How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her supervisor to review a decades-old murder file. The woman 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, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand 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 scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and possibly 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 tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – 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 precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change 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 Key Discovery

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 many months. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” 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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “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 statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” 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 very wrong.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular 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 Violence

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 older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing 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 cushion,” 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 acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” 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 strong the evidence 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 proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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.

“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, 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 end.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about one hundred and thirty 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 leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”