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

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her sergeant to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand 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 evidence containers,” states Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, 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 quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal 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 beginning 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 nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Case

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Later that year, the unit won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” 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 joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. 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 Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally arriving at the archive,” 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 professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – 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 try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. 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 notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – 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 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 statements 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 witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, 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 History of Violence

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 pleaded guilty to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened 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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

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

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report 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 Profound Effect

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 responsive. 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 see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately 130 unsolved investigations 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”