How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Investigation Was Solved – 58 Years After.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her sergeant to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 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,” says the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

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 nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “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 so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode 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 given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the unit won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct career choice. “He thought 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 nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine 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 Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. 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 quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are interested, 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 notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant 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 living!”

Ryland Headley 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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original accounts 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 got to know the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was widowed twice, 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, 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 Pattern of Crimes

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’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle 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 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Sexual assault 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 practical 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. “With current investigations, 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 submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”