The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her team leader to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was widowed twice, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘In my career all my life and seen a lot of dead bodies but that’s the only one that had been murdered. That stays with you.’”

A Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

Smith was present at Headley’s arrest. “I knew what he looked like, I knew he was going to be 92, and I also knew how compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had believed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are about one hundred and thirty cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”