So, Apparently, It Was the Devil
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There is a specific kind of Slow Day Rabbit hole that starts innocently and ends with you googling court transcripts from the 1990s. Mine started this week with the pilot episode of It’s Not Me, It’s the Devil. It is a true crime show built entirely on court archives and sworn testimony, which is another way of saying it is not interested in your rumours; it wants receipts. The pilot tackles the case of the self-styled “Reverend King”, Chukwuemeka Ezeugo, a Nigerian preacher who set six of his church members on fire, one of whom, Ann Uzoh, did not survive.
The episode does something clever with structure. It hands you the story through Ann Uzoh’s father first, a man who joined his own daughter’s church just to be near her after she disowned him at the Reverend’s instruction. From there, it walks you through the abuse the congregation quietly endured, the kind that hides in plain sight because everyone around them assumes a church cannot also be a cage. Then it turns the camera on the Reverend himself, a man who never once, in the presence of the people he burned, managed to produce anything resembling remorse; he seemed genuinely convinced he was being persecuted like Christ, which is a wild note to hit while standing in a courtroom holding evidence of arson.
And that might be the most disturbing part of the episode. Evil, when we imagine it from a comfortable distance, tends to have a certain cinematic quality to it; we expect a villain to look like a villain, speak like a villain and generally announce his intentions before doing something terrible. Real life is much less considerate. Sometimes the person at the centre of something horrific is standing in front of a congregation every Sunday, wearing a clean shirt and telling everyone that God has chosen him.
Picture a canvas, on Ominous scene framed with bright colours almost like the painting is trying to disguise itself, the kind of painting where the figure looks slightly too serene for the horror implied in the background. That is the mood of this whole story. The podcast widens its lens towards the end, pulling in Jim Jones, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, and a Kenyan priest currently jailed for eerily similar crimes, before landing on the point that this is not a Nigerian problem or an American problem; it is a human one, and it keeps happening because we keep underestimating it.
There is something particularly uncomfortable about putting these stories next to each other. Different countries, different decades, different religious movements, different circumstances; somehow the same basic machinery keeps appearing. A charismatic figure gathers people around himself, slowly becomes the centre of their social world, and eventually starts defining what is true, what is false, who can be trusted and who cannot. By the time someone outside the group looks in and says, “This is obviously insane,” the people inside may have already been taught that the person saying it is the enemy.
I have my own smaller, less deadly version of this story, and I promise it is going somewhere. Between 2016 and 2021 I was a student at UNIBEN, where nearly every campus fellowship traced its roots back to some existing church. Except one. This particular fellowship built itself from scratch, recruiting almost exclusively from first and second year students, the demographic most likely to be far from home and looking for somewhere to belong. Members carried the pastor’s face on their phone wallpapers and their shirts, and if I am being honest, it often looked like they loved him a little more than they loved the God he was supposedly representing.
There was something almost funny about the intensity of it until you thought about what the intensity meant. University students are already living through an awkward period where everyone is trying to figure out who they are, what they believe and whether the person they have become will still make sense after graduation. Add a charismatic authority figure who can tell you exactly what God wants from you, who you should date, who you should avoid and what your problems supposedly mean, and suddenly uncertainty has been replaced with a very convenient instruction manual.
Most students on campus sensed something was off and kept their distance, myself included. But every so often a genuinely impressive, well known student would join, and suddenly the fellowship had a little borrowed legitimacy in the eyes of everyone watching from the outside. A few years later, a newspaper excerpt made its way around our old class page, detailing years of exploitation by the head pastor. I will not name him or the church here, partly out of caution and partly because I never had enough information to responsibly track the full story online, but it rattled something loose in me that this podcast episode has now shaken back awake.
Because the frightening thing about these stories is not simply that someone can manipulate people. We already know that happens. The more uncomfortable question is how ordinary the first few steps can look. Someone offers certainty when you are confused, makes you feel special when you feel invisible, and introduces you to a community when you are lonely. None of those things sounds sinister on their own, which is probably part of what makes the eventual shift so difficult to notice.
Here is the question I cannot stop chewing on. We love to describe these men, and it is almost always men, as master manipulators, as if they are running some elite psychological chess game. But strip away the pulpit and the robes and the follower count, and most of them are not especially impressive. They are rarely the smartest person in the room, and often the people orbiting them go on to achieve far more, intellectually and otherwise, than the man they once worshipped. So what exactly is the mechanism here, if not sheer intellect or strategy?
I have started, only half jokingly, to think of it as something that borders on the supernatural. Not because I believe these men have actual otherworldly powers, but because of how survivors describe coming out of it. It is almost never framed as “I realized he was lying.” It is framed as waking up, as surfacing from a trance, as if a fog physically lifted off their brain one ordinary Tuesday. Think of one of those hazy, dreamlike paintings where the subject’s face only fully resolves the closer you lean in; that is what these accounts sound like to me, description after description of blur suddenly sharpening into focus.
So can we still call them master manipulators if they genuinely believe the psychosis themselves, as fiercely as the people they have pulled into it? Or does that belief make them something stranger, a kind of accidental prophet who convinced themselves first and everyone else second? I do not think the podcast fully answers this, and honestly I am not sure anyone can, but it is exactly the kind of question that keeps me listening long after I should have closed the app and gone to sleep.
There is also a danger in making these people too fascinating. Calling someone a master manipulator can accidentally turn them into a kind of criminal genius, when the more important story is often what happened to the people around them. The victims are not interesting because they were foolish enough to believe something; they are interesting because they were human enough to want what most of us want. Somewhere to belong, someone to trust, and an explanation for why life sometimes feels like it was assembled without instructions.
That is what stayed with me after the episode. Not just the horror of what happened, but how easily the distance between devotion and dependence can become difficult to see from inside. It made me think about the small warning signs we dismiss because the person involved is respected, charismatic or simply someone everyone else seems to like. Sometimes the crowd is reassurance enough for us to stop asking questions.
If you are the type of person who also cannot resist this particular flavour of dread, Chioma’s full episode goes much deeper than I can here, complete with reenacted courtroom testimony and interview snippets that will sit with you for days. You can listen below.
- Alex
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