Murder in the Masai Mara | Telegraph Investigates

With Julie’s murderer still at large, attention focuses on the last man to see her alive and the head ranger of the Masai Mara game reserve. Reporter Katherine goes to Kenya herself to track them down and see if their recollections can help unlock the decades-old cold case. A previously unknown tip from a Masai elder emerges. Could this be the breakthrough the Ward family has been waiting for? 

Archive in this episode: ITN via Getty, The Telegraph

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The authorities insist Julie killed herself, but father John refuses to believe it. An altered post-mortem prompts him to take matters into his own hands. When a team of British cops is dispatched to Kenya, hopes are high that they can solve the riddle of Julie’s murder/death. How did her jeep end up nine miles from her body? What are those strange marks on her leg? And who forged her signature in a nearby guesthouse?

Archive in this episode: NPR, ITN via Getty, The Telegraph

Get in touch: [email protected]

On a cold February day in 1988, Julie Ward sets off on the journey of a lifetime from England, through Africa. She establishes a new life in the bustling capital of Kenya but mysteriously disappears while on safari - leaving her plane ticket back to England untouched on a table in her Nairobi home. When her father John flies to Kenya to track her down, he finds a gruesome crime scene in the Masai Mara that throws up more questions than it answers. 

Archive in this episode: NPR, ITN via Getty, The Telegraph

When Julie Ward vanishes mysteriously in the Masai Mara in 1988, her father begins a hunt for answers that stretches from a safari lodge in Kenya to MI6’s headquarters in London. The case was never solved.

Nearly four decades on, The Telegraph Deputy Investigations Editor Katherine Rushton pours over classified documents, interviews the people tangled in the case, and travels to Kenya to try to understand who tried to stop her murder being solved.

What happened to Julie Ward, why did the Kenyan authorities try to cover it up, and why were MI6 agents involved?

Murder in the Masai Mara: Coming Friday 28th November.

When the charred remains of a young British woman were found in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988, the Kenyan authorities tried to convince her father – and the public – that she had been killed by wild animals.

It soon became clear that 28-year-old Julie Ward had been murdered. But no one was ever convicted.

This is the story of how the crime was covered up by the Kenyan authorities, and of the Ward family’s belief that the Metropolitan Police did the same. Plus, of newly emerged evidence which puts the son of Kenya’s former president in the frame for Julie’s murder.

In this episode of The Daily T Investigates, the Telegraph’s Katherine Rushton revisits the cold case as part of a months-long investigation.

Read: Former president’s son implicated in safari murder of British woman: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/09/presidents-son-implicated-safari-murder-julie-ward/

Producer: Lilian Fawcett

Executive Producers: Louisa Wells, Cara McGoogan and Venetia Rainey

Mixed by Elliot Lampitt

Studio Operator: Meghan Searle

Original music by John Cadigan