Murder in the Masai Mara, Ep 2: Go Home

0:28The Telegraph to Kenya in 1988. In today's episode, Catherine begins to uncover some of the bizarre explanations that were offered up after Julie's murder and the shocking cover-up that tried to stop her father, John, from getting to the truth of what had happened. This is episode two of Murder in the Maasai Mara. Go home.

1:02Before we begin, I want to warn you that this series contains details that some listeners may find distressing.

1:15Sometimes, when someone dies, you know what's happened straight away. Other times, the story has to be pieced together. Fragments of evidence collected and inspected from different angles. They're held up to the light like grim gemstones until their rough-hewn planes point towards the truth. This was the task facing Julie Ward's father, John.

1:46Almost as soon as he discovered his daughter's remains, strange narratives started to take hold. Like that she'd taken her own life. That got mum's hackles up straight away. She wouldn't commit suicide. Julie loved being out there. That hasn't happened. But the seed had been sown and the suicide story continued to spread. It was initially adopted by the Kenyan police. The theories of how Julie killed herself were wild. A police officer suggested that she cut herself up, that she built the fire they found at the scene, and it then spread and burned her. John became suspicious of the Kenyan authorities but it wasn't just them he needed to be wary of.

2:36Really early on, Dad's liaising with the British High Commission all the time trying to liaise with the police who aren't launching a murder investigation. Thirteen days after Julie's remains were found he went to the High Commission for a meeting and he was greeted by some contacts he already knew. And then he gets told, can he come to an office upstairs? The room was through a set of doors with security key panels. There were two men waiting for him. They say by chance, and to help, that's what their job is. They were both white and spoke with British accents. They wouldn't give John their names, which he found strange.

3:14But even stranger was what came next. One of the men said... I used to be a senior officer at the Kenyan police. It looks like she's been struck by lightning. I've seen it many times before. John was taken aback. And he questions, why are you saying this? You know, struck by lightning? That doesn't explain lack of body. If you get hit by lightning, you don't explode. But the man in the High Commission was undeterred. And he's trying to explain, you do, you know, and the animals would have taken it. And it's not uncommon for a hyena. They've got the strongest bite in the Maasai Mara. John looked around the room, but no one raised any objections.

3:56He'd heard it all now. Suicide, hyenas, lightning. Then, according to John, the other nameless man spoke up. Our advice is always in these instances to have the cremation here in Kenya. Go home and grieve with your family. Alarm bells rang in John's mind. Grim though it was, he knew that the few pieces he had left of his daughter's body were his best chance of understanding what had happened to her. That is not stupid. He knows something's wrong here. So, of course, as a family, we straight away go, why on earth would they give that advice?

4:42Walking away from this meeting, John had a deep sense of unease. the investigation into his daughter's death wasn't progressing as he thought it should. He realised there was an overwhelming task ahead of him, one he'd have to face alone, sifting through the rubble of his daughter's death to try and discover who killed her.

5:11I'm Catherine Rushton and this is Murder in the Masai Mara. Episode 2, Go Home

5:28These were the facts as John Ward knew them. Julie went missing on the 6th of September 1988, and at some point in the following week, she was murdered. John didn't know exactly when or how, but he did know that her charred remains ended up nine miles away from her jeep next to the ashes of a fire and a half-eaten can of pilchards. John had gathered up the pieces of Julie himself before going home to Suffolk and sharing the horror of what he'd seen with his family. Within days he was back in Kenya and the first person he wanted to speak to was the pathologist, Dr Adel Shaker in Nairobi City Mortuary.

6:16Dr Shaker told him unequivocally that Julie's bones were cleanly cut. With a heavy, sharp instrument and subsequent burning. Dr Shaker was certain that Julie had been murdered. He showed where the jaw went together and showed it was clean. Here's John being interviewed by The Telegraph in 2008. One of the features of Shaker's pathology, which was very simple stuff, is that the leg had been severed off just below here. So you've got a flat end at the end of the leg with a foot here. And this was all charred and burnt on the flat end. So Shaker says, well, the sheer sequence of events must have been cut first and then burnt.

7:00It was horrifying to even think about these details. but now John knew it was murder and he just wanted the Kenyan police to catch the culprit. First he had to get hold of Dr Shaker's post-mortem report. It hadn't been ready when John went to see him and even though John agitated for it over the next few days it proved tricky in a way that troubled him. Then the Kenyan police passed on a message to say the post-mortem report should be kept private and that John shouldn't mention the possibility of murder at a press conference they were planning to hold about Julie's death. John became concerned that someone might be trying to obscure the truth, so when the British High Commission got their hands on the report, he rushed straight there.

7:55John stood in the office of one of his trusted contacts and stared down at the document in his hands. It was neatly typed and ran to four pages. This is what it said. Julie had died just 36 to 48 hours before the post-mortem exam. If correct, that means she could have been alive whilst her father was searching for her. She may have even seen his plane flying overhead. It's a shattering detail. But there was something else that John found much more disturbing. The report didn't match what Dr Shaker had told him. He had said Julie's leg and jaw had been cut by a human that should be murdered. But here, in stark black and white, it's said that her bones were cracked and torn, as if it was the work of an animal.

8:52When I cut and when it cracks, those are different. I've got a copy of the post-mortem report and I'm looking at it with Edwin Akoth, the Kenyan journalist who's working with me on this story. There are some details that we know are true. It says the joint has been burned, charred, and then it is like a blunt wound on the... But then there are clear falsehoods. The first thing that will attract your attention is the change of what is written there where there's an XXXX kind of rubbing. The report's very obviously been tampered with. Someone's literally blanked out one of the words and typed some X's over the top of another.

9:36It's not the least bit subtle. Here's John being interviewed on NPR.

9:54I've never seen that in any post-mortem. What is your takeaway from it all? It kind of gives you the idea that some narrative was being developed. This is one of the documents that you would have to rely on because it tells you the cost of death. And so for me, that is where there was quite some games that were beginning to start playing. Quite some games.

10:22John was furious. He stormed back to the mortuary in Nairobi. Dr Shaker was trembling with nerves. He said it was his boss, Dr Jason Cavite, who made the crude alterations. So John went to confront him. In typical dad fashion, he walked in past all the secretaries who were trying to stop him from walking in and said, why have you changed this? And Cavite couldn't answer, he didn't want to see him, he was shaking, he couldn't talk. Why have you changed this? To John's surprise, Dr Kaviti admitted making changes to Julie's post-mortem report. Not only that, he stood by what he'd done. He claimed he was correcting Dr Shaker's mistakes, that the Egyptian Dr Shaker's English wasn't good enough and that he didn't know enough about Kenyan wildlife to recognise a hyena attack when he saw one.

11:20There was no-one else for John to complain to after this. because Dr Kaviti was Kenya's most senior government pathologist. Over the next few years, Dr Shaker came under huge pressure to agree with Dr Kaviti. He was forced to sign a statement he didn't write, and was falsely accused of bribery. Eventually, he left Kenya and never returned. For John, the altered post-mortem report brought things into focus. He wanted to have Julie's remains re-examined back in Britain. I was so suspicious of what was going on then that in fact I told them I was going to have her remains cremated and I had booked the crematorium to have it done and that gave me release of the remains.

12:12Then I arranged with British Airways to ship a home like that tonight. Without alerting the Kenyan authorities, he flew her leg and jaw back to the UK and consulted two renowned pathologists there. They confirmed what Dr Shaker had told him, that Julie's bones had been cut by a sharp instrument. This was the work of a human, not an animal. One of the pathologists, Professor Austin Gresham, observed something else too. On Julie's leg, there were four small marks, shaped like old-fashioned kites. Probably just short of a centimetre, they're sort of diamond-shaped, all in a row. And whilst you can't say what they're from, they're unusual.

13:01Professor Gresham wasn't exactly sure what had caused them, but the family speculated she'd been tortured. We always thought perhaps the torture is a possibility, hence why we haven't got much of her body. Bob said I can share this information. The family have always known about the marks, but John avoided publicising the details because the implications were so awful. Bob says John didn't want his wife Jan to have to read about it in the press. He was trying to protect mum and me and Tim because it was his nature to do so and he was controlling. Some weeks after finding out about the kite-shaped marks, John dispatched another piece of Julie to Dr Gresham's office.

13:48Her skull, which had turned up several hundred metres away from the spot where her jaw and leg were discovered. Dr Gresham concluded that she'd been decapitated from behind, with a single swipe. But in Kenya, Julie's death was still being treated as an accident. John lobbied the Kenyan government to hold an inquest into how she died. And while he waited, he set to work himself. One, two, three, four, five. OK, we're off again. John was hard of hearing, so he recorded his calls to make sure he didn't miss anything. OK, this is John Ward calling you from England. This is John Ward calling you from England.

14:34Bob's given me access to hours and hours of his father's tapes. Hello, that is John Watergate. Hello. It's there. I mean, the answer is in the Maasai Mara. It's in that area. In the first year after Julie died, John flew to Kenya. Probably 30, 40 times to interview people, take statements, take evidence, dig out soil, take it back in a flask, all sorts of things. I mean, just done a fantastic job. I do take extreme care that I never followed, and I always meet my contacts in cases where I know we can't be overheld or even seen together. John ploughed back and forth to the Masai Mara, tracking down anyone and everyone he thought could have information.

15:19He became fluent in post-mortems, forensic samples and chains of custody. Did you see that Suzuki and that girl at Serena Lodge in September 1988? I managed to locate that there were 32 people on that campsite. We've got their names and addresses, and we're after them for statements to see if they saw anything. John drew up a list of suspects, people who worked in the Maasai Mara game reserve, who he didn't think were telling the truth. And he put a reward out for information. Dad used to go to places and put the reward notice up on telegraph poles and bars and things in areas around the Mara where Julie was found.

16:02He offered a considerable sum of money, 30 ,000 Kenyan shillings for the return of Julie's lost camera. That was more than three times the average annual income at the time and 5 million shillings for information that led to the conviction of her killer. Calls came in thick and fast.

16:25You'd have a phone call on a Sunday morning and it would be crackly line and you couldn't hear what they were saying. Evidence continues to come in. I've just had two phone calls this evening from people who continually phone me. Do you have any absolute proof or have you just got some information that you've heard from somebody? Every lead generated a new set of details to cross-reference and usually disprove. John went to extraordinary lengths. There was a Swiss film crew that were camped nearby. Anyway, we tracked them down and went across to Switzerland last week to see them. He hired a private detective and ordered more forensic reports, this time of Julie's hair and the ashes found with her remains.

17:11He tracked down a machine that could show petrol had been used to fuel the fire. And he even got the Russian Space Agency to check its satellite images of the Masai Mara in case they'd captured the movements of Julie's Suzuki. These satellites are buzzing around the world the whole time. It's quite possible that satellite photographs exist of her jeep and of the Maasai Mara and where it was on every day between the 6th and the 13th of September.

17:46John felt like he was fighting alone. Nearly a year had passed since Julie died. The Kenyan police still hadn't opened a murder investigation, and he didn't see that changing, unless he got them to accept it was murder. But finally, after a lot of lobbying from John, a date was set for an inquest to formally establish the cause of Julie's death. John collated all the information he'd gathered, knowing this was his chance to silence those wild theories about suicide, hyenas and lightning. Dad had got ten forensic reports which all showed murder. Forensics on the hair, forensics on the soil. Everything pointed to murder.

18:34Shortly before the hearing, John got a strange phone call from an official in the Foreign Office. He turned on his recorder. Hello? Hello, David. Hello, Mr Ward. Hello, Mr Ward. Mr Ward, I'm glad you were able to... to telephone me back. The High Commission have now come back. So there's two alternatives. I see. This official was trying to persuade John not to give all the evidence he'd found to a lawyer to present at the inquest, but to instead give it to the Kenyan police. And the High Commission has said that it's in favour of the latter approach. The evidence to be given to the police investigating officer.

19:15I see. Not only had John lost his faith in the Kenyan authorities by this point, he actually suspected they were trying to cover up his daughter's murder. There was no way he was going to rely on them to present all the evidence he had found, so he refused. It was totally unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. Absolutely, yes. I'm absolutely willing to meet with the police, to meet with whoever down there. I'll go down there again especially to talk to them, but I want some action on the evidence that they've got rather than this continued cover-up of what they've got. This call stayed with John and made him question what was going on behind the scenes.

19:57If I gave evidence at the inquest, it was bound to be murder. They couldn't avoid it, so the only way they could avoid that was to stop me giving evidence at the inquest. So they couldn't physically stop me. I just told them, ridiculous, you know, what the hell are you doing? And they backed off. fairly quickly. A Kenyan judge will decide whether there are grounds to launch a murder investigation. The inquest opened in room four of the Nairobi courthouse in August 1989. This is controversial in Kenya where authorities fear that publicity about the gruesome death might scare away tourists. The wards felt they faced an uphill battle.

20:36The woman's father and British investigators say she was murdered and that Kenyan officials are trying to cover it up. Some Kenyans say those charges are tinged with colonial-style racism. At times, this accusation of racism was also levelled against John, who'd recruited a number of white experts to support his case. The issues in that inquest now almost cease to be how a girl died in a white Kenyan trial. Dad was on in the dock for an extraordinary amount of time. John Ward described to the court how he found a lock of hair in the fire. He told the inquest how he had to arrange the aerial search for his daughter because the police had failed to act.

21:20She was a super little girl and she didn't deserve to die like that. And I want to catch the bastard who did it. By the end of the hearing, the weight of the evidence John had brought meant there was really only one conclusion the coroner could draw. The evidence Professor Gresham gave to the inquest completely refutes the claim by the Kenyan authorities that Julie Ward fell victim to wild animals. Besser used these diagrams of the injuries to Julie's skull to prove that she was decapitated from behind by one single swipe. So the judge surmised by, it looks like the animals are innocent. We got the verdict, which was murder.

21:56Finally, more than a year after Julie died, this is what John needed.

22:05A court in Kenya has handed down a victory of sorts to the family of Judy Ward. The verdict made headlines around the world, and Kenya's president, Daniel Arup Moy, was under pressure to do something. Judy's death was earning the country a bad reputation, and it had begun to put tourists off visiting. Our tourism industry is more sensitive than our financial markets here in Kenya. That's Edwin, my Kenyan colleague. Even an accident that involves tourists sometimes bring down numbers. It's a big thing. It's right inside Kenya's economic thinking. Even our currency has lions and elephants and buffaloes.

22:51President Moy knew something needed to happen to restore confidence in his country as a safe place to go. At long last, the Kenyan police opened a murder investigation into Julie's death, and President Moy asked Britain to send in London's Metropolitan Police to assist them. The Ward family were thrilled. There was a genuine kind of level of excitement and hope because the Met will go out there and they'll investigate and they're the best force in the country. High hopes. Didn't quite work out like that.

23:34More to come after this short break.

23:51have you seen that photograph before and can you describe it to me please actually i don't think i have seen the photograph before uh but it's definitely dad the photograph doesn't show his head, but it's definitely Dad, I can tell, by his stature. I'm back in Suffolk with Bob, Julie's brother. I'm showing him a picture I've got hold of, a photo of his father, John, given to me by a police officer. John is standing in front of a clump of bushes in an area of Maasai Mara scrubland. His back is towards the camera. He's bent and holding out his arms in front of him. He's gesturing towards some grass.

24:34He's pointing to the spot where the fire was, so this isn't at the time, this is a later visit to the place. The place. That's what the Ward family call the area, where Julie's remains were found on the 13th of September, a week after she went missing, alongside the ashes of a fire and near a half-eaten can of pilchards. I've been there a couple of times, it's horrendous, it's a horrible place. We took flowers when we went there, but the place has got a darkness to it. The place has a darkness to it. The place is marked on a large map in John's Library of Secrets, near that famous photo of Julie hugging a chimp.

25:17And you're looking at, that's a map of the Masai Mara, with some important locations marked on. The map shows the southern end of the Masai Mara. The place is in the bottom right corner, very close to the point where the irregular outline of the reserve touches the artificially straight one of the border with Tanzania. About halfway down the map, on the left-hand side, there's a label for Sand River Gate, where Julie camped on her first night in the Masai Mara, before she went missing. Closer to the middle, between Sand River Gate and the place, is another label, bearing the words Suzuki SOS. That's where her jeep was.

25:59Stuck in a gully, nine miles away from the place. So, as you can see, there's not a great deal there other than it's wilderness. That's what it is. This distance between Julie's jeep and where she was found throws up a lot of questions. Did Julie drive her jeep to that gully herself? We don't know that she arranged those SOS stones on its roof. And how did Julie get from the jeep to the place? Nine miles away. Was she killed in the same spot her remains were found? Or was she simply taken there after she'd died? A body for disposal. And what happened to her before she died? She left Serena Lodge on the 6th of September and was found seven days later.

26:49That means there's a week unaccounted for.

26:56I keep turning these questions over in my mind. Questions that were facing the Metropolitan Police when they were drafted in to assist the investigation.

27:11Superintendent Graham Searle was part of SO1, an elite team that got the call. He told his deputy... We've caught the Julie Ward inquiry. and we're going to be flying out on Friday. They got their travel jabs and met up with John Ward. He just poured out information. Loads and loads of photographs and documents that he'd gathered. I can remember actually saying to him, John, this is not like Poirot, where suddenly the grey matter works and it's all solved. We will go out, we will look at everything, but it's 14 months since she died. So don't expect a huge amount. That's a long time in forensics.

27:58The scrubland where Julie's remains were found had been rained on and trampled, and any ashes of the fire that had been left behind had been blown away by the savannah winds. Another member of SO1 had gone to Kenya on a brief scoping exercise, but he never made it to the place. He said the ground conditions were too difficult, so Graham knew he had his work cut out. It wasn't like a murder scene in London. You were miles away. So you'd go down for maybe four or five days and stay there and do all the things we wanted to do. And you'd get back to Nairobi, we'd sit and talk through it and say, oh, we didn't do so and so.

28:42And then you'd have to think about going back again. Then there were the animals, the wild carnivores hidden in the long grass. I can remember getting out of the car around the area where the remains were found on the fire. The ranger showing Graham around. He put his arm across and he said, stay there. So I said, what? He said, limes. And there was a pride of limes about 40 yards away. And there were other challenges. When Graham's team ordered the exhibits from Julie's inquest, they expected them to arrive in forensics bags. Instead... They came wrapped up in a brown parcel tied with Hessian string.

29:26Graham remembers his forensic expert... Being in my hotel room and unpacking it and going through and having to relabel everything, including her jaw, the bones, everything, hair samples. It was unbelievable. And they'd all be tainted, wouldn't they? Of course they were. Other forensic evidence had been lost altogether. This wasn't all down to the Kenyan police. John also made mistakes, including with Julie's unreliable beige Suzuki. You see, after the search for Julie, he'd wanted to thank the helicopter pilot for helping. The pilot had only just met John, but wouldn't take any money for flying him about.

30:12So John gave him a gift instead. Julie's broken down jeep. John didn't think Julie had been murdered at that point. He hadn't realised the vehicle was important evidence. And then the jeep went missing. Someone, possibly the helicopter pilot, had arranged for it to be picked up from the gully. The Kenyan police lost track of its whereabouts, and it was never properly examined. But despite the difficulties, there was still plenty for the Met to do. John had already gathered so much information, and he'd become suspicious of some of the people working in the Maasai Mara. People he wanted Graham to pursue.

30:58There were two men in particular he'd set his sights on. The first man was the last known person to see Julie alive David Candula Unchoco He sometimes goes by David and sometimes by Candula So I'm just going to call him by his last name Unchoco was a revenue clerk at Sand River Gate And it was his job to keep track of the tourists arriving each day He'd get them to sign a record when they paid their fees Shortly after Julie's murder he told the Kenyan police that he had seen Julie leave on her own just after 2.30pm on the day she disappeared. The Sand Rivergate Visitors book backed up Unchako's claim.

31:44Julie's name was there, in very even handwriting. But to John, something seemed off. He knew his daughter's signature and this wasn't it. He took a picture and gave it to a handwriting expert in Britain. Here's John. The handwriting expert, bless him, said, categorically, no, it's not hers. Good, well, we knew that, really. But he says, I have some news for you. It's this guy. Really? Yeah, it's the handwriting of the clerk. It wasn't Julie's. The handwriting expert compared it to other entries in the visitor's book. They believed it matched N 'Choco's. We know, of course, that N 'Choco forged the register.

32:32According to evidence at Julie's inquest, N 'Choco only admitted it was his writing the third time he was interviewed by police. To the wards, that looked suspicious. Here's Bob. If somebody forges a girl's signature who's dead within the next week and he's the last person to see her, Most people would argue, oh, that puts him right at the top of suspects list. John wanted the Met to get to the bottom of why N 'Choco had written Julie's name. Graham Searle interviewed N 'Choco twice, but N 'Choco said he'd just been trying to get the records right for the local council. Graham believed him. Very simple man doing a very simple job.

33:18That record has got to be right. Do that. There are simple explanations for most of these things, but it's not evidence of his involvement. The second man John had set his sights on was Simon Ole McCullough, the head warden of the Masai Mara Game Reserve. Simon had led the search party that found Julie's remains at the place. And John was suspicious about how little time it took him, given they were nine miles from her jeep. Here's Bob. That's just not possible. And it's like me saying to you, Catherine, go and find the bag of gold. It's nine kilometres away. Here. You couldn't do it. But he did somehow.

34:01Graham also interviewed Simon. Christ, I spent hours with him. I didn't pay statement from him. Simon McAllister said, no, we were doing loops. We were covering as big an area as we could. Graham's team tested his claims. We were doing all sorts of measurements. Very untechnical, using a speedometer in a vehicle. It was the only way we could do it. They also checked Simon's alibi for the time when Julie was missing. They didn't find anything to implicate him. Just because John didn't like him, and clearly John did not like Simon McCalla at all, doesn't make him a suspect. Give me some evidence and I'll lock him up.

34:44But I've got to have some evidence. Whilst John continued to obsess over Simon McCullough and David and Choco, Graham came up with another theory, one that centred on Julie's Jeep and how it ended up in that gully. Graham's deputy, David Shipley, explains. A lot of our investigation at the time was based on where Julie's vehicle was found and what might have happened to her. Did she walk away from the vehicle, having got it stuck in the tributary? what she found whilst in the vehicle. There are two schools of thought about how the jeep ended up there. The first one is that Julie's murderer had something to do with it, either forcing her there or having the jeep planted as a decoy.

35:36The second is that Julie drove there herself. The theory goes that soon after she set off from Sand River Gate in the direction of Nairobi, she took a sharp right veering off the main road down a track across Scrubland and then got stuck before being found by her killer. This track is really important. It's the only clear explanation for how Julie would have voluntarily got her jeep to the gully. This is what Graham thinks happened. I genuinely believe that she collected her tent and I then think she tried to drive back towards Nairobi and she took that track and got stuck in the tributary. What happened after that can only be speculation, but she was clearly found by someone.

36:33Graham speculates that whoever found Julie may have sexually assaulted her. Whoever attacked her decided that she had to be disposed of. John had doubts that his daughter would ever have veered off the main road, but he also had faith in the Met that they knew what they were doing. There was plenty of evidence to support Graham's theory. The SOS on the roof, deep grooves in the mud from spinning wheels, and the Jeep's battery was flat. Why was the battery flat? Was she sounding her horn all the time to attract attention? Did she have the headlights on at night time to try and attract attention?

37:10The question was who could have found Julie, lost on her own in the savannah. For Graham's team, back in the early 90s, the clues pointed in one direction. We believed that the Macari Outpost was an ideal place to have kept Julie. The Macari Outpost was about two miles north-east of the gully where Julie's jeep got stuck. It was a small station for rangers who monitored poachers coming over the border from Tanzania. It's just kind of five huts in the middle of nowhere, no running water, no electricity. They really are huts. They were corrugated iron with straw roofs and things. John had stopped off there during his search for Julie.

37:54He'd noticed something small lying on the dusty ground, glinting in the sun. He found a button battery there, so I think in Dad's head he thought there was something wrong. It was the kind of battery Julie would have used in her Olympus camera. It was on a penny, so it was, you know, in the sun, trying to give it a bit more charge. Graham's team wondered whether Julie had stumbled across the ranger station while she was looking for help, or if the rangers had found her jeep and taken her back there. So they interviewed them, and the Met officers say that two of the rangers struggled to get their stories straight.

38:30Their names were Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy, young men in their 20s. They were very nervous, extremely nervous when we were interviewing them. It transpired that what they were telling us wasn't the complete truth either. Graham's deputy, David Shipley, says the men got certain details wrong, like how many rangers patrolled the area together, and that their radio wasn't working. We found out subsequently that in fact it was working. There were so many irregularities that were building up to a suggestion that they might be involved in this incident. The Met officers returned to Britain and sent the case to Kenya's Attorney-General.

39:16Then another piece of evidence came in. Forensic material from the huts at the Makari outpost had been sent for testing. There were several hares there, but out of those hares, The scientist at the time thought that, based on the technology that was in existence at the time, suggested that they might possibly have come from Julie Ward. It backed up our thoughts that these two from Makari Outpost may well have been responsible for Julie's murder. Armed with this new evidence, the Met officers wanted to go back to Kenya to ambush Kippen and Magaroy whilst they were under formal police caution. Here's Graham.

39:55David and I were on a plane on the Sunday night with John Ward, funnily enough. He said to me, I'm coming as well. I said, John, you will not be involved in anything I do while I'm out there. He said, no, I'm coming. I said, well, you won't get on the plane. I said, because I think they've taken two people off to get me on. Anyway, David and I were sat in business class on a British Airways flight to Nairobi. And all of a sudden, John appears from first class through the curtain. and that was the power of John Ward. The element of surprise was crucial here. Graham's team wanted to see how the two rangers would react and they worried that if the rangers knew what was coming, there was every chance they'd disappear.

40:41And so how did, when you did eventually go out and put it to them, how did that go? It didn't. Never saw them. Oh, you couldn't track them down? John Ward went out on his own. and he interviewed them with his private detective. That's what I was up against, don't get me wrong. Admiration for him, but he could be a nuisance. And so you lost the opportunity? Yeah. That was never put to them officially in a police interview. Even though the Met hadn't interviewed the two rangers a second time, the evidence was enough to sway the Kenyan Attorney-General, Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy were charged with Julie's murder.

41:27John still had some questions about the case, but he supported it. In 1992, Kippen and Magaroy went on trial, nearly four years after Julie's death. John's wife, Jan, went with him. Mrs Ward sat just two rows in front of the men accused of killing Julie. I have to hear and see and be here instead of being at home. hearing what happens from the news. The trial will focus on the barren bushland of the Masai Mara game reserve, far from the crowded court. They sat in the courtroom, grimly hoping for a guilty verdict, to at last give their family closure. It was an austere place, with dark wooden panelling and a raised platform for the judge.

42:14Kipin and Magaroy sat side by side, in ill-fitting suits, looking stressed. It's alleged that the accused Jonah Magiroy and Peter Kippeen were the only rangers on duty at the Macari outpost when Julie disappeared nearby. This tiny camera battery is emerging as a crucial piece of evidence and today it was at the centre of some bitter exchanges. If they're found guilty, they face the death penalty. Almost as soon as the case started, John's confidence in it faltered. We'd had one of those round-the-kitchen-table family discussions. You know, how's it going? Are you happy with the detectives? What's going on?

42:54And there'd just be something you could see who was niggling him. What's niggling you? It's about this track. Graham keeps saying there's a track. Graham's case against Kippen and Magaroy hung on there being that track from the main road to the gully, one substantial enough that Julie decided to turn onto it and drive, of her own accord, for three miles before getting stuck and running into the two rangers. But John didn't believe there was a track. He never had. The fact that that jeep was in the galley has always been, you know, under some question marks as to why it should even be there, you see.

43:37It might just have been that they stuck that jeep in the galley themselves, you see, to sort of ditch it, get rid of it. Dad always had a doubt that Julie, who was an extremely intelligent, extremely sensible, well-thought-out, extremely well-planned girl, would drive along a track and then suddenly turn right into what is basically long grass and rocks. No track there at all. Would she do that? It didn't make any sense whatsoever. When we searched that area, there was no signs that anybody had been in that location for any length of time. and she smoked a bit and there was no dog ends around.

44:14We even looked for signs of excrement. I mean, she must have gone to the toilet. If you'd been there for a week, you know, we'd find something, but nothing. You know, there was no sign that anybody had been there more than really half an hour. This is something that's played on my mind a lot. Steve Watson, who helped John on the search for Julie, told me that Julie's Jeep was in a rocky area. It's not the sort of bit you would normally think about driving over. You know, it wasn't like a road or a track or anything like that. I've asked James Sindio about it. He was the senior warden of the Masai Mara, so he knew this terrain better than most.

44:52There was no track indeed, yeah, from the main game drive track to where the car was found. So she cannot have gone into that valley alone. So this road is a very major issue, and unfortunately, it's untrue. So if there was no track, then the question of how Julie's Jeep got to the gully feels very different. This suggests that actually there may be something to the first school of thought, that someone else might have driven Julie's car to the gully and staged the scene, or that the person who'd harmed her came across her long before she got stuck. Perhaps they'd met her on the main road and forced her into the bush.

45:38Or they might have been sitting next to her, in the jeep, from the moment she left Serena Lodge. Sat around the kitchen table, Julie's family obsessed over this. They knew that if Kipin and Magaroy were found guilty, they could be executed. And they didn't think for evidence stacked up. Mum was probably the first to go, well, got to tell them. We don't want somebody to hang for doing something they didn't do. That's the worst thing that could possibly happen. John felt he had to do something. So, without telling the Met officers, he got a message to Kipin and Magaroy's lawyer. You're going to hear evidence that says there's a road there.

46:20There isn't a road there. You have to know, can you let the judge know? But in the end, it was something else that won the Rangers from the Macari outpost their freedom. evidence from the Met's forensic scientist. Here's Graham. The defence put to him, is it possible that a bird, a vulture, fed off the remains of Julie's body and then overflew Macari Outpost, excreted and then the hair, when it dried, was blown into the hut? and his answer was, I cannot discount that possibility. Under Kenyan law, the three assessors take the place of a jury. They each decided that the two accused, Jonah Magaroy and Peter Kippin, had not carried out the killing.

47:14There wasn't enough in the trial to convict them of murder. John Ward, who set out on a one-man murder inquiry to uncover the truth, looked totally demoralised. We're back to square one. Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy were acquitted due to a lack of evidence. It's just as well. Six years later, as DNA science advanced, the hair found at Macari Outpost was examined again. It didn't belong to Julie.

47:48In the years after the trial, the Ward family questioned why the case had ever got caught. and for John, it added to a concern that the Met team wasn't as thorough as he'd initially hoped. The charges against Kippen and Magaroy were based on a theory, propped up by circumstantial evidence, and Hare, that even at the time of the trial, was only probably Julie's. There was nothing really concrete. He'd already nitpicked certain aspects of the Met investigation, small fishers in their case which he didn't agree with. But now, knowing that the two men they'd gone after were innocent, those small fishers John had identified started to appear to him like chasms.

48:35Here's Bob. What we do know, in our opinion, is that their investigation was flawed in so many ways and simply aimed at the wrong two people. Graham is adamant that they did follow other leads, but that the evidence wasn't there. Under the circumstances, we did the very best job we possibly could. And I stress, under the circumstances.

49:05Sources in Kenya have told me that Kippen died a long time ago. I haven't been able to verify that, but I have established that Magaroy died in 2020. He was around 57 years old. That's pretty young. People close to him say he became an alcoholic and never recovered from what happened. Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy were innocent, which meant Julie's murderer was still out there. John had achieved an extraordinary amount in the four years since Julie died, but still, no conviction. He knew that to find the culprit, he would have to rake through the evidence all over again. I do too. I need to talk to some of the individuals in Kenya myself.

49:59People who might hold shreds of information that will help, like one of those grim gemstones held up to the light. I'm hoping that all these years on, they might finally be ready to share them.

50:21Next time on Murder in the Masai Mara. There is one missing link that in the whole investigation, I never heard anywhere. The person you've called is not reachable. I understand you wrote the name Julie Ward in the book. Can you tell us why? They say they heard some scream at night, loud scream. is when they went and found the body. If you're enjoying this series, my colleague Jack Leather has made a film charting my investigation in Kenya. Follow the link in the show notes for this episode to see some of the people you hear in this podcast. Murder in the Masai Mara is a podcast from The Telegraph.

51:06It's written and reported by me, Catherine Rushton. The series is produced and sound designed by Anna Stauffenberg and the executive producer is Cara McGugan Additional reporting by Edwin O 'Coth Additional production by Lillian Fawcett and Jack Leather Script editing by Venetia Rainey Mixed by Elliot Lampet The commissioning editor is Louisa Wells Original theme music by Nyokabi Karaoke With thanks to the Ward family If you have any information about this case that could help us get closer to the truth, please get in touch at juliewardcase at telegraph.co.uk