Delia D'Ambra

This conclusion, as you can imagine, did not sit well with John Ward, who'd been extremely outspoken about how ridiculous he thought that theory was.

He traveled back to Kenya to launch his own inquiry into the matter and sought assistance from an independent pathologist and a professor from the UK.

Originally, he'd planned to have Julie's remains cremated, but he canceled those plans when he realized that Kenyan officials were being really sketchy about the autopsy report.

A few weeks later, the two men from the UK who John hired to review Julie's remains concluded that she'd died as a result of a homicide.

In fact, one of them said it was crystal clear that she'd been decapitated and one of her knees had been severed in half prior to her body being burned.

So with that information, John accused the Kenyan police force of refusing to treat his daughter's death as a murder because they cared more about the negative impacts it could have on the country's tourism industry than getting to the truth.

He told reporter Peter Godwin, quote, Kenya is a country which relies very heavily on tourism, and there may be a temptation to look the other way.

If there is a man out there who killed my daughter, I want him, end quote.

John's resolve was seemingly limitless, along with his ability to bankroll independent efforts to investigate what happened to Julie.

He was a wealthy businessman and the managing director of a hotel group, so it's no surprise that from day one he was able to contract several private pilots and aircrafts to search for his daughter.

No amount of money, though, could buy him patience when it came to dealing with the Kenyan government.

He wrote in his book, The Animals Are Innocent, A Search for Julie's Killers, that the methods the country's police force employed were both unprofessional and outright bizarre.

For example, about a month after finding Julie's remains in the reserve, two Kenyan police investigators showed up to John's hotel room in Nairobi and handed him a plastic grocery bag with a skull inside.

They said it was Julie's and had been found during an additional search of the reserve.

About six months after that, in early April 1989, the first Kenyan police officer who was in charge of the investigation filed a formal report in which he concluded Julie had died by suicide, full stop.

A few months later, in August of that year, an official inquest into the matter took place in Kenya, and John was hopeful he and his family would get some clarity and be able to present their own findings.

By that point, he'd traveled to and from Africa multiple times since September of 1988, and he'd spent countless hours gathering interviews and evidence as part of his own investigation.

He and his lawyer planned to present what they'd found to the magistrate overseeing the inquest, or at a minimum, just publicly raise doubts about the police's version of events.

Andrew Hogg reported for the Sunday Times that John himself wasn't allowed into the courtroom for most of the proceeding, only his lawyer was.

And very little of what his investigation had uncovered could be presented outside of his own testimony when he eventually was called as a witness.