Delia D'Ambra

In July 1998, Kenyan police arrested and charged Simon Olimakola with Julie's murder.

By that point, it had been almost 10 years since the crime happened, and Simon was working as the assistant director of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

He was no longer the chief game warden of the reserve.

Kenya's sitting attorney general at the time told the press that sufficient circumstantial evidence had come to light over the course of an 18-month-long investigation that allowed them to move forward with arresting Simon.

Lucy Hannon reported for The Guardian that one tool investigators were exploring in their case against Simon was DNA.

Kenyan authorities had agreed to send some of the hair evidence in the case to England for further forensic testing.

If you remember from earlier, a few blonde hairs had been found in the Ranger outpost that Scott Linyard suspected Julie had been held at.

But it doesn't seem like testing the hairs resulted in anything monumental or new coming to light.

Because when Simon went to trial in March of 1999, I couldn't find anywhere in the reporting that hair evidence was presented, as like a linchpin that connected him to Julie's abduction and murder.

What prosecutors did argue was that Simon suppressed other evidence in the case and had done nothing to try and search for Julie when he first learned she was missing.

The prosecution also accused him of being dishonest about several things, including his actions during the initial investigation.

For example, back in 1989 during the formal inquest, Simon testified that he didn't know how to drive a vehicle.

But when he was confronted with statements from some of his deputies who said they'd seen him drive many times, and John Ward's testimony that he'd personally driven him on more than one occasion in the reserve the day after Julie's remains were found, it became clear that Simon had lied about his driving abilities.

His explanation for lying, though, wasn't so much that he didn't know how to drive, it was that he'd been doing so illegally and lied afterwards to avoid possible charges.

His dishonesty about whether or not he could drive made him look really bad, especially to John Ward.

John accused Simon straight up of having prior knowledge of where to go to find Dooley's remains.

John claimed that reports had revealed that Simon joined the official search party only after Julie's Jeep was discovered, and he'd driven straight to the spot where her burned remains ended up, so that he would be the first person to make the discovery and radio the update to everyone else.

Simon denied those allegations though and claimed that he and others had driven in several different directions around Julie's Jeep before taking the route that brought them to her charred remains.

He said the only thing that had caused him to go in the direction of where she was eventually discovered was because search teams had spotted a flock of vultures circling in the air over that area and his group had wanted to investigate it further.

In the end, after 43 days of trial, the assessors and judge weighing Simon's guilt determined there wasn't enough evidence to convict him of murder, and he was acquitted.