The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her supervisor to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, 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 presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry found little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (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 hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value 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 first episode of a investigative series. The end result 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 imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. 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 chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” 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 crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

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, sexual assaults, 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 moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. The new officer 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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification 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 hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” 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 time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding 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, 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) 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: ‘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 question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced 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 mental health professional 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “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 granddaughter had been identified and approached by family liaison. “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.

“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, 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 die in prison.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. 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 won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 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 opening boxes.”