The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In June 2023, an investigator, received a request by her sergeant to review a decades-old murder file. 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 of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, 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 familiar presence in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match 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 evidence containers,” says Smith.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying 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 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 pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Case
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved 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 real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation 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 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 distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding 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 I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases with a new perspective. 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 Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.
“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Key Discovery
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 laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” 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 rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, 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 accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Understanding 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 outside her home 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now 89, who had been at the crime 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 stays with you.’”
A History of Crimes
Headley’s prior offenses 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’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial 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 appealed, supported by a psychiatrist 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 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 sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “She had believed 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 mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and 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 different, 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 began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
She is confident that it is not the last resolution. There are about one hundred and thirty 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.”
