BBC probe uncovers gaps in pastor's account of wife's Ghana death

Charmain Speirs was 40 when she met Eric Adusah through a Christian dating site in spring 2014, beginning a whirlwind relationship that ended with her body found in a bathtub in a hotel in Ghana on 20 March 2015. They married in September 2014, but the case has remained unresolved for more than a decade, leaving her family with unanswered questions about how she died and what was recorded about the hours before her death.

BBC Disclosure’s documentary series, Charmain and the Prophet, says it uncovered significant omissions from Adusah’s account of the night Charmain died. Police records reportedly identify Adusah as the last known person to see her alive. A hotel witness told the programme that two tall men arrived with him and went to room 112, stayed for up to an hour, and helped him load bags into his car before he left around 1 a.m., after telling staff not to disturb his wife.

Adusah was the head pastor of Global Light Revival Church, had appeared on Christian television and was known in his church as a prophet believed to receive divine revelation directly from God. He was later arrested on suspicion of murder and released because of lack of evidence. He has denied involvement in Charmain’s death. The new reporting also says Adusah used multiple identities, including Eric Adu Brefo in Ghana and Eric Isaiah Kusi Boateng in the United States.

Charmain had grown up in Arbroath, Scotland, later lived in Glasgow and Swansea, and had joined Liberty Church after struggling with post-natal depression. She had a son, Isaac, in 2007. Friends described her as a social butterfly, drawn to Adusah’s status as a man of God after what one friend said was her frustration with ordinary relationships.

Now 19, Isaac told the BBC he heard his mother screaming and crying and alleged that Adusah hit her and controlled her phone, money, clothes and eating habits. Charmain’s mother, Linda, said she noticed bald patches on her daughter’s scalp and was told Adusah had pulled her hair.

The case has become a test of accountability across borders, where a death in Ghana led to a police investigation, an arrest, a release for lack of evidence and years of silence. The BBC investigation has renewed scrutiny of how police handled the death and whether key parts of Adusah’s version were left out of the official record, deepening the sense of a justice process that never fully reached the family left behind.