How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.
In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.
“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 Smith.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it 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 indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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 professional decision. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-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 crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.
Those boxes, 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 aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – 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 give it a go?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process 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 precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was 92, a widower, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the weeks 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 time periods. “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 generational differences.”
Getting to Know 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 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 very wrong.”
Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now 89, who had been at the crime 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 stays with 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 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two older 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 less time,” 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 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 proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame 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 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 different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began 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 certain that it is not 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.”
