or the Court of Appeal, and that without them the appeal could not be heard. The Enquirer had first reported the missing docket in October 2007, and three Chief Justices had held office since. The Chief Registrar of the High Court, S. P. Otoo, would not confirm that the papers were missing and said he believed his predecessor had sent them to the Court of Appeal. The registrar of the Court of Appeal's criminal section, Jude Mensah, said nothing had reached him and that the Appeal Register Book showed no entry. Justice Dordzie, the paper noted, was by then serving as a judge in The Gambia. Amui, then 74, said he was not surprised, repeated that he had not been paid, and said he would visit his client at Nsawam once he had recovered from an injury.
Through prison sources, The Herald reported Quansah's own version in 2010. He maintained his innocence. He said he had told the police he killed nine women, not 34, and that interrogators had turned this into a confession to nine of the 34 deaths. He said he had been blindfolded, handcuffed and driven at night to places he did not know, and beaten until he bled, by a team that he said was led by the former CID director, Asante-Apeatu. The CID chief had said, according to the paper, that the confession was neither videotaped nor recorded.
Quansah also said the police had taken him from Accra to Kumasi and made it look as though he had shown them where Akua Serwaa's body was found. His lawyer told the paper that her sister, called as a prosecution witness, could not say that Quansah had been her sister's partner. The reports do not record any court ruling on his torture allegations.
On June 4, 2003, at a rally marking the anniversary of his 1979 coup, former President Rawlings alleged that 15 ministers in Kufuor's cabinet had been directly involved in the killings of 34 women. IRIN reported that police questioned him at his home in Accra, and that he declined to name anyone. A spokesman said Rawlings would give the names only if the government brought in an independent investigator to give lie detector tests to him and to the people he accused. The Inspector General, Nana Owusu-Nsiah, said he was "profoundly disappointed" with the former president, and that nine years of police work had led to the arrest of a serial killer who, he said, had pleaded guilty to murdering eight women. That description does not match the court record, in which Quansah was tried by a jury and convicted of one murder.
The claim reached Nsawam. A CID report signed by Asante-Apeatu and published by the Crusading Guide in September 2007 said the CID director had been summoned to the Ministry of the Interior on July 24, 2003, and told that a woman posing as a Legal Aid lawyer, backed by a convicted former minister, was trying to get Quansah to make false claims against serving ministers, with a senior prison officer arranging the meetings. A special investigation team interviewed prison officers and inmates. Quansah told the team that after Rawlings's speech he had asked the officer to help him petition against his sentence, that he had been taken to the officer's office four times and had met former ministers there without discussing anything, and that he had not been coached. He called himself a staunch supporter of the governing party and said Rawlings should be arrested if he would not name the people he accused.
The report found that the rules on prison visits had been widely ignored, with high-profile prisoners meeting visitors in officers' offices, and that the identities of Quansah's visitors and what they discussed had never been clearly established. It recommended disciplinary action against the prison officer and stricter enforcement of the prison rules.
In September 2007 the Minority Leader in Parliament, Alban Bagbin, called the police documentary on the case "erroneous and deceptive" and said the facts had been distorted for propaganda purposes. Bagbin pointed out that Quansah had been convicted of one killing, not of the 30 or more women who died before the 2000 elections.
In November 2010, President John Atta Mills, who had been vice president at the time of the killings, directed the Inspector General of Police, Paul Tawiah Quaye, to reopen the investigation. The deputy information minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, said criminal matters had no "expiry date." Nana Obiri Boahene, a former minister of state at the interior ministry under Kufuor, called the order a "dangerous precedence," arguing that the president should be concerned with all unexplained deaths, not one series in which someone had already been convicted. Kweku Baako Jnr, editor of The New Crusading Guide, called it a wild goose chase on Joy FM and said relatives had been identified for about 95 percent of the victims; his paper reported that police CID records showed only six of the women had not been identified. Dr. Omane Boamah, a deputy minister, said the government believed Quansah was not the only person behind the killings.
A Daily Guide report of the time, carried by MyJoyOnline, said Quansah had later claimed to know nothing of the killings and that his earlier confession was made under duress. No result of the reopened investigation was reported in the coverage that followed.
Ghana had carried out no execution since 1993, Amnesty International noted in 2002. On July 25, 2023, Parliament passed amendments replacing the death penalty for ordinary crimes with life imprisonment, and President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo assented to one of the bills on August 11, 2023, according to a 2025 article in the Ghanaian Times by Genevieve Partington, country director of Amnesty International Ghana. She wrote that 178 people were on death row at the time and that their sentences were to be reviewed, and that a later presidential pardon had commuted 87 death sentences to life imprisonment. The death penalty remains in the constitution for high treason. Neither that article nor the reporting on Quansah's appeal says what has become of his own sentence.
Proven in court: the murder of Akua Serwaa in Kumasi on January 19, 1996 (jury verdict, High Court, Accra, August 7, 2002). The conviction was under appeal from September 2002; in November 2010 the appeal had not been heard.
Confessed, by police account: eight killings of women (police statement, May 2001; IRIN's report of the Inspector General's words in 2003), later given as nine in reports of 2005 and 2010. Quansah retracted, says he was tortured, and says he admitted nine, not 34. None of these killings was tried.
Attributed, never tried: police and later officials linked him to the wider series of about 34 killings of women in Accra and Kumasi. Officials of the Mills government said in 2010 that they did not believe he was the only person responsible. Reports in 2010 that he was convicted of nine killings, or of killing his girlfriend, are wrong: the court convicted him of one murder.
Points on which the reports differ: the date of his arrest (February 2001 in the police statement and in a 2010 report; June 2000, July 2000 and February 2000 in others); his age (36 in May 2001, 35 in November 2002); and whether he confessed to eight or nine killings.
1986: jailed at James Fort Prison, Accra, for rape (police statement, 2001).
1987: jailed again for rape and sent to Nsawam prison for three years; afterward settles in Ayigya, Kumasi.
January 19, 1996: Akua Serwaa, 24, leaves home in Kumasi in the evening and does not return.
January 20, 1996: her body is found in Kumasi and reported to the police.
Around 1997: Quansah moves to Dansoman, Accra.
Late 1990s to 2000: killings of women in Accra and Kumasi; protests by women's groups; the toll is put at more than 30.
September 2000: Quansah moves to Adenta, Accra.
December 2000: the National Democratic Congress loses power in the general election.
February 2001: arrested at his home in Adenta (police statement).
May 8, 2001: police record a confession to eight killings.
May 10, 2001: an FBI team is reported to have arrived in Ghana to help the police.
May 16, 2001: police announce his arrest and confession.
March 15 (reported 2002): committed for trial to the High Court by an Accra Community Tribunal.
May 7, 2002: Justice Agnes Dordzie suspends the trial over media coverage.
May 2002: trial resumes before a seven-member jury.
July 9 and 11, 2002: the defense subpoena to the CID Commissioner is issued; he does not appear.
August 7, 2002: convicted of the murder of Akua Serwaa and sentenced to death by hanging.
September 6, 2002: notice of appeal filed.
November 2002: held in the condemned cells at Nsawam Medium Security Prison.
June 4, 2003: Jerry Rawlings alleges that 15 ministers were behind the killings of 34 women.
July 24, 2003: the CID begins an inquiry into meetings arranged for Quansah inside Nsawam.
September 2005: his lawyer says the confession was taken under duress and the appeal is unheard.
October 2007: The Enquirer first reports the appeal docket missing.
September 2007: a police documentary on the case is broadcast; Alban Bagbin calls it deceptive.
November 2010: President Mills orders the investigation reopened; The Herald reports the trial record missing and the appeal unheard.
July 25, 2023: Parliament votes to replace the death penalty for ordinary crimes with life imprisonment; one bill receives assent on August 11, 2023.