How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – 58 Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her team leader to “take a look at” 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 grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 evidence containers,” says Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it 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 saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, 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 so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, 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 tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

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 resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered 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 crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “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 – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” 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 engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure 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. “Live-time murders 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 assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, 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 all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding 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 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 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 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 Pattern of Violence

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

“He menaced to choke 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 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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned 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 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 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 older women would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are approximately 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”