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

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her team leader to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Investigators 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 scientific analysis, 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 put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress 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 scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as 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 stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps 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 confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “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 nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – 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 area and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, 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 different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – 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 give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

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 many months. “The laboratory scientists are keen, 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 rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect 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 numerous original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating 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. Nowadays, 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. “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, separated from her family, but she remained social. 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, who had attended the 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 History of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” 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 a shorter term,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter 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 stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone 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 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 started 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 approximately one hundred and thirty cold cases 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”