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

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her team leader to review a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

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 were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels 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 initial day on the job), both gloved up, 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 great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award 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 right professional decision. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” 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. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists 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 message that forensics had a full DNA profile 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, a widower, and living in another city. “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 thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would typically 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 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 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular 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 haunts you.’”

A Pattern of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate 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 acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 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 go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “She had assumed 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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. 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. “With current investigations, the process is very responsive. 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 box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are about 130 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”