How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her team leader to review the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent 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 recognized presence 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 back window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained open.

“Upon realizing 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 a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels 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 first day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award 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 correct career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, 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 non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started 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 lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Solving problems 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 absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are interested, 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 full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, a widower, and living in another city. “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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in 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 changes over time.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was twice widowed, 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular 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 stays with you.’”

A History of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 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 threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, 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.

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 contacted by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

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 pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last resolution. 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 reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”