To those who loved Charmain Speirs, so much about her death doesn’t make any sense.
After a whirlwind romance and quickfire wedding, she was mysteriously found dead in a hotel bathtub in Ghana six months later.
Her Ghanaian husband, Eric Adusah, the head pastor of a Pentecostal church, was charged with her murder before being released due to lack of evidence.
The prophet, as he is known by his followers who believe he shares divine revelation directly from God, has denied any involvement in his wife’s death.
Friends and family told the BBC they were puzzled about why Charmain had left her seven-year-old son with members of her husband’s church while she went to Ghana alone.
In a new podcast series – Charmain and the Prophet – one woman, Elma Adams, says she may have the answer.
She says Charmain was “on a mission” to find out who her husband really was.
Elma, a devout Christian who is now in her 80s, had been Eric Adusah’s “Scottish mum” after they met in Edinburgh in 2012.
But she thinks the prophet used her and Charmain for his own gain.
Innovation PhotographyElma first encountered the prophet in a Christian bookshop in the Scottish capital and recalls that he seemed “very charming and easy to talk to”.
The pair exchanged numbers and Elma told him to phone if he ever needed help.
Several weeks later, he called and before long he was staying with Elma and her late husband George whenever he was in Scotland.
The prophet was based in London but his Global Light Revival church already had branches in Manchester and Dublin.
Elma helped him recruit Christians to establish the Edinburgh branch and he would stay at her home about once a month when he came to host services.
Elma was fond of him and he was a source of support when she found she had cancer.
But she was less impressed by what she saw after he got together with Charmain.
“There seemed to be a lot of urgency to get married,” she says.
“What struck me was that they didn’t impress me as a romantic couple.
“It was more like she was an acquisition rather than a beloved romantic partner, more like a stage prop than anything else.”
FacebookCharmain, originally from Arbroath, met the prophet through a Christian dating site in spring 2014 and after a whirlwind romance they married in September that year.
She was 40 years old and, after a string of broken relationships, finally thought she had found what was promised for her – a man of God.
Within months, Charmain was the wife of Eric Adusah, referred to as the “first lady” by members of his church.
She was a celebrity in the church, who appeared on publicity posters alongside her husband.
But according to Elma, and others the BBC has spoken to, all was not well behind the scenes.
Charmain lost touch with most of her friends but Elma was able to remain in contact – perhaps because she was close to the prophet.
Elma says: “She, from time to time, would phone me or leave me a text and she would be quite distressed, angry, emotional, resentful.
“She had little or no extra money at all. She was dependent on support from Eric.”
Elma says Charmain told her that her husband insulted the way she looked and controlled what she wore.
Other witnesses have told the BBC they saw signs Charmain was being coercively controlled after her marriage and her son claimed she was physically abused.
Another friend who managed to stay in contact with Charmain, Anne-Marie Bond, visited the couple’s home in Essex.
She says: “She sat me down and she told me, ‘I have got to tell you something. He is not who he says he is’.”
Anne-Marie says Charmain told her he had different identities and other women.
The BBC spoke to two women who had been in relationships with Eric Adusah and claimed they had been emotionally abused by him.
We also learned that another woman, who was in a relationship with him, contacted Charmain to try to warn her.
Anne-Marie says Charmain was planning “an exit strategy” but was still trying to believe that her “prophet” was the man that God had chosen for her.
“She still had that little bit of faith in her, that little belief that this was possibly the man that she’s supposed to be with – because of God,” Anne-Marie says.
FacebookExactly why Charmain went to Ghana when she appeared to be planning to end the marriage has always been unclear.
Elma thinks she was trying to find out more about her husband’s past.
“She was adamant, she wanted to find out more about him and she wanted to meet his background,” Elma says.
“And I took that to be his family.
“She was very resentful at the end, and she was angry enough to go on what I say was a bit of a mission to find out what it was really all about.”
Elma says that Charmain felt strongly enough to leave her son behind and fly to Ghana to try to “get to the root of things”.
PA MediaElma and Anne-Marie did not speak to Charmain while she was in Ghana but a friend from the Global Light Revival church, who we are not naming to protect her identity, claims to have been in regular phone contact while she was in the west African country.
In a statement given to British police a month after Charmain was found dead, the witness claims Charmain had discovered her husband went by another name and that he was much older than he had claimed.
According to the witness, Charmain also claimed to have found out that Eric Adusah had another wife in Ghana.
The witness says Charmain told her on 16 March she was going to check into a hotel with the prophet, who was by now also in the country, and confront him about everything.
She says she received a phone call later that evening from Charmain’s number and could hear the couple in the background.
She says Eric Adusah was shouting and it sounded like he was banging a table as he spoke.
Then the call ended suddenly.
This was the day before Charmain was last seen alive.
FacebookOn 20 March 2015, Charmain’s body was found in a bathtub in the hotel where she spent time with her husband.
More than a decade on, a BBC Disclosure investigation uncovered omissions from the prophet’s account of what happened at the hotel where Charmain died.
He told police he left the hotel after midnight to travel to Accra for a 06:00 meeting with a reverend before a scheduled flight back to the UK.
The BBC found that the man he claimed he was meeting did not corroborate his story.
He also did not mention that three men had visited their hotel room that night, one holding a briefcase, and spent an hour there before they helped the prophet load bags into his car.
Two of the men were later traced and said they were in the room praying.
Eric Adusah, who now lives in the USA and goes by the name Eric Isaiah Kusi Boateng, did not answer the BBC’s questions about alleged domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour.
It has been over 10 years since Charmain died.
Her friends, like Elma and Anne-Marie, are still reckoning with what happened, replaying those final moments they spent with Charmain.
For Elma, Charmain’s death has caused her to examine the power she claims the prophet held over them both.
“We’ve both been conned, useful idiots, which is not a very nice way to put it, but we’ve been used,” says Elma.
“Charmain was used; she was a commodity.”
