The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her supervisor to review the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne 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 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 familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.

“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,” states Smith.

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 barcodes. These were not. 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 colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to 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 sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving 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 assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also review live cases 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 secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred 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 senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” 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 try?”

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 forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations 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 a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, 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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in 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. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 widowed twice, separated 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, 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 prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. 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.

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 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 granddaughter had been identified and approached by family liaison. “She had believed it was never going to be solved,” 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 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 never be released. 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. “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 interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately one hundred and thirty 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 sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”