How a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, received a request by her team leader to examine a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.

“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (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 nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – 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 relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had originated 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 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 different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – 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 cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. 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 lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” 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 thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Today, 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 outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged from her family, but she remained social. She had a gaggle 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 spoke with the doctor, now 89, 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 stays with you.’”

A History of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping 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 strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” 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.

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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative 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.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a unique 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 urgency is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it won’t be 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 a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”