Between 1993 and 2000 women were found strangled in Accra, Ghana's capital, and in Kumasi, the second city: thirty-four of them by the count that came to be attached to one man. Most were night traders and market women; some, investigators said later, had worked as prostitutes. Many were found stripped to the waist, raped and posed, with condoms scattered around them, and some had been mutilated. The killings clustered around Mataheko and Dansoman in western Accra, and the Ghanaian press named the series after Mataheko. Ghana had never dealt with a case of this kind, and its police had no training for one.
The man eventually charged was Charles Papa Kwabena Ebo Quansah, born in 1964, a mechanic and spare parts dealer who lived in Adenta, on the northeastern side of Accra. The press called him the Accra Strangler. Police and prison records produced at his trial showed that he had been jailed at James Fort prison for rape in 1986, had raped again after his release and been sent to Nsawam for three years in 1987, and had been imprisoned once more for robbery in 1996, after which he moved to Accra.
The president of Ghana asked the FBI for help. Investigators from the Bureau's unit for child abductions and serial killings at Quantico traveled to Ghana with a polygrapher from Atlanta, and trained Ghanaian officers in geographic profiling and systematic neighborhood canvassing. Quansah had already been watched as a suspect. One name, witnesses said, kept coming up near the places where victims had last been seen.
He was arrested in February 2000 over the death of his girlfriend in Kumasi, Joyce Boateng, who had been strangled the same way as the Accra women. He was never charged with her death. The charge he faced instead was the murder of Akua Serwaa, strangled on January 19, 1996 and found the next morning near the Kumasi Sports Stadium. In interviews with the FBI he said spirits had made him kill.
The confessions came in stages and were counted differently by different people. The American polygrapher recorded nine over two days, according to an account of the FBI's role published by the crime writer Kwei Quartey; a 2007 Ghanaian report put his admissions under the polygraph at eight. The CID listed four in Kumasi and two each in Dansoman and Adenta, every place he had lived. Ghanaian detectives then used the American interview techniques, including telling him he would be famous as the country's first serial killer, and Quartey writes that those interviews brought his admissions to thirty or more, with details of the victims never made public. The confessions were said to have been completed on May 8, 2001. Quartey also reports that the FBI laboratory at Quantico found Quansah's DNA on a bloody T-shirt together with a victim's blood.
His trial opened in the High Court in Accra in the summer of 2002; Wikipedia gives the date as July 11, a GhanaWeb account June 11. It was briefly suspended in July. On August 7, 2002 he was convicted of the murders of nine women and sentenced to hang. The CID director general, David Asante-Apeatu, told the press he believed Quansah capable of every one of the killings and that his statements had contradicted themselves.
He withdrew everything. He said first that he had been joking, and then that he had been tortured on the orders of CID officers, and pointed to scars on his body. In 2003 he told the press he had killed none of the nine women he was convicted of or any of the others he was suspected of. In June 2004, writing from the condemned cells at Nsawam Medium Security Prison, he asked for a lawyer willing to take up his case. The police denied that he had been tortured. Victor Smith, a former aide to President Rawlings, was among those who spoke up for him.
His appeal argued that the judge had misdirected the jury over a defense witness. By 2010, Quartey reports, it had still not been heard, because the case docket could not be found.
Ghana has carried out no execution since 1993, and he remained on death row at Nsawam. Two other killings of the period were attributed to other men, one of them an imitator. Quartey believes the nine convictions were the cases with the strongest witness corroboration, and that more than thirty killings in Accra and perhaps ten in Kumasi were his.