Delia D'Ambra

Then, wild hyenas or some other carnivores had eaten on her remains.

It was either that scenario, or she'd died by suicide, or, wait for it, she'd been struck by lightning.

Yes, I'm not kidding.

These were all scenarios that the police force felt were more likely than someone murdering her.

But John Ward, Julie's dad, didn't believe any of the police's theories.

He told reporter Michael Horsnell for The Times that his daughter had been to Kenya two times prior to this trip, and she knew what to be on the lookout for.

There was no doubt in his mind that she'd been ambushed and killed somewhere between where she left her Jeep and the hunting lodge that was just a few miles away.

Evidence he said supported that scenario was the fact that Julie's Olympus camera and two of her telephoto lenses were missing.

I imagine his point in saying that was to introduce the possibility that maybe someone had robbed her of those expensive items and killed her to keep from getting caught.

John told the Times, quote, End quote.

By September 18th, almost two weeks after Julie was last seen alive, John returned to the United Kingdom without his daughter and without answers to the growing number of questions he had about what in the world had happened to her.

The only upside to the situation was that the case had been officially deemed a homicide.

But just a few days after that update, something truly wild happened.

About a week after the Kenyan police force was told by their own resident pathologist that Julie was a homicide victim, the chief government pathologist, a guy named Dr. Jason Kaviti, who from reading the source material is described as having more authority than Dr. Shaker, changed Julie's post-mortem autopsy report to say that her manner of death was no longer murder, but instead an animal attack that perhaps occurred simultaneously with a lightning strike.

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.