The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (56 page)

The previous week the body of a middle-aged woman was found in the same condition in another part of the city. Until then, most of the killing had taken place in Mataheko, a lower middle-class residential area to the southwest of the city. Until then Accra, with a population of just two million, had been considered safe.

The Ghana branch of the Federation of International Women Lawyers (Fida) wrote to the then President Jerry Rawlings and to parliament, asking them to treat the situation as “a national crisis”.

“We wish to state without hesitation that we’re deeply aggrieved, highly disappointed and extremely agitated by this unnecessary and unjustified shedding of innocent blood,” said Elizabeth Owiredu-Gyampoh, President of Fida.

The women protesters said that the situation would have been treated a lot more seriously if the victims had been men.

“As it is, it’s the lives of ordinary people that are being lost so the big men don’t care,” said Angela Dwamena-Aboagye.

The police were also being accused of lacking professionalism. Sylvia Legge, who made the initial report of the most recent killing at a nearby police station, says she was not treated seriously by the police.

“I made the report at 06:30, but the police officer in charge eventually saw me after 10:00, almost four hours later,” she told a local radio station.

But the police claimed that they are starved of resources. The equipment they have for testing blood samples pre-dates World War II.

In July 2000, Charles Ebo Quansah was arrested in the Accra suburb of Adenta for the murder of his girlfriend Joyce Boateng, but he was also charged with the murder of 24-year-old hairdresser Akua Serwaa who was found dead near the Kumasi Sports Stadium in the Ashanti region, 125 miles inland from Accra. He had previous served jail terms for rape.

In custody, he reportedly confessed to the murder of nine other women around Accra and Kumasi, though he was charged with only one. He was found guilty on the basis of a lie-detector test and sentenced to death. However, when he appealed to the High Court, the Commission of Police failed to respond to a subpoena to produce the polygraph machine and, later, denied that the police department had one – though there were hints that a lie-detector test had been administered by “white men” from the FBI. There was also evidence that Quansah had been tortured. Previously, when a list of suspects in the case had been read out in parliament, Quansah’s name was not on it.

Meanwhile the killings continued. In December 2000, a corpse was found in a bush in an uninhabited area off a major road in the south-east of the city bringing the total to 31. The dead woman was in her mid-thirties or early forties. She was lying face-up, naked except for a brassiere. A pair of leggings were lying near by. Police said there were abrasions on her hands, but otherwise there were no signs of struggle. It was thought that she may have been killed elsewhere and her dead body dumped where she was found. Police allowed scores of people to walk past the body, in the hope that someone would identify her. But no one knew her.

On Monday men and women alike called into radio phone-in programmes, alarmed at the sheer frequency of the murders.

“I’m not going to sell
kenkey
[a popular cooked milled-corn dish] late at night any more, I don’t feel safe; I’m going to close early and go home,” said Abena Nyarkoa, a food seller in Madina, a suburb where two women had been found dead that month.

The murders became a political issue and Interior Minister Nii Okaidja Adamafio and his deputy Kweku Bonful were voted out of office. In a TV broadcast, presidential candidate John Kufuor made finding the killer a plank in his 2000 election campaign. Jerry Rawlings had already stepped down and Kufuor won the presidency. However, in 2003, Rawlings alleged that 15 ministers in President John Kufuor’s cabinet had a direct hand in the women’s murders that had now climbed to 34 – though the killings had taken place while Rawlings himself was head of state.

Police questioned Rawlings about his claims at his residence in Accra, but the former president refused to name names. He said he will only reveal the names of the ministers involved if the government would invite an independent investigator to administer a lie-detector test on him and those implicated in order minimize the telling of lies in the case.

Ghana’s Inspector General of Police, Nana Owusu-Nsiah, said he was “profoundly disappointed with the utterances and conduct of the former president”. He said that police had conducted thorough investigations over nine years, which eventually led to the arrest and capture of a serial killer, who pleaded guilty to murdering eight of the women. He pointed out, once again, that the Ghana Police Service did not have a lie-detector.

At the time former President Jerry Rawlings made the allegations against leading members of President Kufuor’s ruling New Patriotic Party, he was due to be called to give evidence before Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission about the alleged torture and murder of members of political opposition during his own period of nearly 20 years in power. Rawlings ruled Ghana for several months after leading a coup in June 1979. He came to power again in a second coup in 1982 and was subsequently elected president in 1992 and 1996. But he chose not to contest the presidential elections of 2000 which brought Kufuor to power.

Charles Ebo Quansah was only ever charged with 11 of the murders and the case against him in nine instances seems flimsy at best. Whether or not they now hold high office, the killers in the other cases are still at large.

Guatemala’s Plague of Death

Guatemala is a paradise for serial killers. In a population of just 15 million, two women are murdered there every day. Even more men are murdered, but the gap is closing fast.

In 2005, 665 women were killed – more than 20 percent up on the previous year. No one really knows why because the crimes are rarely investigated. According to the BBC, not one of those 665 murders has been solved.

The newspapers in the capital Guatemala City carry a regular tally of the number of female corpses found dumped in the streets. But these discoveries are so commonplace that a regular murder barely rates a sentence at the bottom of an inside page. A short paragraph may be given over to the story if the woman had been tortured, trussed naked in barbed wire, scalped, decapitated, dismembered, abandoned on wasteland or, as is common, dumped in empty oil drums that serve as giant rubbish bins. Some reports mention in passing that “death to bitches” or some other insult has been carved into the woman’s flesh. Rarely, though, is there any mention that the woman or girl – sometimes as young as eight or nine – has been raped. According to director of Guatemala City’s central morgue Dr Mario Guerra the majority have.

Little effort is made to identify the victims. They have often been taken far from the place where they were abducted and subjected to unimaginable tortures before being killed. Many are so badly mutilated they are unrecognizable. In Guatemala, there is no fingerprint or DNA database, no crime or victim profiling and no real forensic science. No one investigates and witnesses do not talk. It can take a woman’s family months to trace their daughter to the morgue. Some are never claimed. They are simply designated “XX”, or “identity unknown” and buried in unmarked communal graves.

Guatemala is a lawless country where people kill with impunity. This began in the 1950s when the United Fruit Company, fearful of losing its holdings under government land reforms, encouraged CIA efforts to foster a military coup, destabilizing the country. Left-wing guerrillas took to the hills. Civil war raged for 36 years. Large areas of the countryside were razed and the rural population, mainly Mayan Indian, were massacred. Villagers were herded into churches, which were set on fire. Whole families were sealed alive in wells. Politicians were assassinated with impunity. Women were routinely raped before being mutilated and killed. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open and foetuses strung from trees. Life became very cheap indeed.

By the time the UN brokered a peace deal in 1996, over 200,000 had been killed, 40,000 “disappeared” and 1.3 million had fled the country or became internal refugees – all this in a country of little over ten million. Today the graves of entire massacred villages are being exhumed, yet no one has ever been held responsible for these crimes.

In 1998 the Catholic Church published a report saying that 93 percent of those who had perished in the preceding decades of genocide had died at the hands of the armed forces and paramilitary death squads. Ronald Reagan described the accusation of genocide as a “bum rap” and the bishop who wrote this report was bludgeoned to death on his doorstep. To placate foreign outrage, three army officers were convicted of his murder.

Once the civil war was over, the paramilitary squads were stood down and those in the army responsible for the sadistic repression were eased out. Three generations of killers now walk the streets of a country awash with guns. There are at least 1.5 million unregistered firearms in Guatemala and an estimated 84 million rounds of ammunition were imported in 2005 alone.

Many former paramilitaries found employment in the police force, corrupting it. Drug traffickers have moved in and organized crime has moved into the highest ranks of the government. In 2003, Amnesty International labelled Guatemala “a corporate Mafia state” controlled by “hidden powers” – an “unholy alliance between traditional sectors of the oligarchy, some new entrepreneurs, the police, military and common criminals”.

In 2005, the ombudsman’s office issued a report saying it had received information implicating 639 police officers in criminal activities in the past 12 months. The crimes range from extortion and robbery to rape and murder. As most of the population is afraid to report crime committed by the authorities, this figure is almost certain to be a considerable underestimate of police complicity.

“A key element in the history of Guatemala is the use of violence against women to terrorize the population,” says director of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights Eda Gaviola. “Those who profit from this state of terror are the organized criminals involved in everything from narco-trafficking to the illegal adoption racket, money-laundering and kidnapping. There are clear signs of connections between such activities and the military, police and private security companies, which many ex-army and police officers joined when their forces were cut back.”

Guatemala also has a particularly “macho” culture. A man can dodge a charge of rape if he marries his victim – provided she is over the age of 12. A battered wife can only prosecute her husband if her injuries are visible for over ten days. Having sex with a minor is only an offence if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively. And in some communities it is accepted that fathers “introduce” their daughters to sex.

Then there are the
pandilleros
– the gangsters who live in the poorest barrios of Guatemala city. Vicious infighting takes place between rival street gangs – known here as
maras
, after a breed of swarming ants. This makes Guatemala City one of the deadliest cities in the world, with a murder rate five times higher than even Bogotá in war-torn Colombia, per capita.

The country’s largest gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, has now spread throughout Central America and northwards. From California, its tentacle have reached out across the United States. In 2005, it was held responsible for two killings in Long Island and is increasingly making its presence felt on the East Coast. In Guatemala, young women are often the victims of inter-gang rivalries. Usually the authorities dismiss the casualties as prostitutes.

But 19-year-old Manuela Sachaz was no prostitute. She was a baby-sitter, who had recently arrived in Guatemala City to look after Anthony Hernandez, the 10-month-old son of working couple Monica and Erwin Hernandez. Together they shared a small apartment on the second floor of a block in the Villa Nueva district of Guatemala City.

On 23 March 2005, the child’s mother Monica Hernandez came home from work. She had no key to the apartment and there was no answer from Manuela inside. She went to see her mother Cervelia Roldan to ask her if she had seen Manuela. She had not and together they went back to the apartment together and started calling out Manuela’s name, but there was no answer.

A middle-aged police officer lived in a nearby apartment. He came to the front door of his apartment block.

“It was about five in the afternoon,” Cervelia Roldan recalled, “but he was wearing just his dressing gown. He seemed very agitated and told us to look for Manuela in the market.”

When Erwin Hernandez arrived home and again got no answer, he broke a window and opened the apartment door. Inside he found the body of the baby-sitter and their child. Manuela was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The baby was sitting in a high chair, his breakfast still on the table in front of him. Both had been beheaded. The nanny had also been raped and mutilated. Her breasts and lips had been cut off, her legs slashed.

Three days later their police neighbour shaved off his beard and moved away.

“Neighbours told me later how he used to pester Manuela,” says Cervelia. She claims that, after the double murder, Manuela’s bloodstained clothing was found in the policeman’s house. The authorities dispute this. They say the blood on the clothing did not match that of the baby or his nanny.

Cervelia says she has seen the policeman in the neighbourhood several times since the killings.

“He laughs in my face,” she says. “What I want is justice, but what do we have if we can’t rely on the support of the law?”

In mid-December 2001 Maria Isabel Veliz was just a happy teenage girl with a part-time job in a shop. Earlier that year she had celebrated her 15th birthday by attending a church service wearing a white dress with flowers in her hair. She had a deep religious faith.

“Sometimes my daughter would visit me at work and pretend she needed to use my computer for her homework. But what she really wanted was to leave me a note telling me how much she loved me,” said her mother Rosa Franco, a secretary who had been studying for a law degree.