Delia D'Ambra

I have to presume that tip pointed toward the two park rangers, or else investigators wouldn't have been so heavily focused on them.

Anyway, Scotland Yard's theory at that point was entirely circumstantial, but it went like this.

Julie willingly sought help from the two park rangers while they were patrolling on foot on September 6th, 1988.

But then something went south and she was held for a few days at their ranger outpost where they sexually assaulted her and killed her.

To cover up their crime, the men dismembered her body and burned her remains in the Savannah in a different location than where her Jeep was found.

John Ward mostly agreed with this theory, but he was also convinced that Kenyan officials higher up in the government had played a role in the seemingly corrupt and questionable events that followed the murder.

Kenya's attorney general took a look at Scotland Yard's theory and reviewed evidence that allegedly supported it.

Something he noted as interesting was that a button-sized solar-powered battery that had been discovered at the ranger's outpost after the crime was the type of battery that Julie's missing Olympus camera would have taken.

When it was found, it was resting on a coin in the sun.

That position was one way to build up a charge, a fact that seemingly its owner would have known.

And because Scotland Yard determined that none of the rangers owned an Olympus camera or knew how to charge a battery like that, it almost seemed as if Julie had left it at the outpost herself, perhaps with the intention of coming back to get it.

However, there was other evidence that suggested the battery may have belonged to a wristwatch, which some of the rangers who lived at the outpost wore.

So in the end, the battery being there wasn't necessarily a smoking gun clue.

In February 1991, Kenya's attorney general made his decision about how to move forward, and he ultimately charged both of the park rangers with Julie's murder.

But roughly another year passed before their trial finally got underway in February 1992.

Sam Kiley reported for The Times that the two defendants hired the same defense attorney who wanted to focus just as much on the Kenyan government's cover-up of the crime as he did on the innocence of his clients.

An interesting bit of information that wasn't directly related to the trial, but certainly couldn't be ignored, was that just a few months after Julie was killed, Kenya's sitting foreign minister had also died under suspicious circumstances.

Apparently, that guy was found dead two kilometers from his house, shot in the head at an awkward angle, sporting a broken leg, and burned with accelerant.

From reading the source material, it's pretty clear that his untimely death only increased some people's suspicion that the government was trying to cover up or silence people who may have known important information about what really happened to Julie.

A lot of the defendant's trial went the same way as the inquest a few years earlier.