John Ward, businessman determined to reveal the truth about his daughter Julie’s brutal murder – obituary

John Ward, who has died aged 89, spent more than a quarter of a century seeking to bring to justice the men he believed murdered his daughter Julie during a safari holiday in Kenya in 1988.

A genial self-made millionaire in the hotel trade, Ward was convinced that his daughter’s murder had been the subject of a high-level cover-up. “The truth has been enveloped in lies and corruption on a scale I would not have thought possible,” he declared.

As soon as he heard that his 28-year-old daughter had gone missing, Ward flew to Nairobi and began searching, hoping to find her alive. She had been travelling in Africa for more than six months, photographing wildlife. But shortly after his arrival, Julie’s mutilated and charred remains were found in the ashes of a fire near the Sand River camp in the Masai Mara game reserve. She had almost certainly been raped before being brutally murdered.

“I looked down and found myself staring at the bottom half of [her] left leg,” he wrote in his book The Animals Are Innocent (1991). “I can’t remember what I said, or indeed if any sound came from my mouth … I remember crouching down and stroking her calf with the back of my middle finger and feeling tears start to well up in my eyes.” Her leg bone and jaw bone had been sliced through, and she had been decapitated with a single blow.

He was handed his daughter’s skull in a carrier bag, and after gathering pieces of charred bone, her red flip-flops and other possessions strewn in and around the ashes of the fire, Ward set about proving that Julie had been murdered.

He swiftly realised that the Kenyan investigation was flawed. A draft report by a local pathologist, which indicated foul play, was altered by the man’s superior, who insisted that Julie had been attacked and eaten by wild animals. But a post-mortem by two British pathologists, commissioned by Ward, concluded that his daughter had been hacked to death, soaked in petrol and burnt. It was the petrol that discouraged the hyenas, vultures and other creatures from devouring Julie’s remains and destroying evidence.

Nor was the cover-up confined to the Kenyan side. When Ward visited the British High Commission in Nairobi, one high-ranking official tried to persuade him that Julie might not have been murdered, but instead struck by lightning. Meanwhile, a senior Kenyan police officer suggested she might have committed suicide.

Ward believed the Kenyan police were unduly concerned with protecting local tourism in the area, and suspected that the British High Commission was anxious not to jeopardise Britain’s relations with Kenya and its then President Daniel arap Moi. Ward rejected British attempts to have his daughter’s remains cremated in Kenya.

He placed large advertisements in Kenya’s two national newspapers, offering a reward of 10,000,000 Kenyan shillings (£77,000) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Julie’s murderers. In the course of his investigation, Ward recognised the dangers of venturing into areas away from the tourist trail. His quest would eventually take him much further afield, to Australia, the Seychelles, America, Denmark, Belgium, France, Uganda and Tanzania.

By the time an inquest was held in Kenya a year after Julie’s death, Ward had passed a substantial dossier detailing his allegations of official incompetence to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But shortly before the inquest he received a call from an FCO official urging him to allow only the Kenyan police to present evidence at the hearing.

“I realised the British government, the people I thought I could trust, were actively working against me,” Ward said later. He believed that if he did not give evidence himself, there would be a verdict of misadventure and the inquiry would close. Having ignored the FCO’s request, he was relieved when the coroner ruled that Julie had died “as a result of foul play by person or persons unknown”. But he realised that he would have to track down the killers himself.

Ward’s campaign cost him a large slice of his personal fortune. Over the years he spent more than £2 million, and visited Kenya more than 100 times.

The son of a bristle-buyer for a London brush factory, John Alan Ward was born in Harrow on June 22 1933.

After National Service in the RAF, in the early 1950s he spotted the growing fashion for coffee bars, opening his first, the El Toro, in Muswell Hill, north London, and a second soon afterwards. In 1965, as the motorway network started to expand, he bought his first “motor hotel”, the Saxon Inn at Harlow, building up a small chain of similar hotels which he later sold to a bigger group.

The sale made him a rich man but – bored by early retirement to California – Ward returned to Britain to found the Butterfly hotel group, a chain of small two- and three-star hotels in towns like Banbury, Colchester and Dudley.

After Julie’s murder, he sold half his holding in the Butterfly group to fund his investigation, with expenses including flying out an eminent British pathologist to give evidence at the inquest in Kenya in 1989. Ward hired two British shorthand typists to produce a verbatim transcript of the hearing, as well as a private detective and a lawyer.

In 1990 two Scotland Yard detectives visited Kenya and concluded that Julie had been raped and killed by two Masai Mara rangers. Peter Kipeen and Jonah Magiroi were tried for murder in Nairobi in 1992, but the evidence against them was weak and they were acquitted.

Ward’s own prime suspect was Simon Makallah, chief game warden of the Masai Mara, but he was cleared of the killing in 1999. Of the two other men he believed to be complicit in Julie’s murder, one was a policeman with a reputation for pestering visitors to the Sand River camp, and the other a park ranger whom Ward believed helped dispose of the body.

Ward was always aware of the extent of official corruption among the Kenyan authorities, and took precautions to protect himself on his frequent visits to the country. One man died in a road “accident” after apparently threatening to reveal what he knew about Julie’s death. Ward kept his own itinerary secret, and ate from the hotel buffet rather than ordering any individually prepared dish from the menu.

At a second inquest, held in Ipswich in 2004, the Kenyan minister for justice and constitutional affairs admitted in a statement that there had been “deliberate obstruction” of Ward’s attempts to discover how his daughter died. He said Julie’s death was part of Kenya’s “dark and ugly past”, and he pledged to bring the culprits to justice “irrespective of their status in our society”. The inquest was subsequently told of rumours that Jonathan Moi, the son of Daniel arap Moi, was involved in her death – a claim emphatically denied. Moi died in 2019.

The Suffolk coroner, Dr Peter Dean, who recorded a verdict of unlawful killing, said apparently inconsistent evidence from an MI6 officer “leaves a lot to be desired and a lot of questions unanswered”.

There was embarrassment, too, for the British authorities. Jon Stoddart, who was heading an independent inquiry into the case by Lincolnshire police, confirmed that Ward’s claims of a conspiracy between the Kenyan and British authorities were true. When Stoddart eventually completed his three-year inquiry into the case later in 2004, his report was suppressed on grounds of national security.

When its findings were eventually made known, the report heavily criticised the FCO and the British High Commission in Kenya, and highlighted mistakes and cover-ups over the murder. Ward believed that Stoddart’s findings “shamed” Britain’s reputation for honesty and fair play.

In 2009 the Kenyan police announced a new inquiry into Julie Ward’s murder, helped by at least two Scotland Yard detectives. Hopes were raised after human DNA from the murder scene – believed to belong to one of her attackers – was identified. But at the time of writing the Metropolitan Police is understood not be investigating the case further.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2008, John Ward insisted he was “committed but not obsessed by” the case. “I just feel very angry. She died a terrible death alone out here, probably raped before she was murdered, her body then chopped up, set alight and thrown to the animals.”

John Ward married, in 1958, Janette (Jan) Foreman, who predeceased him by two weeks; he is survived by their two sons.

John Ward, born June 22 1933, died June 7 2023