The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her team leader to review the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.
“When I saw 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,” says Smith.
She found a trio. “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 brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”
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 there was no progress 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 that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. 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 chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”
Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, 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 region and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The case documents had originated in a precinct, 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 lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are challenging – 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 try?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 read every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
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 on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, separated from her family, but she remained social. She had a gaggle 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, who had attended the 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 History 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 admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea 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 appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.
Securing Justice
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 feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault 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 remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.
A Profound Effect
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 reactive. With this case you’re proactive, 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 confident that it is not the last solved case. There are about 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
