The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her team leader to review a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Police canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” says 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 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 worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved 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 real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed 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 fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting 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 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. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – 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 Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” 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 rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was 92, widowed, 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 navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged from her family, but she remained social. 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. (“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: ‘In my career 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 History of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty 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 menaced to choke 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 mental health professional 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 compelling the proof 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter 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 sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape 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 practical purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique 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 driving the inquiry, 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 end.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are about one hundred and thirty 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.”