How a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to examine the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. 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 co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

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

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved 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 lead detective arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems 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 absolute no-brainer. 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 real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” 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 accounts and records.

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

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 twice widowed, 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, 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 History of Violence

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 admitted to raping two older 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 strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” 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 not behaving normally. “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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “Mary had assumed 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 elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, 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 interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about one hundred and thirty unsolved investigations 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 leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”