The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was asked by her team leader to examine a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

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 that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary 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 right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

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

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” 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. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit 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 a full team effort.” In the period 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 the victim’s home 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 got to know the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a group of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was very wrong.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, who had attended the 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 prior offenses seemed to leave little question 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’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “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.

“Sexual assault 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 remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, 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 started with me trying to get someone to take some notice 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 130 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.”