The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her team leader to review a cold case from 1967. The woman 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 grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point 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 killing, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“Upon realizing 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 exhibits boxes,” states the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags saying 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 initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. 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.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the unit won recognition 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 confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered 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 crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” 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. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. 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 actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “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 notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match 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 luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original accounts 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 changes over time.”

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 outside her home 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime 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 haunts 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 the late 1970s he had admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” 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 a shorter term,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “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.

“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 never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. 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 follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are about 130 unsolved investigations 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”