The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was asked by her sergeant to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match 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 storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” 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 sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying 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 cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal 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 high-priority matter.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct career choice. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” 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 inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy 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 Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group 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 gathering all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times 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 head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases 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 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 keen, 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 message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant 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 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 all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous 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 accounts. 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. “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 wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now eighty-nine, 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 prior offenses 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 elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate 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 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She 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 massively underreported 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 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 proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are about 130 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 following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”