Ball and Graham Nott, the newly appointed Investigations Officer, fly into Chirisa. John Ralston’s body lay in the cupboard of his bedroom; there was a single bullet hole in his head, a .357 revolver lay at his side. The trajectory of the round was traced and the .357 cartridge-head was found lodged in a shelf above; John had taken his own life. John’s suicide was kept under wraps for a few days; it was brought out into the open at a specially called meeting at Head Office in the research library. I was briefed shortly before the meeting by Graham Nott - evidently there were conflicting views within Head Office as to whether John’s death should be announced as suicide, which it was, or left untold. I told Graham rumours were already spreading among some of the younger rangers—it was imperative the facts be made known. John Ralston was extremely intelligent. Warden Oliver Coltman ranked him highly as a Senior Ranger, but mentioned there was considerably more to John than met the eye, Susan, Oliver’s widow, is to this day still of the same opinion. I visited Mana Pools in early 1982 when John Ralston was the Senior Ranger in Charge; I knew John well from his early days at Robins, where he’d been one of my rangers. John told me he was afraid and wanted out of Mana Pools; he didn’t elaborate, other than to say he was wanted in Zambia on a trumped-up murder charge relating to the drowning of a Zambian fish poacher in the Zambezi. It was unheard of to want a transfer out of Mana; without a doubt he was scared. In hindsight, the matter should have been pursued. No mention was ever made of John holding munitions. Nick Tredger notes in his book Rhodesia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Chronicles of a Game Ranger, “I had been with John when we’d jointly disposed of everything remotely sensitive, even including used cartridge cases. The chance of him retaining a box of grenades was absolutely ludicrous.” Nick and John were the best of friends; the arms amnesty had come and gone; the government had legislated a mandatory seven-year jail sentence for anyone found in the possession of ‘weapons of war’. Both knew the score if they were caught with anything illegal. Would John, as intelligent as
“They locked Willem up; they kept him in custody for four or five nights which Willem, who suffered from claustrophobia, found very, very difficult.
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he was, have disregarded the threat of torture at the hands of CIO and a seven-year jail sentence? This seems very unlikely. Was John set up or framed? In view of the dissention on some stations, coupled with the fact that attempts had already been made to frame other members of staff, this is certainly a possibility; it would give the Government security agencies due cause to cast suspicion on every white officer. The skewed report in the Herald Newspaper certainly saw to that—there was no gun battle, none of the ‘security forces’ was wounded—a CIO officer cut himself diving through a plate glass window. Was it a charade? Why did the CIO chaps start to open boxes in the storeroom; did they know what they would find? With John Ralston’s tragic death, the truth will never surface. Tailpiece Once John Hutton discovered his buddies were in jail, he searched the house shared by Steve Atwell and Derek Adams for any ‘unwanted’ military paraphernalia. He found a couple of bayonets and other bits and pieces, as well as a shotgun; like any good friend would do, he got rid of everything. The shotgun, unbeknown to him, was a Department issue firearm used for problem animal control; a while later, and after considerable effort, rangers recovered it from a deep pool in the Sengwa River into which it had been thrown! THE ARREST AND DETENTION OF WARDEN WILLIE DE BEER An account of this event has been documented in From Rhodesia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe by Nick Tredger, but warrants re-telling as a frightening example of the subterfuge, harassment and intimidation used by the police and CIO, in collusion with junior Parks staff to get at ‘white officers.’ It was a Thursday - unfortunately no one can recall the date - and Warden de Beer was due back from leave the next morning; in the Warden’s absence, Senior Ranger Nick Tredger was in charge of Marongora. Sometime during the morning, game scouts, returning from a patrol, reported to the office and presented a hand grenade to the Senior Ranger, informing him that it had been found on their patrol. As a result of the war and contacts between security forces and terrorists, limited ordnance was known to be lying about the Valley; the