The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her sergeant to review a cold case from 1967. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained 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 storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”

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 listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

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

Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new central archive.

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

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

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

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message 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 match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, 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 all hands on deck.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a big character,” 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 remained social. She had a group 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 great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every detail from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘I’ve been a doctor all my life and seen a lot of dead bodies but that’s the only one that had been murdered. That haunts you.’”

A Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

Smith was there for 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 family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women 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 Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”