The story of Julie Ward, a young British woman murdered in Kenya in 1988, continues to resonate decades later. This article explores the circumstances surrounding her death, the flawed investigations that followed, and the unwavering determination of her father, John Ward, to uncover the truth.
Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya
The Discovery and Initial Cover-Up
Julie Ann Ward, a publishing assistant and amateur wildlife photographer from Bury St Edmunds in England, embarked on a trip to the Masai Mara in September 1988 during an extended break from work. She was born on 20th April 1960. On 5 September 1988 the vehicle they were driving broke down; Dr. Ward was reported missing and her father John Ward flew to Kenya to find his daughter. He hired a plane to search the areas of the game reserve where his daughter was known to have camped alone. A pilot sighted the vehicle in a gully next to a river and Mr. Ward found the vehicle.
When the charred remains of 28-year-old Julie Ward were found in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988, the Kenyan authorities tried to convince her father - and the public - that she had been killed by wild animals. Not admitting that it was murder, Kenyan officials first postulated that she committed suicide, burning herself after hacking her body proved ineffective. Later they forwarded the idea that she was struck by lightning and devoured by animals.
The attempted verdict of suicide would have closed the case and confined it to gather dust on a coroners shelf.
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A Father's Unyielding Quest for Truth
Julie’s father, John Ward, spent more than £500,000 trying to find who killed his daughter. Not convinced, Julie’s father, John Ward, spent 2 million pounds of his own money to launch private investigations into his daughter’s killing, but encountered many stumbling blocks in Kenya.
Through pressure from the murdered woman’s father-his book about his daughter’s death is a major source for this study-junior and then senior game wardens were put on trial and in each case the defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Giving up on his theory of lustful black men and defenseless white women that pointed to the game wardens, Ward’s father, after years of investigation, came to believe that a “Big Politician” was responsible for his daughter’s death. Other binaries from the colonial archives that had fueled his indignation-the inefficiencies, duplicities, and corruption of Africans versus the truth, justice, and integrity of the British-also collapsed as he noted the complicity of the British High Commission in Kenya in covering up the truth of his daughter’s death.
Timeline of Key Events:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 1988 | Julie Ward disappears in Masai Mara Game Reserve. |
| January 1989 | Kenyan police refuse to conduct a murder inquiry. |
| February 1990 | Mr Ward persuades UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd to order an investigation by Scotland Yard. |
| 17 September 1999 | Judge clears Makallah of murder. |
| October 2009 | The case was reopened after a secret visit, to Kenya, by John Yates, the head of the Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorism squad. |
| December 2009 | Valentine Ohuru Kodipo, a key witness of the murder, died. |
Investigations and Trials
Two game wardens were accused of murder after Scotland Yard’s initial investigation but were acquitted in 1992. The judge who had presided over the trial criticised the police for conducting a flawed investigation.
The trial of a man accused of killing Julie Ward, the 28-year-old British tourist murdered in a Kenyan game reserve more than 10 years ago, got under way in Nairobi yesterday. Simon ole Makallah, a 49-year-old assistant director to the Kenya Wildlife Service, was arrested in July following an independent investigation set up two years ago by Kenya's attorney general.
Prosecuting counsel Salim Dhanji told the court that Makallah had suppressed evidence and lied repeatedly. As chief warden at the game reserve, Makallah had failed to do anything about the missing woman for nearly a week.'Not only did the accused suppress evidence, but he told deliberate untruths in order to steer away any suspicions of his having been involved or having committed the crime,' Mr Dhanji said. This is the second trial since Ms Ward's murder in 1988. Seven years ago, two park rangers were acquitted in a trial in which Makallah was a prosecution witness.
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The prosecution was also allowed to cite the previous trial judge's opinion that Mr. But the time-logged radio message Makallah made to his reserve headquarters upon his discovery, together with charts drawn up after time-and-distance studies in the reserve, would show, said Mr Dhanji, that Makallah could only have gone straight to the remains and must therefore have had prior knowledge of where the body lay. Over the objections of the defence counsel, Mr Dhanji went on to quote the judge in his ruling at the end of the 1992 trial, 'one may not rule out the possibility that Mr Makallah was aware of Julie's fate before the afternoon' when she was found.
Theories and Rumors
Outside the courts, Kenyan public opinion, or the “pavement radio,” as Musila puts it, circulated rumors that a “Big Politician” or someone related to a “Big Politician” did it.
One witness stated, “I remember Jonathan Moi and his party arrived very late one evening. Throughout the month of September 1988, I was at my farm in Eldama Ravine. Jonathan Toroitich Moi was famous for motor rally racing in East Africa."
An investigation also revealed that the British authorities had deliberately obstructed Mr Ward in his pursuit of justice over her brutal murder.
Inside the Heartbreaking Murder of Julie Ward | True Crime Documentary
Colonial Binaries and the "Criminal State"
Grace Musila's analysis of the Julie Ward case, as presented in "A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour," highlights the enduring influence of colonial binaries. Stories about who killed a white woman tourist in Kenya in 1988 led Grace Musila to interrogate what she calls the “colonial archive”-the set of attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices that recur long after the social structures that propped them up have fallen. Exquisitely examined through memoirs, reports, official documents, journals, newspaper articles, blogs, social media, scholarly works, and novels, A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour visits the contact zone between Africans and Europeans and traces unequal relationships from colonialism to the present. It is a study of the effects of the tenacity of colonial binaries of modern-traditional, white-black, nature-culture, male-female, and virgin-whore, as well as an unblinking look at the space of terror in what she calls “the criminal state.” Musila happened upon the story of the murder of Julie Ward while doing research on political assassinations in Kenya.
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Tracking how Ward’s father came to see unities and continuities across what he once believed were absolute divides, Musila shows that “binary lenses-often articulated through notions of Europe’s commitment to justice and human rights as contrasted to postcolonial African states’ abuse of these-work to mask the intersections between the two, marked by complicities largely mediated by the interests of capital, which fracture the myth of Europe’s moral authority sanctioned by a value-neutral progress through modernity” (168).
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