The distance energy of a simple connected graph $G$ is defined as the sum of absolute values of its distance eigenvalues. In this paper, we mainly give a positive answer to a conjecture of distance energy of clique trees proposed by Lin, Liu and Lu [H.~Q.~ Lin, R.~F.~Liu, X.~W.~Lu, The inertia and energy of the distance matrix of a connected graph, {\it Linear Algebra Appl.,} 467 (2015), 29-39.]