How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her sergeant to review a cold case from 1967. The woman 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 grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.
“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 evidence containers,” says the officer.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Case
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the unit 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 confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed 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 experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering 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 precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times 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 senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.
“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”
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 a long time. “The forensic team 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 precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”
Ryland Headley was ninety-two, 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 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 old lady’s house 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 got to know the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was twice widowed, estranged 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 compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now 89, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every detail 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 Violence
Headley’s previous convictions 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 assaulting 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 choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “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 feared 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 go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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 massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.
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 reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure 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 lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
