Africa 24 Media Photography

Julie Ward; a British publishing assistant who was also a passionate wildlife photographer was murdered in September 1988, while on a safari at the Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya. At only 28 years of age then, her burnt and mutilated body was found a week after she went missing. Twenty-two years later, it has been a case of justice not only delayed, but denied as her killers are yet to be apprehended. The original theory fronted by the then Kenyan officials investigating the murder, suggested that she had been a victim of a lion attack and then later struck by lightning.

However, her father’s relentless efforts to resolve the death unearthed different findings. The postmortem report had been altered to camouflage human participation and disguise the fact that her bones had been cut by a sharp blade rather than gnawed by animals. John Ward, Julie’s farther, a retired Hotelier from Suffolk has spent nearly £2 million ($3 million) and made more than 100 visits to Kenya in a persistent pursuit of his daughter’s killers. To date there have been two trials: in 1992, two park rangers were acquitted of her murder, and then in 1998, the head park warden was also acquitted. And while the case has boiled to international levels, key witness to the murder died in late 2009 jeopardizing plans for a fresh inquiry. Valentine Ohuru Kodipo, 36, died in a hospital in Denmark, where he had lived in exile for more than 20 years. Kodipo testified on Ward’s murder, before seeking refuge in Denmark due to the sensitivity of the case. Nevertheless, a new probe into the murder is set to begin after senior UK police officers convinced their Kenyan counterparts that a new trial was possible based on advances in the forensic science. This was aided by the identification of human DNA from the murder scene, which is believed to belong to one of her attackers. In 2009, John Ward said that he welcomed the news to a new inquiry since “This case is solvable because we haven’t run out of leads yet.”.

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