Delia D'Ambra
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They ended up having to get towed to a nearby lodge by a local tour guide who let them borrow a tent because they'd left theirs across the park at Sand River Camp.
By Sunday morning, September 4th, Julie and Glenn had come up with a plan to get Julie's Jeep fixed so they could continue on with their travels.
But the only problem was the car part they needed, a new fuel pump, had to be retrieved from Nairobi, which wasn't super close by.
Like I mentioned earlier, the city was more than 150 miles away from the reserve.
Glenn was scheduled to go to a conference at a museum in the city the following day anyway, so he told Julie he would hop on a charter plane to the city, link up with her friend Paul Weld Dixon, and see if Paul would be willing to buy a new fuel pump and fly it back to the reserve.
That plan panned out because when Glenn returned to Nairobi by the end of the day on September 4th, Paul was more than happy to assist.
The next day, Monday, September 5th, the new fuel pump was on its way to Julie.
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.
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.