The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her supervisor to “take a look at” a cold case from 1967. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, 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 figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Police 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 evidence containers,” says Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. 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 listing 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 did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered 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 June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” 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 nosy and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, 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 non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred 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 senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Key Discovery

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are keen, 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 message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, widowed, and living in another city. “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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She 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, estranged 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with 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 prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to raping two elderly 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 smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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 60s and 70s, 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 special 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 proactive, 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 see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is confident 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 a number of murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”