The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to review the Louisa Dunne case. The woman 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 mother, a grandmother, 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 residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence 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 initial day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In 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 Investigation

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

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-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 distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “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 civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. 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 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. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, 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 forensic team are interested, 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 another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, 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 pored over every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding 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 outside her home every day. She was widowed twice, 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now eighty-nine, 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 the late 1970s he had admitted 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 menaced to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. 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 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 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 contacted by family liaison. “She had believed 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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women 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 Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, 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 is not the last solved case. There are approximately 130 unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”