The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her supervisor to review a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.
“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” states Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress 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 value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, 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 tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” 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 demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review 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 Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times 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 novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.
“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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, 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 interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was 92, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, 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 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 wasn’t reclusive. 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, 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 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 older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” 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 not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 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 solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is often not reported 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 remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
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 responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”
She is confident 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 reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
