How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her supervisor to review a cold case from 1967. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure 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. Investigators knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification 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 archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it 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 indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates 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 was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Case

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team 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 chills.”

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

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties 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 demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally arriving at the archive,” 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. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, 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 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. 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 came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed 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 stays with you.’”

A Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting 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 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 acting out of character. “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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth 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 contacted by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. 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 reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the urgency 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 conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 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 sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”