The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her supervisor to review a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained 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 exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags 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 first 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 did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, 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, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct career choice. “He thought 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 assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations 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 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 career path.

“Solving problems 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 absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” 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 complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in another city. “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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. 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 wasn’t reclusive. 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 Pattern of Crimes

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 raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” 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.

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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “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 granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary 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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies 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 distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”