This chapter reflects on the interactions between British and Kenyan actors in the search for Julie Ward's killers, and how the case is narrated in the three true crime texts. It suggests that Julie Ward's presence in Kenya as a tourist and wildlife photographer was mediated by a certain discursive archive on Africa. Upon her death, British investigations into her murder were tinted by this archive, at the core of which lay assumptions about ‘noble savages’ on the one hand and the postcolonial African state on the other, both of which were taken to be transparent to instruments of Western modernity in line with what Homi Bhabha has described as colonial discourse's production of the colonized ‘as a fixed reality which is at once an “Other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’ (Bhabha 1983: 23). Subsequently, the three books on the case – John Ward's The Animals are Innocent, Michael Hiltzik's A Death in Kenya and Jeremy Gavron's Darkness in Eden – also narrated the case through the prism of discourses drawn from this archive of ideas on Kenya and Africa. Yet the Kenyans – both the individual players involved in the case and the state institutions – subscribed to a different set of discursive regimes, some of which were inscrutable to the British. So, I suggest, there was an epistemological disarticulation between the British and Kenyan approaches to the case, as the Kenyans were proficient in both local epistemes and the institutions and values of modern state epistemes, while the British were hampered by their illiteracy in the local textualities which were illegible to orthodox instruments of Western modernity, namely modern law and science. This epistemological disarticulation resulted in what I term ‘cultural illiteracy’ in reference to some British actors’ inability to access the local ideas and practices that were at play in Kenya. This chapter argues that this illiteracy had less to do with an insider/outsider positioning than with the continued reproduction and deployment of assumptions embedded in colonial archives on Africa(ns), which retain epistemes that proved disabling in the quest for Julie Ward's killers.