Delia D'Ambra

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.

John Ward testified, and so did the original witnesses from Sand River Camp.

One big difference, though, was that the judge overseeing the trial had everyone involved travel out to the reserve to tour the important locations of the crime.

That experience was incredibly emotional for Jan Ward, Julie's mother, who traveled from England to attend the trial.

She and John were allowed to grieve in private after the tour ended for the day and the defendants were escorted out of the area.

Not long after that, the murder trial abruptly paused so that another case could go before the court.

It was scheduled to resume at a later date, and I guess this is just something that happens within the Kenya court system.

I'm not familiar with a situation like this happening, but regardless, John Ward was once again unhappy with the way Kenya's court system chose to operate.