How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.
In June 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her sergeant to examine the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Police knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed open.
“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,” states the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating 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, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, 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 so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere 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 culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Case
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly 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 real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” 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 assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Revisiting the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. 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 Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.
“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”
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 skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit 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 a full team effort.” 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 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 prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, estranged 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 very wrong.”
Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea 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 appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.
Securing Justice
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 feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted 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.
“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever report 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 different, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began 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 certain 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 a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
