How a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on eight thousand 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 storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags 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, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty 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 oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable 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 in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role 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 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 compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review 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 case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved 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. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” 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 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 back-burner,” 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, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

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 wasn’t reclusive. 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 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 History of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two older 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 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 psychiatrist 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 medical incident. “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 specialist officers. “She had believed it was never going to be solved,” 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 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. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last solved case. 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 re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”