The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her team leader to review a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.

“Upon realizing 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 exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. 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 gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing 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 did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

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 resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” 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. The new officer took a different approach. 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 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 quickly. In real life, the submission process 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 priority.”

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 clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over 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 photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 widowed twice, 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular 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 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 the late 1970s he had admitted 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 suffocate the other with a pillow,” 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 most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “Mary 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 massively underreported 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 intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

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 pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is confident 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 sending things to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”