Clues Point to Murder of Tourist : Daughter’s Death Spurs Father’s Quest in Kenya

For two weeks, the mystery unfolding in Courtroom 4 of the colonial-era sandstone law court has been fascinating Kenyans and discomfiting their officials in equal measure: What befell a slight, 28-year-old British woman who disappeared last year while driving alone in Kenya’s famous Masai Mara Game Reserve?

Behind the wooden door of Room 4, and before an audience packed with members of the public, law students and a troop of British newspaper reporters, two lawyers have been presenting evidence on the question to a magistrate, who is trying to decide whether the police shirked their initial investigation of the matter.

Simply put, the issue is this: Was Julie Anne Ward eaten by wild animals? Or, as her father believes and the evidence increasingly shows, was she abducted by or with the knowledge of park personnel, held prisoner inside the Mara for as many as six days and then hacked to pieces by people hoping to obliterate all the evidence?

British businessman John Ward has pursued this question, almost alone, for a year since his daughter’s singed jawbone and lower left leg were discovered strewn around a heap of ashes in the Masai Mara.

Local authorities have plied Ward with any number of improbable theories about how his daughter’s scant remains came to be discovered six miles from where her Suzuki jeep was found mired to the fenders in mud. The spirited young woman, an experienced traveler, was in terror at being lost amid savage wild animals and committed suicide, they suggested. Or she caught fire accidentally and was eaten by wild animals. She knew the rules, and should not have left her jeep. And so on.

The alternative understandably makes the authorities uncomfortable. Murdering the woman and making it appear that she ran her own jeep into the mud could only be managed, argue Ward and his Nairobi lawyer, Byron Georgiadis, by someone who knew the park well, could travel even its remotest corners with authority and could order deputies to forge evidence and lie to investigators--in short, one or more top park officials.

That possibility might explain why it was only after a year of refusal that the government agreed to convene the current inquest, at which a magistrate may decide that the case warrants the official murder investigation that has never been done.

“I see this inquest as a necessary steppingstone,” Ward says, the frustration of a yearlong battle only occasionally revealed in his otherwise gregarious demeanor. “I can’t force these idiots to do a proper murder inquiry. They’ll never catch the blokes as long as they’re still talking about wild animals.”

In this country, where the national economy can rise or fall on the question of how safe tourists feel, a lot is at stake. From Kenya’s standpoint, a public inquest implicating park rangers in the brutal killing of a tourist they were supposed to protect could not have come at a worse time.

Tourist Safety an Issue

Over the last few months, the killings of three Western tourists by poachers in the national parks, and attacks on many others, has turned tourist safety here into an international issue. The concern was heightened by the killing last month of famed naturalist George Adamson, who was shot by a band of Somali marauders while trying to protect a guest.

Kenyans fear the effect of all this on their thriving tourist industry, which last year brought to the country about 700,000 foreigners who spent an estimated $360 million. The killings produced some relatively minor cancellations, tour operators report, but the situation may become worse in coming months if advance bookings drop off because of the bad publicity.

The recent crimes have put officials on the defensive. President Daniel Arap Moi has gone as far as to order police to shoot anyone loitering in the parks.

The Ward case has all the electricity of a modern “White Mischief,” the book and movie about an unsolved murder among Kenyan colonials of the 1940s. The inquest has revealed almost farcical police and ranger incompetence, not to say misconduct, as well as signs of a clumsy cover-up on behalf of senior officials. Government documents crucial to the case have been crudely altered and clearly forged. A camera and film that John Ward used to take pictures of a suspect document were mysteriously stolen.

Insisted Remains Be Bagged

Until Ward insisted that his daughter’s remains be bagged and taken in for examination, police officers at the scene were about to leave them to the elements, as if the discovery marked the end of the investigation, not the beginning.

“ ‘Kwicha’--finished--they were going to wash their hands of it,” lawyer Georgiadis says.

After assigning the investigation to one of his underlings, local police superintendent Charles Issika did not inquire once about its progress. Subsequently, he was promoted out of the district.

Police have never questioned most of the wardens on duty near where the jeep and body were found. They never examined records on the use of the nine official vehicles assigned to the rangers, so the movements of the only men with unobstructed access to even the remotest corners of the park could not be ascertained.

They trampled over the sites, obliterating physical evidence, and have lost or given away much of what they did retrieve. They released the Suzuki to its owner without photographing it or checking for fingerprints; when they decided to examine it weeks later, it had already been hosed down and cleaned out.

As for the park officials, Senior Game Warden Simon ole Makallah asserted in testimony that neither he nor most of his deputies can drive, although they supervise a game preserve of 645 square miles. No duty rosters or attendance sheets are kept by the force, so no one can tell who is or was supposed to be on duty at any given time, or if an assigned officer even showed up for work.

Kenya had marked the end of a six-month African grand tour for Julie Ward, who was taking a year’s vacation. Her last trip before returning to England was to the Masai Mara, which she reached Sept. 2, to see the annual migration of the wildebeest.

On Sept. 6, Ward checked out of the reserve’s Mara Serena lodge and returned to a campsite several miles away to pick up some tents she had left there. Clerks at the park’s Sand River Gate, adjacent to the huge campsite, say they saw her pack the Suzuki. Her signature appears to have been forged in the visitors’ logbook documenting her departure for Nairobi. She was not seen alive again.

Friend Became Apprehensive

On Sept. 10, Paul Weld Dixon, a friend who became apprehensive at her delay, arranged to alert the park authorities that she was missing. Within a day, her father, also alarmed, flew to Nairobi. By Sept. 12, John Ward had assembled a fleet of five private planes to search the park. While he was searching in one of them the next day, he got word that the jeep had been sighted, with a crude “SOS” smeared on its roof.

Ward was momentarily perplexed when he broke into the locked jeep stuck miles from nowhere. “I thought, ‘What’s it doing here?’ ” he recalls.

Inside was not a word from his supposedly stranded daughter, “an inveterate note-writer,” he says. There was no sign that its driver had been on the scene for even the better part of a day--none of his daughter’s cigarette butts, trash or even human waste.

Found inside were a pair of sneakers her size, a map of the park, cans of food, binoculars and bottles of beer, all of which an intelligent traveler would presumably take along on a trek for help, instead of departing unprovisioned and shod in the pair of rubber flip-flops discovered later with her remains. But there was still no reason to consider foul play, and the father thought no more about it at the time.

Later that afternoon, in a secluded spot six miles to the southeast, rangers found the remains of a human leg and a lower jawbone around a fire where clothes, Kenyan coins and film canisters had been burned. The clothing and film were unmistakably Julie Ward’s. Identity was confirmed through dental records.

A post-mortem later determined, based on the decomposition of the leg, that she had died no more than 48 hours earlier.

Meanwhile, park and police officers offered the conclusion that she got stuck in her jeep on Sept. 6, a week before, and walked on foot to the place where she was slaughtered by the park’s wild carnivores.

To believe that, Georgiadis says, one must assume she sought help by going downhill and across a river “like an idiot,” instead of up a gentle adjacent rise to a hilltop from which a park lodge and the Mara’s busiest airstrip are clearly visible.

Immediately behind the hill, its presence broadcast loudly by the clatter of a power generator, was a camp occupied by 12 Swiss photographers. One would have to assume that Julie Ward somehow failed to hear that or disregarded it. The camp’s crew chief later swore that his people scouted for animals from that hill at least once a day and never saw a jeep stuck virtually in front of their eyes.

An Unlikely Scenario

Did Julie set off alone across trackless country, in the opposite direction from a major campground she had just left? To die by the campfire, she would have had to cross one well-traveled road without stopping to flag down any passing vehicle, and then make the fire, set herself ablaze on purpose or by accident, and then be consumed in the glare of the flames by wild animals. It is not a likely scenario.

Any alternative theory raises the question of where she was between Sept. 6 and Sept. 11, the earliest she could have died.

The issue of how the jeep and the remains reached their respective sites has already produced the inquest’s most telling and sensational exchange: Georgiadis’ attack on the credibility of Senior Warden Makallah.

Makallah, who supervises all 154 park rangers, was the first to report the discovery of the remains on Sept. 13, after leading his driver from the abandoned jeep along a supposedly random search route that could not have been more of a beeline if his truck had been fired from a cannon.

Reported Seeing Vultures

He said that he took his bearings from a set of footprints that he found near the jeep. Ward and his party, who reached the jeep first and searched desperately for any clues, had seen no such prints. Makallah said he homed in on the remains by spotting some circling vultures in the distance, but the remains showed no sign of the vultures’ usual voraciousness.

“You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?” Georgiadis asked Makallah.

“Your honor,” answered the warden, “I know what I saw with my own eyes.”

Testifying about the jeep, which he contended he had never seen before its discovery and never examined closely, he observed that it would have been able to drive out of the mud and up a nearby river bank--if only it had been equipped with four wheel drive. But as any game warden would know, the ubiquitous Suzuki jeeps do have four wheel drive--except that on this one, the drive linkage to the front axle had been disconnected.

Makallah thus revealed knowledge of something that could have been known only to someone who had driven or examined the vehicle. And if he had driven it, he is clearly implicated in the woman’s disappearance. Makallah left the stand adamant about his innocence but with his credibility in tatters.

More disclosures are expected to emerge when the session turns its attention to what Ward contends is the cover-up. That aspect began with the post-mortem conducted in Nairobi by Deputy Police Pathologist Adel Youssef Shakir and witnessed by Julie’s friend, Dixon. Shakir showed Dixon how the leg bone had been sheared off neatly at the knee and the jawbone cut cleanly in half, as with a sharp instrument. The fire had singed the exposed end of the leg bone, proving that the remains had been burned after being cut.

“That makes this a case of murder,” Shakir said at the time, according to Dixon’s testimony.

But when the post-mortem report was finally issued, Shakir’s findings had been crudely rewritten. Shakir had typed that the bone had been “cut,” but that word was overtyped with three X’s and the word “torn” typed instead. There were other changes, all to suggest the body had been attacked by animals, not humans.

Shakir’s superior, Chief Pathologist Jason Kaviti, has admitted he made the changes himself, because, he says, he knew that his Egyptian deputy’s English was poor and that Shakir “meant” to communicate the different findings.

Brief Stay in California

Meanwhile, Ward has conducted the sole murder investigation, by default. A prosperous businessman who had twice started chains of successful hotels, having retired briefly in between to Claremont, Calif., at the age of 45, he has turned all of his energies to the case.

He shipped his daughter’s remains to England, where a Cambridge University pathologist confirmed Shakir’s original findings. He visited the game park 12 more times. He sent the ashes of the fire to London for chemical analysis, which revealed that it had been set with gasoline. He hired a private detective to interview sources, and he personally tracked down the chief Swiss photographer in Zurich.

At each step he provided scientific reports and other documentation to Kenya Police Commissioner Philip Kilonzo, but Kilonzo to this day has refused to authorize an official murder inquiry.

Ward hectored British diplomats and Kenyan politicians and eventually appealed to the British press. Finally, early this summer, the government agreed to convene the inquest.

Even now, Georgiadis believes his client may have to be satisfied with the government’s agreeing to institute a formal murder investigation, which could then fade into oblivion.

“That would be a vindication for the father,” he says.

Ward demurs.

“We’ve only ever had one target,” he says. “I want to catch the man who killed her. Because he must have put that little girl through an awful lot of pain and terror before she died.”