Delia D'Ambra

His adult daughter and several members of the Maasai tribe celebrated the news outside of the courthouse.

John Ward was not happy though.

He claimed that the assessors had been influenced and directly contacted by Simon throughout the trial, and that the proceedings had been fundamentally flawed due to corruption.

Author Grace Masilla wrote in her book, A Death Retold in Truth and Rumor, that no one could deny the racial and cultural discourses swirling around Julie's case as it went through multiple criminal trials and continued to stay in the media limelight.

Julie was a young, white British woman who'd been brutally murdered in an area predominantly occupied by native Maasai tribe members.

The fact that her father was a white British wealthy businessman who relentlessly questioned the guilt of Kenyan citizens and the Kenyan government made the issue that much touchier.

When you take into consideration the bloody history between British colonizers and Kenyan native people dating back to the turn of the 20th century, you can see where it would have been possible for prejudices and deep-seated tensions to influence people's opinions about the case, potential perpetrators, and the government agencies that at times conducted parallel investigations.

Simon Olimakola and the two game wardens who were also acquitted of Julie's murder were all reported to be members of the Maasai tribe.

Now, I don't know if these men truly were guilty or not.

I don't think anyone can know that except them.

But it's clear from reading a lot of quotes from John Ward that at one point he was convinced they were responsible for what happened to his daughter.

However, on the flip side, there were also many native Kenyans who felt like the accusations being made against the defendants by Julie's British family members and supporters were a result of blind prejudice.

Kenyan author Grace Masilla discusses in her book that one of the big reasons Maasai tribe members weren't necessarily forthcoming with information to Scotland Yard investigators or John Ward was because culturally the tribe is a very close-knit group and their members always support their own.

They've also historically been at odds with British influences and the norms of modern legal procedures.

I think dynamics like this and other wild spinoff theories as to who might be responsible for Julie's death just made this case a lot more difficult to try and solve as the years dragged on.

For example, one theory that cropped up speculated that Julie might not have been the innocent, wildlife-loving photographer she presented herself as.

Some people believed she might have been a British spy who'd come across damning information about the activities of powerful Kenyan political figures in the reserve.

It's unclear, though, if anyone with any authority ever really pursued that theory beyond just it was possible.

And naturally, John Ward and the Scotland Yard denounced it as completely unfounded, which at this point in the story isn't a huge surprise to me.

By 2004, a formal inquest in the UK had been held to help snuff out rumors like this, and that proceeding concluded with the same ruling.