Murder in the Masai Mara, Ep 5: Cover-up

0:28The Telegraph in Kenya's Maasai Mara in 1988, how her father John faced years of obstruction to his attempts to uncover the killer, and the case against Jonathan Moy, the son of Kenya's former president. In this final installment, Catherine asks why the Kenyan government covered up the crime and investigates claims that the British state was involved too. This is episode 5 of Murder in the Maasai Mara. Cover up.

1:08Before we begin, I want to warn you that this series contains details that some listeners may find distressing.

1:18In the early 2000s, a police officer walked into a beige and turquoise building overlooking the River Thames, the headquarters of Britain's Secret Service. MI6. It's James Bond building there where it got blown up in Skyfall, you know, all that. That's the place, yeah, went in there. Detective Chief Superintendent Terry Hackett from Lincolnshire Police had gained a top level of security clearance. Being developed, vetted, ain't a nice process to go through. But Terry was determined. He wanted to look through some of MI6's secret files to read any of their documents that related to the murder of Julie Ward.

2:03Her father, John, had told Terry MI6 was involved in her case. Terry wanted to find out if this was a grieving father's conspiracy or if it was really true. He was shown into a room without any windows, empty except for a desk and a chair. Someone bought him a box filled with papers. I just remember it as a square box with just documentation in it. No index or anything like that. It was just a cup of tea, biscuit, here you are, and left to my own devices to go through it.

2:43Terry spent two days pouring over the box's contents looking for mentions of Julie Eventually he found something that stopped him in his tracks I thought, blimey There is a contact note, as that's what they called it A contact note It was an official record of a meeting between an MI6 agent in Kenya and an informant with Julie Ward and a gender item. The two of them had discussed what happened to Julie, just eight days after her remains had been recovered. That wasn't the only thing Terry found startling about this note. Decades after the fact, it made sense of one of the strange events John had puzzled over since 1988.

3:31Looking down at the paper, Terry realised that the MI6 agent and informant were the two nameless men John had met, less than a fortnight after Julie's murder. One of the guys just starts saying, it looks like she's been struck by lightning. He then says, our advice is always in this instance to have the cremation here in Kenya. Go home and grieve with your family. They had this meeting at the British High Commission in Nairobi, coming out with this absolute rubbish. This contact note was crucial evidence for Terry because he wasn't here to investigate who murdered Julie. He was investigating the investigators.

4:14And here, in black and white, was documentary proof that an MI6 agent was involved in Julie's case right from the start.

4:30At the beginning of this series I said this wasn't like any other cold case that it was a messy knot of cover-ups and strange behaviour by MI6 a case that went beyond the Ward family to questions about how far the UK will or won't go for its citizens Over time, John came to question everyone involved in his daughter's case The Kenyan police, the Met, officials in the British High Commission and others What keeps you going is generally being, can I say, on camera, fucked about by people Ever since this thing started, there's been cover-up after cover-up after cover-up and there's been lies and deception.

5:18And it just tends to get you more and more angry, actually, and more and more determined, because you think these bastards shouldn't get away with it. Just like John and the many police officers before me, I haven't been able to prove who murdered Julie. But this case isn't just about who killed her. It's also about why the killers have never been found. I'm Catherine Rashton and this is Murder in the Maasai Mara, episode 5, cover-up.

5:56As years passed and John still hadn't caught Julie's murderer, he came to believe the obstacles he'd faced were by design, that someone with influence didn't want the case to be solved. Initially, he speculated that Kenya was trying to protect its tourist industry. But as more evidence pointed towards Jonathan Moy, he started to think that was the real reason. The fact that the son of the Kenyan president could be a suspect. In 2004, 16 years after Julie's death, a second inquest into her murder opened. In the UK, John had pushed for it. 70 years old now and still on a tireless crusade to fight his daughter's murderer.

6:45For 16 years, John Ward has fought cover-up and bureaucracy. Now he believes this inquest is his best hope of unravelling the truth. It was a rainy day in April. All the Wards were at the coroner's court in Suffolk, along with my friend, the filmmaker James Hawes. There were a lot of press outside, which tells you something, that all those years later, the British press was still intrigued and captivated by John. This time, John didn't bother hiring a lawyer. He took on the role of barrister himself. He quite rightly says he knows the case better than anybody. And he was briefed and prepared like the very best of lawyers.

7:26The hearing lasted six days. And it was dramatic. The case had reflected badly on President Daniel Arup Moy's Kenya. But by 2004, there was a new president and a new regime. They wanted to draw a line under the corruption of the past. And in the middle of the hearing, the coroner, Dr Peter Dean, received a letter. They said, could you please read this to the court? It was from the new Kenyan justice minister. It's clear that the efforts made by Miss Ward's father to get to the bottom of the case did not meet an adequate response from the Kenyan authorities at the time. There even appears to be some prima facie evidence of deliberate obstruction of his inquiries by some officials in the previous regime.

8:18Deliberate obstruction. That acknowledgement, I think, was the one thing that John had always wanted. and you could feel the emotion in the room. Finally, 16 years after Julie's murder, Kenya was admitting to a cover-up. And it was literally one of those moments where you saw journalists suddenly disappearing from the exit to phone her story through.

8:51The next day, Kenya's admission made headlines. But to John, it was the tip of the iceberg. He didn't think Kenya was alone in covering up what happened to Julie. He believed Britain was doing the same. Here he is speaking to The Telegraph in 2008. You've got the Kenyan government mucking me about. You've got MI6 mucking me about. You've got the High Commission mucking me about. You've got the Foreign Office being difficult. Still, you know, I've got reports being blocked. I mean, just about every bloody obstacle they've put in the way, they've put in the way. And yet if I could beat them, it would give me a lot of satisfaction.

9:32His thoughts, I think, were that there might be bigger things at play, that Kenya was important to the UK.

9:45It's true that Britain and Kenya were hugely important to each other. Dr Poppy Cullen is a lecturer in international history at Lovebury University I would characterise the Anglo-Kenyan relationship as being unusually close in the post-colonial period So therefore more important for Britain than many of its other relationships in Africa Kenya was a British colony and Poppy tells me that despite the messy lead-up to its independence in 1963 it quickly cemented a quid pro quo relationship with its former coloniser. A military agreement was front and centre. The Kenyans will get military training provided by Britain.

10:33There'll be arms, supplies, there'll be money, aid, all that kind of thing. And the British also will get the things that they want, which is over-flying rights and air-staging rights. But more importantly, the British military will be able to train in Kenya. Britain established a military training ground in Kenya, which amazingly is still in operation 70 years on. It's big enough to train whole battalions at a time. It's not something that they can easily replicate somewhere else if they were to lose it in Kenya. The army base has been in the news recently because of the horrific murder of Agnes Wanjiru, a Kenyan woman who was stabbed and then locked in a septic tank in 2012.

11:18It took six years for a Kenyan inquest to find that British soldiers were responsible, and another six years for someone to be charged. You can see how cases like Agnes Wengeru's or Judy Ward's could expose a vulnerability in this strategic relationship between these two countries, especially when John started agitating against President Moyes' son. And John understood this. He realised that solving his daughter's murder was not as important to Britain as it was to him. We've got training barracks out here down by Mount Kenya. There's British Army training barracks. The SAS trade here sometimes.

12:01So there's all these sort of things that, with the flick of his fingers, Moy could have kicked the bloody knot of them out, you see.

12:10By the turn of the millennium, John was convinced that the Met Police had bungled their investigation into Julie's murder on purpose. Here's Bob. Our overarching view is that when Scotland Yard got involved, they went to support the Kenyan narrative rather than base their reports on factual evidence that my dad got. They systematically tried to not find the murderer, therefore perverted the course of justice throughout their investigation. The Met's failures, as John saw them, started right at the beginning. Even before Graham Searle went to Kenya in 1990, another senior detective called Ken Thompson went there on a scoping exercise.

13:02As far as the wards are concerned, he made huge mistakes. Like with Julie's beige Suzuki Jeep, it should have been treated as a key piece of evidence. But it was never forensically examined. John had, rather naively, given it away before he realised Julie had been murdered. But in a stroke of luck, he found out where it was and he told Ken. He planned to have it wrapped and shipped back in a container and completely forensically analysed because we really believe that whoever disposed of Julie's body probably drove her jeep to do it. But Ken didn't take charge of the vehicle. Instead, he told the Kenyan police where to find it.

13:48It was found maybe a year later at a scrapyard. Now, it's hard to explain the motive for doing that, knowing the Kenyans were covering up, and he still did that. What Bob's suggesting here is that the Kenyan authorities deliberately destroyed the jeep because of the evidence it might hold. I haven't been able to verify this, but I've seen Ken's report from that scoping exercise, and it does sound a bit trusting of the Kenyan authorities. Ken said that the Kenyan post-mortem report, the one that was crudely altered, should be strongly considered, even after it had been debunked, that Julie might indeed have been, quote, party to her own death.

14:40When Ken was quizzed about it, many years later, he said that if he'd accused Kenya of a cover-up, the Met wouldn't have been allowed back to investigate properly. But the wards don't think Ken was their only problem with the Met investigation. They came to a similar conclusion about Graham Searle's team after the case against the two Rangers, Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy, fell apart over the hair that wasn't Julie's. To this day, the wards think Graham's team went after the Rangers because they were following instructions. Their investigation aims towards Kipin and Magyaroy. I mean, like a bow to an arrow, that's where it's going.

15:22So in the year 2000, John lodged a formal complaint against the Met. To his surprise, they responded by ordering an independent investigation into the way the case had been handled. This is how Terry Hackett got involved. He's the detective who got permission to read MI6 files. I investigate cops, I investigate corruption. Bad cop is a bad cop and I want them out.

15:52The probe was entrusted to the Lincolnshire Police and he was second in command on the case. It was a small team, but the best detectives anyone could ever wish to have. The police officers on the Lynx inquiry, as it became known, spent three years sifting through paperwork and retreading every aspect of the case. They produced a mammoth report that fills eight large files. I'm one of a small number of people who've read it. That's because it's never been published. One of the detectives who worked on the inquiry says that even he hasn't seen it. Initially, the wards weren't allowed to either.

16:35There's simply no need to make it secret unless you're trying to cover something up. That's what they've done. Eventually, John got hold of the report, using freedom of information laws and a lot of persistence. And that's the only reason I've been able to see the files in John's library of secrets. The Lynx report concludes that there's insufficient evidence to support John's allegation of a cover-up by the Met. But it's also utterly scathing about the quality of the Met's early investigation. It says, and I'm quoting here, that it was poorly led, under-resourced and incompetent. Significant witnesses were ignored.

17:22Explanations from less than credible witnesses were accepted without corroboration and that forensic opportunities were missed. Searches were not carried out.

17:35I asked Graham about it. given he's been so strongly criticised. He says he did pursue other leads hard, but that the evidence just didn't stack up. John was a very focused individual and if it didn't fit into his particular bag, he didn't like it. And so to me, he was just fighting back. If other people want to nitpick it and say it wasn't good enough, that's their opinion. But we did what we thought was right at the time. And I'll stand by that for the rest of my life. His deputy, David Shipley, also defends their investigation. We don't feel it was incompetent at all. We felt, Graham Searle and I, that we did the very best we could at the time in very difficult circumstances.

18:26Looking back, Terry, who helped lead the Lynx inquiry, remains unsparing in his assessment. Just amateurish, incompetent, no forensic strategy. As a result of that, it was a very poor investigation, which led to two innocent men, certainly from the evidence I've looked at, being put on trial. The Met isn't the only UK authority whose work the Lynx team was investigating. Here's another of their detectives, Andy Crisp. The amount of civil servants and diplomats we interviewed, it was obvious we were investigating them. Alongside the Met, they were also looking into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, also known as the FCO.

19:15It was Andy's job to work through the Foreign Office files. It was a different language. It was a completely different language. But if you read between the lines, you knew what they were saying. To this day, Andy suspects he didn't see all of their files. We find a page missing out of a continuity of a document. So somebody had redacted it or taken it out or whatever. And we asked them, we said, is that everything? And they said, yeah. I have no evidence to say he's right that some of the pages were missing. But even amongst what they saw, there were some documents that were puzzling. For starters, a curious memo dated May 1989 about a conversation between a Foreign Office official and a senior Kenyan official.

20:04Here's Terry Hackett again. Sally Kosgai, who was a Kenyan High Commissioner at the time. She was the highest-ranking Kenyan diplomat in the UK. In the memo, the official from the UK Foreign Office is supposedly reporting what Sally Kosgai told them. And according to the memo, two men would be arrested and charged. I've seen this memo. It doesn't say who the two men were, just that Sally Kosgai understood from a figure in the Kenyan government that, quote, the inquest was coming up soon and that the evidence that would be presented should result in two charges being brought. And this was months before the inquest proving how Julie died that it was murder.

20:51This is months before two men are going to be charged. How do you interpret it? Well, if you look at the conspiratorial side of it, why would you write something like that? Know that that would be open to people like me coming along and reading it later. Or did they think that no-one would ever come across and see something like this? As Terry says, why would it have already been decided that two men would be arrested when a crime hadn't yet been determined. We know that two people were charged, Peter Kippen and Jonah Magaroy, who were both found innocent. The wards think that this memo shows that the Kenyan government had a plan to pin the crime on the two rangers and that the Met fell in line.

21:41It was almost like it was a pre-arranged scenario that somebody had written, which I think I know is the case. Now, this doesn't make total sense to me. I struggle to believe that Kipin and Magaroy were in the frame before the Met had even interviewed them. But this memo, if it's accurate, does strike me as strange. I want to speak to Sally Kosgai to try and understand. The person you've called is not reachable. Nope. Let me try the other one. eventually I get hold of her. Hello. Oh, hello. Is that Dr Cosguy, please? Yes. Hello, Dr Cosguy. It's Catherine Rushton here calling from the Telegraph.

22:29I would like to record a conversation with you to use on a podcast. On what? I'd like to talk to you about a memo in this Julie Ward case. I've just sent it to you on WhatsApp. Leave me alone. Leave me alone, please. But you are the... Sally Kosgye doesn't help me understand how this memo fits in, but I can tell you what the Lynx report said about it. It accepted it as, quote, a prediction, one which proved correct when the two Rangers were charged.

23:08The Sally Kosgye memo isn't the only intriguing document the Lynx team got their hands on. As Andy Crisp went deeper into Britain's archives, he came across another diplomatic cable which grabbed his attention. It was sent in April 1989, seven months after Julie's death, and signed by the then head of the British High Commission in Nairobi. It's marked restricted, and it has a note at the end asking for information to be shared with a Foreign Office official called David Muat. I've played part of a call between him and John before, one that's in John's archive of recordings. Hello. Hello, David.

23:53Hello, Mr Ward. Hello, Mr Ward. Mr Ward, I'm glad you were able to telephone me back. It's David Muat speaking. David Muat was the Foreign Office official who called John shortly before the first inquest into Julie's death, back in the 80s in Kenya. David suggested to John that he let the Kenyan police present his evidence for him. But John, who believed correctly that the Kenyan authorities were trying to cover up his daughter's murder, refused.

24:26John had had a feeling that David Muat was reading from something during that call, and I suspect he was right. I wonder if the wording of this memo was in front of him. I'm quoting here. There is something to be said for the latter approach. The magistrate might well be surprised if all the evidence collected had not been made officially available to the police. John thought this call showed that the British and Kenyan authorities were in cahoots. There's direct collusion, collaboration, conspiracy between them.

25:10But there was something else in this memo that the British High Commission didn't share with John. The name of the man they were liaising with, Hezekiah Oyugi. I've mentioned him before. He was a permanent secretary in President Moy's government, said to be in charge of Kenya's secret service. The Met suspected he was involved in the murder of Dr Robert Ukko, the foreign minister. According to the Lynx report, Hezekiah Oyugi's chief priority was to nullify any perceived threat to President Moy. It says, This man was the most trusted of all President Moy's friends, and without doubt the most powerful and terrifying.

25:57If British High Commission officials were in direct contact with Hezekiah Oyugi on this, then that raises much bigger questions. Could he have been trying to protect Jonathan Moy and his father? And what the wards wanted to know was, was he doing so with Britain's help? Both the wards and the Lynx team wanted answers. The Lynx investigators probed deeper and deeper, interviewing officials from the Foreign Office and people from the UK government. They eventually directed their attention towards one of Britain's most powerful and secretive institutions, MI6. I just thought, you know, I may have been lied to.

26:50More on that after this short break.

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27:34Inside MI6 headquarters in the early 2000s, Terry Hackett's perspective started to shift. He'd found that contact note containing details of two people linked to the secret services, people his team had already interviewed. They were the two nameless men who had met John at the British High Commission in Nairobi, 13 days after Julie's remains were found, at that strange meeting where one of them tried to persuade John that Julie had been struck by lightning.

28:10Over the years, John had become convinced that the two men were spies, and that they were part of a wider conspiracy by Britain to scupper his investigation. So true to form, he found out who the two men were and he'd passed their names to the Lynx detectives. Terry was still waiting for permission to view the MI6 files when his colleague Andy Crisp first interviewed them. I said all along, from day one, it was going to be a very difficult inquiry. They would only tell us what they think we wanted to know. The first man, the MI6 informant, was called David Rowe, He'd previously worked for the Kenyan police, and now he was on the payroll of both the UK and Kenya as a kind of police instructor.

29:00He was a very difficult man to interview. David Rowe has died, but his answers are laid out in the links report, in black and white. David Rowe was adamant that he hadn't communicated with anyone in the Kenyan police or the UK Foreign Office about Julie's case before the meeting with John. He just happened to be in the British Eye Commission. David, you're here. Can you come in a minute? David Rowe told Andy that he'd raised the prospect of lightning because he was asked about possible causes of fire in the Masai Mara, that he'd just been speculating. Andy took a strong dislike to him. He wasn't convinced by what David Rowe had to say.

29:43Do you want this on tape? Yes, please. I found him to be a typical, ex-colonial, arrogant man. He knew this, he knew that, but he couldn't answer the straight question. On top of this, a source, a well-placed one, told the Lynx police that David Rowe had actually visited the place, the location where Julie was found, and the gully where her jeep got stuck within days of the murder. If true, it raises the prospect that David Rowe, a man whose salary was partly funded by Britain, could have been working closely with the Kenyan authorities to cover up Julie's murder.

30:26The other nameless man in the meeting was a member of staff at the British High Commission. I have his name written down in my notebook, but legally I have to refer to him as Mr A, because he was an MI6 agent. His job in the High Commission was a cover role. According to John, Mr A advised him to have Julie cremated in Kenya and go home and grieve. Andy had a feeling that Mr A wasn't being entirely straightforward. It was obvious that he wasn't telling the truth initially. And there was one detail in particular that Andy wanted to get to the bottom of. Had they been in touch about Julie's case before that meeting with John?

31:09David Rowe told Andy they hadn't. Mr A said he couldn't remember. There was a lot of jiggery-pokery about had those two met and discussed the case and they denied it. So when Terry saw the contact note shortly afterwards in MI6 headquarters in London, he knew he'd got hold of something big. I'd found the contact note, which was contradicting what they'd said. The note showed that David Rowe and Mr A had met each other and discussed Julie's case, and Terry immediately noticed the date on it. The 22nd of the night, that's four days beforehand, with Julie Ward and a gender item. They had met four days before seeing John at the High Commission, where David Rowe tried to persuade him that his daughter had been struck by lightning.

32:05I mean, odd. Odd. I don't know the details of what they said in their meeting. It feels possible that they could have strategised about what to share with John. I wonder if they had an idea at that point who could have murdered Julie or that Jonathan Moy would be in the frame. I hate being lied to. They say it wasn't a lie, they say it was poor memory. Well, I thought, if you work for MI6 and everything, surely one of the prerequisites is you've got a very good memory. I would have thought so. But that is what their answer was. The Lynx team were pretty withering in their assessment of these two men.

32:45The report says David Rowe and Mr A both fall far short of credibility in their respective explanations. It concludes that David Rowe, quote, was used by the Kenyan police to feed Mr Ward with preposterous theories in order to divert him, and that Mr A was either part of the apparent conspiracy or just didn't understand what David Rowe was saying. Andy and Terry are bound by the Official Secrets Act, but they've been able to tell me some of these things because in 2004, Mr A was called as a witness at Julie's second inquest. My friend James Hawes was there. There was this rather chilling moment when a lawyer stood up and addressed the coroner and said, a little bit of housekeeping first, I think was the phrase, we have some issues in this case touching on national security.

33:45It's highly unusual for a member of MI6 to give evidence. So Mr A was allowed to speak from another room. He admitted, under oath, that he was a member of the secret intelligence services. It was a huge vindication for John. He's seen a bigger picture and been told he's a nut. He's a conspiracy theorist before there were conspiracy theorists. But the bigger vindication came as Mr A was forced to account for the fact that he hadn't volunteered the whole truth to the Lynx detectives. Here's the coroner, Dr Peter Dean. So that clearly, I can put this diplomatically, gave some cause for concern for John.

34:30Dr Dean reached a verdict of unlawful killing. It isn't the job of an inquest to find people guilty or otherwise, but by the end of the hearing, the investigation into what happened to Julie had leapt forward. I mean, clearly in the Kenyan situation, there was a cover-up. My concerns, in a sense, about our side of things was that decisions were clearly taken that did not further the search for the truth and the search for justice for Julie Ward and the family. Dr Dean is very careful with his words, as you might expect from a coroner. And I can't speak to the motivation behind it, But you have to worry when the outcome of those decisions was not going to help the investigation in the circumstances of the death.

35:30The Lynx detectives, Andy and Terry, are split. Andy thinks Britton was involved in a cover-up. Without any shadow of a doubt. Terry is much more circumspect. There is evidence of strange things have happened, whether it's cover-up or missing things out or trying to manipulate the facts as they see them. But it's insufficient to prove in a court. In their report, the Lynx team concluded that they were, quote, unable to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the British High Commission and the Foreign and Commonwealth conspired to divert John Ward. But it said the staff operated with an apparent total lack of understanding, bordering on the naive, of exactly what the Kenyan authorities were up to.

36:26When I contact the Foreign Office, they respond with a statement, expressing sympathy for the Wards, but insisting they have, quote, always absolutely refuted any allegations of a cover-up in this historic case.

36:48David Rowe has died, but I find out that Mr A is still alive and I want to speak to him.

37:02I track him down and knock on his door But it's fruitless Mr A is very unwell He's virtually unable to speak And so I'm walking away And I think that the reality is that we'll never find the answers I never get to know if Mr A received orders that had come from London. And so I feel like the answers are...

37:40..going to disappear. Thank you.

38:12in julie's case but at one point mr a said it was mr b who asked him to contact david rowe as part of his cover role years later there was a third agent mr c and unlike with the other mi6 agents he and john became friendly mr c had an in with president moi and at one point he liaised with the Kenyan secret services to recover some of the money John had spent investigating Julie's killer. It was a secret deal. Kenya agreed to pay John the equivalent of around£700 ,000. According to Bob, John was able to waltz through airport security with a suitcase full of cash. Some of it went to settling his overdraft, which by that point ran to a quarter of a million pounds.

39:09It takes me months to reach Mr C, but eventually he agrees to meet me one sunny weekend in London. What's going to be a bit strange about this meeting is that this man knows that I know he worked in the Foreign Office and was helpful to John Ward. What he doesn't know is that I know he was at MI6 and I'm going to have to broach that at some point. That might kind of, you know, make him very unlikely to be recorded. There's a moment of awkwardness when I tell him, but to my relief, he does agree to be interviewed. The only proviso is that I can't reveal his identity, so we've got an actor to voice him.

39:59Unsurprisingly, Mr C rejects the idea that Britain was working against John. I very, very strongly believe there was no official cover-up or cover-up of any sort at all. John only really seriously became involved with the idea that there was a cover-up when he was unable to make progress in solving the crime. He was at a loss, I think, where to go. And he decided to go, you know, cover up between the British government and over the case. Mr C says he only got involved because he felt sorry for John, that he was never instructed to do so. I had absolutely zero other motivation other than, you know, to solve the murder and get him the justice that he wanted.

40:55It was so sad, it never worked out. The way Mr C tells it, Julie Ward was far less important to both the British High Commission and the Kenyan government than John seemed to believe. Certainly by the 90s, when Mr C arrived in Nairobi. Several years afterwards, I mean, it was history. And here was this English bloke who popped up every now and again. He says that, to President Moy, John Ward was an irritant. Political advisers would bring the subject up every now and again, and he would think, who's this wretched man who keeps popping up into my life, causing a nuisance for Kenya? And that would be it.

41:39I mean, you know, he would regard Julie Ward as a problem, but not a major one. It turns out that Mr C petitioned President Moy on John's behalf. It was only when I started talking to him about, you know, the effect that this was having on Kenya's relationship or reputation in the world that I think he started taking more of an interest. This surprises me. Wouldn't Julie's case have become a major problem for President Moy when Valentine Kodipo started making claims that his son Jonathan was involved? The depot was a fabricator who basically wanted to get asylum. I don't think Jonathan Moy was anywhere near or had anything to do with it.

42:27It was a simple, very, very sad event. Nothing more than that, in my opinion. Mr C has a different theory of what happened to her. It bears a close resemblance to the one the Met police espoused in the early 90s. He thinks Julie was driving in the Maasai Mara when she took a wrong turn onto a track that eventually petered out. The car crashed into a ravine and probably broke an axle or something. She got out of the car, she wrote an SOS on the top of her vehicle, sort of wandered around and met somebody, probably a ranger. Mr C thinks that what may have started out as a friendly interaction then turned violent.

43:20This doesn't fully explain some of the strange behaviour John encountered from the authorities, Kenyan and British, including the involvement of MI6 right from the start. I ask Mr C what the normal response is when a British citizen dies overseas in suspicious circumstances. Well, it depends entirely who the person was. If it was an ordinary person like Julie Ward, She wasn't a political person. She didn't have an important role anywhere. It was the British High Commission, like any person would be sympathetic and sad, but it wouldn't be, it wouldn't consider it of vital importance. This sounds plausible to me, but it doesn't quite fit with what we already know about Mr A.

44:11Things that have been established as fact. So Mr A had filled out one of the contact notes and lodged it at MI6 HQ, which is the thing that I've puzzled with, because I can well believe that Julie Ward was not important to MI6 from the beginning, but I also have no idea. Does it strike you as strange that an MI6 officer would have done that at that stage? I can't comment on that. and all I can say is that I don't know the man you're talking about. I really can't comment. It's not the only subject off-limits. Mr C is surprised when I tell him, I know John accepted money from the Kenyan government.

44:55Would I be able to ask you about your role in that? No. When I step outside, I reflect on what Mr C's told me. So I've just left Mr C and I don't think it's that surprising that he said there was no cover-up. I know that the wards would say, you know, aha, that's because he was part of it. But I do think it was interesting to hear some of what went on behind the scenes to help John.

45:27The suitcase John used to carry his cash from Kenya to Britain ended up in his library of secrets. Oh, that's full of cash. That's the one he bought all the cash back. It's still in there. No, it's not. Like so many other important items in this story. His old dictaphones and cassettes, his FOIs, and even an old excrement sample in the freezer that he found at the place. But that is the suitcase that he had all the cash in. It's no longer kept at Saxonwood, because the wards don't own their childhood home anymore. Bob and his brother Tim sold it after their parents died in 2023. John and Jan Ward went within two weeks of each other.

46:10They never got justice for Julie.

46:17In that interview that John gave to The Telegraph back in 2008, he reflected on his long hunt for answers. What's been your lowest moment over the last 20 years? oh I think that the realisation that the British government were working against me and that had a profound effect on me, the people I thought I could trust were not trustworthy at all, we had an agenda had I not got involved in this, absolutely nothing would ever have been done, no trials no investigation, it wouldn't have been a murder if I had believed what these people told me do you ever think imagine Julie as she would be today?

47:01No, I can't, actually. I still think of her as she was. She was 28 when we lost her. Now, of course, she'd be 48. I mean, she'd look totally different, probably have kids of her own, married. Who knows? I don't know. I can't picture her in that role. I sometimes wonder whether I've never really grieved, actually.

47:25I thought about it myself, but it might just be that if I ever solve it, it might hit me then. John's archive of documents now has a new home, in a rented office. The picture of Julie with the chimp is in there, along with a framed poem by J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, he likes that poem. He said somebody gave him that and said it reminds them of his journey because it's about a journey, that poem. It's lovely. The first line is the road goes ever on and on. Exactly. This is horribly true of the investigation into Julie's murder, especially because Bob has vowed to pick up where his father left off. But the poem feels particularly poignant to me because Julie's journey was cut so short.

48:25As I'm reaching the end of this series, I give Bob a call. We talk about where I've got to, and I ask him what, ultimately, he thinks happened to Julie. We believe she met Jonathan Moy and his bodyguards somewhere between Sand River and Serena Lodge. We suspect at that point she was attacked, raped, abducted for a number of days. what happened in the missing days is really hard it's hard to think about it's hard to talk about we don't know there's a possibility she was tortured because there's some unexplained marks on her leg she was then murdered mutilated dumped in a desolate spot that we call the place in the and then finally set on fire it wasn't a great end that's horrible i'm sorry it's all right We talk a lot about almost jigsaw pieces of potential cover-ups and, you know, this clue and that clue.

49:27And sometimes it takes you away from actually what's at the core of it, which is this horrible, horrible thing that happened to your sister. I think that's, you've just hit the nail on the head, really. It's, you know, it's a kind of a driving force for Dad and is for me. It's just wrong and it's a horrible way to end your life. And she didn't deserve it. So the people involved in the follow-up to it should be ashamed of themselves.

49:57The Met sent a letter to the Ward family last year in response to a second complaint they filed, accusing the Met of a cover-up. One sentence in particular stands out. It reads, The 2018 inquiry had one remaining person of interest, Mr Jonathan Moy.

50:22When I asked the Met for comment, they said they had exhausted all lines of inquiry by the time they suspended the investigation in 2018. They said, quote, This decision was not taken lightly, and our thoughts remain with Judy's family, who were updated accordingly. We have been clear that detectives would consider any new information provided to them to determine whether it represented a new and significant line of inquiry.

50:54For my part, I think that aged 28 and having travelled through Africa, Julie had become braver and more confident than she'd been in Britain. I think she might have run into someone in the Maasai Mara as she was leaving Sand River, and what could have started out as a friendly situation, possibly even a consensual liaison with someone she knew, turned into rape. I don't have definitive proof that this was Jonathan Moy, but it feels likely he was involved. I also know that this young, independent, kind-natured woman was horrifically mistreated. She was likely whipped, leaving those kite-shaped marks and then murdered to silence her.

51:41Whoever was responsible probably thought they'd get away with it I don't know if they initially left her body for animals to take But then, when John organised an aerial search Panicked and did an amateurish job of disposing of her This would make sense of the Maasai elder story What they didn't bank on was duly having a father As determined, relentless and well-resourced as John Julie's murderer was never brought to justice but when John died he at least knew that he'd done everything in his power to deny the culprit peace

52:28Soon after John and Jan died the Ward brothers hosted a joint funeral for them It turned into a celebration for Julie as well one that they'd missed out on before

52:43We booked a double slot at the crematorium and we did a mum, dad and a Julie. When Julie died we couldn't bury her with a public service, it was just meeting dad and mum because the press were all over the place. So poor Julie's friends could never say goodbye to her. This time her school friends were able to come, including Teresa Smith. The fact that I was invited and to actually acknowledge that I was a good friend and, yes, it was all a very big part of my childhood, being Julie's friend. Julie's old colleague, Rosie Frew, was there as well. It was lovely. The caskets for John and Jan were beautiful and it actually felt like being able to have a chance to say goodbye, which I don't think we feel that there's been an end.

53:34Even David Shipley turned up, one of the Met detectives that the Wards had so heavily criticised. I know that you remain friends with the Suns. How's that work? Well, the Ward family are just lovely people. They're lovely people and I wish them well, of course, in their endeavours to get to the bottom of this. And, of course, Lucy Brewer, who set off with Julie back in 1988 for the adventure of a lifetime, overland through Africa on that big yellow truck. At John and Jan's funeral, God called us soulmates, which is a lovely, lovely thing to say. And do you feel that? Oh, definitely, yeah, absolutely.

54:19Yeah, very lucky to have known her. It was a celebration of Julie that was long overdue. And it was just the best send-off we could have possibly hoped for. After all, this is not John's story. or Bob's. It's the story of Julie, a young woman full of plans, whose life was cut short in the most violent way, and who was badly let down in death.

55:06You've been listening to Murder in the Maasai Mara, written and reported by me, Catherine Rushton. The series was produced and sound designed by Anna Stauffenberg and the executive producer was Cara McGugan. Additional reporting by Edwin O 'Koff. Additional production by Lillian Fawcett and Jack Leather. Script editing by Venetia Rainey. Mixed by Elliot Lampett. The commissioning editor was Louisa Wells Original theme music by Nyukabi Karaoke And with my great thanks to the Ward family If you've enjoyed this series My colleague Jack Leather has also made a film Charting my investigation in Kenya See some of the people you've heard in this podcast By following the link in the notes for this episode If you have any information about this case That could help us get closer to the truth Please get in touch juliewardcase at telegraph.co.uk