How a Appalling Rape and Murder Investigation Was Solved – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was asked by her supervisor to review the Louisa Dunne case. 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 of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“When I saw 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 evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something so old 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 investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Later that year, 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct career choice. “My father believed 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 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”

Examining 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 review live cases with a new perspective. 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 originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those containers, 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 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 innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, 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 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 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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, 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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in 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. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities 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 haunts you.’”

A Pattern 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 admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women resisted. 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 a shorter term,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 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 trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “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.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women 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 Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, 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 began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”