How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – 58 Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her supervisor to review a cold case from 1967. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, 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 recognized figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

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 barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’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 UK, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition 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 right 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 inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling 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.”

Revisiting 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 – homicides, rapes, 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 area and moving them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective 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.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, 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 actuality, 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. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “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 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 photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe 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. “Louisa was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was twice widowed, estranged 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, 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 History of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing 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 challenged the verdict, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. 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. “With current investigations, 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 box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are about 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 re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”