The Way a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – 58 Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her sergeant to examine 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 parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found 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 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 archive to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases 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 scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging 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 very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations 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 lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” 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 submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are interested, 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 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 still alive!”

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 read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” 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 remained social. 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 doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, 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 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 feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed 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 mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

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 driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately 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 opening boxes.”