Martin Fordham remembers very clearly his words to his mother Janet as she packed up her life in Devon and prepared to depart for Ghana. ‘If you get on that plane I’ll never see you again,’ he said.
How he wishes he could turn back time to that moment in October four years ago and shout louder, protest more vociferously, do anything in his power to dissuade his mother, then 69, from setting off on her single-minded and fatefully misguided mission.
For, as the Daily Mail revealed this week, Janet Fordham’s journey to Ghana was to end in the wreckage of a car crash at the side of a dusty road, four months after landing in the West African country.
The circumstances of Janet’s death remain a source of unrelenting pain for her family. They remain convinced that the crash was no accident – and that she was murdered. Janet had travelled to Ghana to meet Kofi, a man she’d met online, who she believed could help her recover the fortune she’d lost to romance scammers.
‘I’m sorry but she didn’t die in a car crash, there is no doubt in my mind,’ said Martin’s wife, Mel, this week. ‘We believe she was killed, she was murdered.’ It is perhaps understandable that Janet’s bereft family would lash out as they try to make sense of their mother’s death but it must be stressed that an inquest at Devon Coroner’s Court on Wednesday concluded that she died from severe head injuries, probably sustained in the crash.
She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt when the car she was travelling in left the road and flipped on to its roof and was still breathing when the wreck happened.
The crash represented the final, tragic twist in a desperately sad six-year saga in which widow Janet was fleeced of up to £1 million in a series of romance frauds perpetuated, police believe, by a single criminal gang, operating from multiple countries.
That her death came on Valentine’s Day, in 2023, feels like a particularly cruel end note.
Janet Fordham packed up her life in Devon for Ghana to meet Kofi, a man she’d met online, who she believed could help her recover the fortune she’d lost to romance scammers
Her journey to Ghana ended in the wreckage of a car crash at the side of a dusty road, four months after landing in the West African country
Sitting at the kitchen of his family home in Honiton, the same home Janet left, Martin, 50, is still battling to unpick the trail of devastation wreaked by the callous scammers who exploited his much-loved mother’s loneliness, bleeding her of every hard-earned penny of her savings and plunging her further and further into debt.
Family photos depicting happier times hang on the walls as Martin and his childminder wife Mel – who have five daughters who have lost a beloved grandmother – describe the nightmare that haunts them.
They are bewildered by it all, not least how that crash unfolded and how Janet sustained the head injury that killed her. They learned this week that police in Ghana did open a murder inquiry in the wake of Janet’s death, which was swiftly abandoned. It has left Martin deeply suspicious.
He returns to that fateful conversation he had with his mother before she left the UK – on a quest, she believed, to recover her fortune, with the help of yet another dashing knight in shining armour she’d met online.
‘I felt she was going to get knocked over the head trying to get her money back but she said, “I’ve got no other choice”. We were trying to shock her into understanding but she was so blinkered.’
Martin, a farrier, couldn’t face going to the inquest, so Mel went on the couple’s behalf.
She told the court how vigorously they’d tried to help Janet, to stop her leaving when their own suspicions were high. As she says: ‘Since the inquest I’ve read hurtful comments online about us, saying where was her family when she was giving away all her money.
‘If only they knew the years of stress we went through. We want to raise awareness about these scams. For somebody like Janet who was switched on to fall so badly for this, I dread to think how easy it is with other people.’
Janet was not a lavish spender nor, insist her family, was she a fool. ‘People might find it hard to believe but she was a very shrewd woman,’ says Mel, the type who would ‘darn her own socks and boil the bones of a chicken carcass for the next day’s meal’.
Such frugality was doubtless shaped by the tragedy of her early life. She was just 22 when her plumber husband Roger was killed while working on their first home together, in the East Devon village of Offwell; he was digging a well when the earth collapsed on top of him.
Janet became a single mother to two children – Martin, one, and his sister Julie, two – and threw herself into giving them all she could. ‘Mum brought my sister and me up together,’ recalls Martin. ‘We moved to Honiton where we started riding and Mum had two jobs in order to pay for horses. She worked really hard, six or seven days per week.’
There was a second chance at love in a 20-year relationship with another man, Gerald, but that too ended in tragedy when he developed dementia and died.
Lonely and working long hours as a housekeeper for a wealthy family with children, it was in 2017 when Janet first got an online dating account, suggested by Mel and Martin – something they now bitterly regret.
It wasn’t long before she had the first of a series of fateful encounters. First, she fell for a man who claimed to be a sergeant in the British Army, working in Syria, who would soon be retiring to the UK. Before long they were ‘in love’.
‘I remember her happily telling us all about it and I was thinking it sounds like b*****ks,’ says Mel.
‘I remember saying, “Janet we have no soldiers there, this doesn’t add up”. I joked that the next thing he’d be asking for money to buy a house. Whatever you do, don’t give him any.’
It wasn’t until years later that Mel and Martin discovered that was exactly what Janet had done. The fraudster, using a ruse about needing help to get gold bars back to the UK, had persuaded Janet to part with £140,000.
Not that she told them. Shame, guilt or pride meant she kept it to herself and only reported her own fears to police. ‘How it escalated from there we won’t ever know,’ says Mel. ‘Because she wasn’t forthcoming with us once she knew what we thought.’
As Martin adds: ‘She knew she was being scammed but didn’t want to admit it. She really was a stubborn woman.’
They have pieced together the escalation of events from investigations that have been conducted and know there were more scams, further identities, yet more stories of ruthless scammers targeting this vulnerable woman.
The inquest was told a large scale operation had been identified, involving online activity with people in Ghana, Germany, the US and UK.
Martin says that his mother ‘knew she was being scammed but didn’t want to admit it’
It was in 2017 when Janet first got an online dating account – only to later fall victim to romance fraudsters who persuaded her to part with her money
Janet sold a valuable tranche of land, used all her savings, maxed out credit cards and borrowed tens of thousands of pounds from other family members as the noose tightened.
‘She wouldn’t tell us anything,’ sighs Martin. ‘She started driving off to send [cash] via money transfers. We would get places to bar her and she would go further afield.’
After another scam by a man posing as a diplomat, Janet’s bank account was frozen. Later her account was restricted so she could only pay direct debits and go to Tesco but couldn’t make large transfers.
Her response? ‘She started making up stories,’ says Mel.
‘[The bank] would have to ring the police because she was kicking off, demanding her money. She told them she wanted £17,000 for a horse; they rang me because she was getting so irate and I had to rush in and take her away.’
Janet sold land she owned for £240,000. Within hours of it hitting her account, it had left it again – into the hands of scammers.
This couple have wrestled with why Janet did what she did. ‘She never thought we were helping her. She saw it as us getting in the way. If anything, we were stopping her making a profit,’ says Martin.
But who was the man driving the car when Janet died?
As the inquest heard, he first contacted Janet in 2018 saying he was a doctor in Ghana, working part-time in a friend’s mobile phone repair shop.
Kofi, 52, told Janet he believed she had been scammed, after seeing messages on a phone he was working on. ‘Whether she genuinely believed what she was being told, we will never know,’ Mel says.
‘We tried everything to stop her. We tried to take her to her doctor but because she was of sound mind they wouldn’t do anything. We tried to get power of attorney but her exact words were “over my dead body”.’
Janet’s family could only watch, helpless, as the relentless cycle of fraud continued.
‘Janet wouldn’t tell us much, so we started opening some of her mail and discovered that she had cashed in a chunk of her pension,’ Mel told the inquest. ‘She was withdrawing the maximum £500 a day, we believe to stockpile, and then transferred cash as the banks had stopped her doing electronic transfers.’
There were, they know, meetings with fraudsters in London, during which she handed over thousands of pounds.
It all put a terrible strain on the family, who went to the police in 2020 and 2022. Officers spoke to Janet, who by then was living in a caravan at Martin and Mel’s home, having sold her own home years before, keeping the proceeds as a nest egg; police couldn’t investigate further because she wouldn’t engage. But what they told Janet’s family was enough to heighten their concerns.
Mel was terrified. ‘One time when she was living in a caravan beside our house, I’d just had a baby and she casually said, “I’m expecting a delivery from Kofi, you don’t need to know what”. I was furious she’d given our address to him. The police tried to get her to realise the danger. She gave away everything.
‘She got to the point she lost so much weight because she wasn’t eating so she could send every penny she was earning to the gang.
‘She had no rent, no mortgage, no bills, no hobbies. She was earning over £20 an hour, working 50-hour weeks housekeeping but her accounts were overdrawn and credit cards maxed out. She sold a really old Land Rover and sent all the money straight to them.
‘The police worked out she borrowed £150,000 from friends and family and sent that.’
By 2022, Janet was making plans to fly to Accra in Ghana. ‘We found out she would be flying when she told us a delivery was coming and we’d need to sign for it,’ says Mel. The delivery? A visa for travel to Ghana. ‘As soon as I saw the van I rushed out like a shot and signed for it because I am Mrs Fordham then threw the bloody thing in the bin,’ recalls Mel. ‘She was so angry because she had a flight booked the next day and couldn’t go.
‘But she got another one sorted within days. At no point did she say she was going for love or romance, she said she was trying to get her money back.’
The family spent £16,000 repatriating Janet’s body – but they say the bigger loss is of the woman they loved so dearly
Before she left, in August 2022, Martin had that prescient conversation with his mum. Her response to him was to say: ‘I’ve got no other choice.’
It’s clear that whatever Janet claimed about her reasons for leaving, she felt differently in Ghana.
She sent a video to her son on WhatsApp, next to a smiling Kofi – a younger man wearing a confident smile with his arm wrapped around her; there was another one of men pouring concrete for a home. ‘Kofi is building a new house,’ she said.
It was the last contact mother and son ever had. Martin learned of his mother’s death in the most appalling of ways, on February 14, 2023.
Kofi, he says, sent him four separate videos – the first of a car wreck, the second of Janet’s limp body with medics performing CPR, the third of her corpse on a table and the fourth, her body in a mortuary drawer. Accompanying the videos was a request to send £10,000 to cover medical fees.
‘I’m not sure what he was thinking when he sent it or what it was to bloody do; was it to prove she’s there and he’s trying to get her care?’ says Martin, in disgust. He keeps a tight lid on the emotional undercurrent, struggling to remember anything but the shock.
There was more communication, Mel says, when Kofi began contacting Janet’s elderly brother, also asking him to send money. ‘It felt like he was trying to squeeze every last penny out of us,’ she says.
Kofi was arrested in Ghana and told police he had been driving with Janet to get approval from a family member to marry when the car swerved on an undulating road and flipped on to its roof.
He admitted driving offences, receiving a suspended prison sentence and a fine.
When approached by the Daily Mail, Kofi insisted he and Janet were in love. ‘I loved Janet, she was my girlfriend and we were very much in love. We were planning to get married when she was killed. She wanted to make a life in Ghana with me. She was happy here with me. The family are wrong to say I was involved; I think about what happened every day. It was an accident.’
But Janet’s family remain deeply suspicious. Coroner Philip Spinney concluded that Janet ‘died as a consequence of a head injury that was probably sustained in a road traffic collision’.
Home Office pathologist Dr Deborah Cook could not say how the death had been caused nor how Janet got the depressed skull fracture. ‘After the autopsy, they kept a quarter of her brain,’ says Mel. ‘The only bit that could definitely tell us how she died.
‘We believe she was murdered. Why else are police reports inconsistent? Why did they say they are investigating it as a murder then suddenly change their minds? Why did they keep the only part of her brain that could tell us what happened? It’s highly suspicious.’
The family spent £16,000 repatriating Janet’s body – but the bigger loss is of the woman they loved so dearly. ‘We feel let down by everybody,’ adds Mel. ‘This didn’t need to happen. It could have been stopped. People are so easily scammed there needs to be another layer of protection for people who slip through the net.
‘We were crying out for help to so many people and nobody could do anything. We just had to say goodbye and let her go.’
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