How a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her sergeant to examine the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification 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 evidence containers,” states Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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 cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, 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 right professional decision. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations 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 central archive.

“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 properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” 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 television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”

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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, 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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original statements 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. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa 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 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime 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 stays with 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 pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight 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 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.

Closing the Case

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 most hidden truth 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 identified and approached by specialist officers. “Mary had assumed 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 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 practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special 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 proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately one hundred and thirty 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 sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”