Delia D'Ambra

When it arrived, though, it was too late in the day for a mechanic to put it in her Jeep, so she opted to spend Monday night at the lodge that she and Glenn had been towed to and just figure things out the next day.

According to people who saw her, she woke up on Tuesday, September 6th, and around midday drove to Sand River Camp to pick up her and Glenn's tents.

She reportedly made plans to pit stop at a lake in the reserve to see the tour guide who'd helped tow them, and then was going to finish the drive back to Nairobi.

The last people who saw her were a police constable working at Sand River Camp named Gerald Karari and the campground's clerk.

The constable said he'd helped Julie take down the tents that she and Glenn had left behind a few days earlier.

And the clerk remembered her paying him for the time the tents were there, even though they hadn't been occupied.

Both men said that around 2.30 p.m., they saw her leave alone in her Jeep headed in the direction of Nairobi.

However, I did read another source that reported it was two park rangers who saw her leave around 3 p.m.

But I wonder if that reporting just assumed the constable and clerk were the rangers, not what their actual titles were.

It's hard to tell.

There's a lot of things like that in the source material about this case, where it's difficult to decipher if factually different information is being reported or if authors just misreported titles and small details.

Anyway, by the time the search for her was fully underway on Tuesday, September 13th, her dad, John Ward, and a pilot he'd hired to take him over the reserve were flying over an area about six miles away from Sand River Camp when he spotted Julie's Suzuki Jeep mired in deep mud inside a gully.

Once he got on the ground, he was joined by local police and park rangers.

Together, the group examined the vehicle and found that it was locked.

They smashed out one of the windows and discovered that some food and water were missing, along with a 20-liter plastic can of fuel that was supposed to have lasted up to five days.

There were also several large scratches dug into the roof that spelled out the letters SOS, though some other sources reported that the letters were spelled out in mud on the roof.

Around the Jeep were several spots where it appeared someone had tried to start a fire or had maybe gotten a few fires going, but none of them had ever grown very big.

This evidence, combined with the missing can of fuel, was a clue to John Ward that his daughter may have attempted to get help by starting signal fires, but when no one came to assist her, she left the Jeep and walked to find help.

Something that seemed odd to everyone, though, was that a pair of binoculars and two maps, one of which was of the game reserve, were still inside the Jeep.

meaning Julie had not taken them with her.