The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – 58 Years After.
In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her sergeant to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Police 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 archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating 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 wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
An Unprecedented Case
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed 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 distress.” Her previous experience in child protection 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 I took the position.”
Revisiting the Clues
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases 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 precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, 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 “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Solving problems that are hard to solve – 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 in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take priority.”
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 a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”
Ryland Headley was ninety-two, a widower, and living in another city. “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 thousands original statements and records.
For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, 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 big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now 89, who had attended the 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 haunts you.’”
A Pattern 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 admitted to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to choke 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 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 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 health crisis. “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 contacted by specialist officers. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Rape is often not reported 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 remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
A Profound Effect
For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency 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 solved case. There are approximately 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
