The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Years After.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center 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 murder, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“Upon realizing 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,” states Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, 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 was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won recognition 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 confirmation that she made the right professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered 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 role in child protection involved grueling 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 I took the position.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, 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 region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred 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 lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” 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 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 interested, 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 assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

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 thousands original accounts 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 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 prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was twice widowed, separated 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed 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 History of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke 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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “Mary had believed 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 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 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 responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”