The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – 58 Years Later.
In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her supervisor to review a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old 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 center of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.
“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, 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 that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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 career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, 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 region and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. 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 testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, 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 full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
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 period 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 photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
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 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, 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 stays with you.’”
A Pattern of Violence
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team feared 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 proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary 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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone 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 distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are about 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 pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
