A lecturer and criminologist at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr Jones Opoku-Ware, has praised the Ghana Police Service for arresting two suspects in connection with the Wa killings, describing the breakthrough as a major achievement in crime detection.

His remarks follow police confirmation that two suspects have been arrested in Wa, with one confessing to 15 killings.

Speaking on the JoyNews AM Show, Dr Opoku-Ware described the arrest as a remarkable achievement, noting that identifying serial killers is one of the most challenging tasks for security agencies worldwide.

“All over the world, you know, when it comes to serial killing, these are one of the types of murders that are very difficult to identify the perpetrators of. So if you look at the way they operate, it is not easy for you to identify them.

"What they do is that they engage in very geographically unrelated kinds of operations, so it becomes tough for you to be able to connect to one particular person at a relatively shorter point in time,” he said.

He explained that many serial killers are difficult to identify because they often live normal lives within their communities.

“Many serial killers, as we know over the period, are people that walk in plain sight. I mean they are people that live with us within a community; they are not sophisticated people.

"So they will be living with us, but we wouldn’t know these are the kinds of activities they engage in. It makes it very difficult for us to be able to profile and identify them over the period,” he said.

Dr Opoku-Ware said it often takes years for police to track and link such crimes together, describing the Wa arrest as a major success.

“If we look at the consistency and the popularity of these kinds of operations, let me be very honest: it is very difficult for you to identify. That is why a lot of times, they are able to have these opportunities to do these kinds of activities over a long period of time before finally the police is able to pick up the trail and get to them,” he stated.

He further commended the police for connecting the dots within a relatively short period, saying it usually takes much longer to arrest serial killers.

“Actually I want to even congratulate the police because from what I know, if you look at the period of his operations — that’s from 2021 and now that is basically like five years. In fact, throughout history we have had serial killers operate more than 10, 15 years before the police are able to get to their heels,” he said.

“If you look at the profiling of serial killers, their activities are very temporal and unrelated and geographically spread. They have something we call a 'cooling-off period' — sometimes they strike and move to another place, relax for some time and then strike and move to another place and strike,” he added.

Dr Opoku-Ware said this pattern makes it “very difficult for the security agencies to be on track,” explaining that linking crimes committed in different areas requires time and patience.

“You need a lot of time to be able to pick the chain to connect it to a particular person or group of people who do those kinds of operations.

“It’s something that is very complex, and over the years, if you look at crime literature, you will get to know that it’s been very, very difficult all over the world to pin down serial killers because of their modus operandi — which we call the MO,” he said.

“So it is very key when we have to talk about what the police have done in the Upper West Region. I think I will really give it up to them because they’ve been able to use the trace and all the key things that the person must have left and been able to connect all the dots and hand it to this person. So I think they’ve really done well,” he stressed.

On whether it is normal for one person to kill 15 people, Dr Opoku-Ware said such cases are often linked to mental health conditions.

“If you look at the typology of serial killers, many of them have been diagnosed with certain mental conditions, especially schizophrenia. So a lot of time, if we are to do a proper assessment of these kinds of guys, we need to also take into account their psychological state at any point in time,” he said.

He added that some killers are driven by thrill, others by financial motives, or both.

“We have those that we call the spree killers — they kill for fun; they get some kind of thrill, and most of the time when you interview them, they tell you that they hear voices in their head that tell them to go and kill.

"So if you have such kinds of people on the loose, it means that apart from the fact that they are committing murder, they actually derive some form of joy from the very act that they commit,” he explained.

Commenting on the Wa suspect, Dr Opoku-Ware said:

“If you look at the pattern of what we have, the guy that we’ve arrested now, apart from the fact that I suspect this form of thrill-seeking behaviour, I also see some form of the classic typology of the serial killers who want to get some form of financial reward. But then what is even more interesting is the choice of people this guy was targeting — mad people and watchmen.”