In her study, Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography, Gillian Whitlock finds Raymond Williams’ notion of residual elements of cultural processes (Williams 1977: 122) instructive in understanding the continued valence of white settler imaginaries in readings of contemporary Kenya. As she writes,

Whitlock's observation speaks to this chapter's interest in the influence of social memories in shaping speculations on Julie Ward's murder. Indeed, as she rightly points out, ‘values and meanings, tropes and allegories which were part of the hegemony of settler culture re-emerge … in interpreting [incidents like] the Ward affair’ (ibid.).

This chapter reflects on how circulating discourses in Kenyan and British social imaginaries shaped the speculations on the circumstances surrounding Julie Ward's death. Drawing on John Ward's speculations as laid out in his book The Animals are Innocent: The Search for Julie's Killers, Jeremy Gavron's speculations in Darkness in Eden: The Murder of Julie Ward, and the claims of alleged eye-witnesses in Kenya, the chapter suggests that Julie Ward's death was interpreted through the lens of ideas constructed across Kenya's post/colonial history, which have over time crystallized into popular wisdom regarding the multiple intersections between sex/uality, race, gender and state power in Kenyan and British social imaginaries. By excavating the subterranean discourses that underpinned the various speculations, the chapter suggests that Julie Ward's death took place in a discursive landscape marked by deeply layered and intermeshed contours of British and Kenyan social memories which tinted speculations on the circumstances surrounding the death.

Julie Ward's murder and the subsequent quest for her killers was a much publicized affair, which convened a range of publics, to borrow from Michael Warner's (2002) useful concept, both through formal institutions such as the media and the courtrooms, and the more informal discursive spaces created by rumours and books about the death.