The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her sergeant to “take a look at” a cold case from 1967. 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 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 recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“When I saw 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,” says 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 identification codes. These were not. 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 first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the unit 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 professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding 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.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. 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 submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message 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 living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, widowed, 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 numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding 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 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, 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 haunts you.’”

A Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions 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 menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, 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.

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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth 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 contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began 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 confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”