The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her supervisor to review a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“When I saw 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,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence 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 first day on the job), both gloved up, 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 diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team 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 correct career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving 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 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 engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. 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 started 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 lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders 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 another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was ninety-two, 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 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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home 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.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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, separated 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) 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: ‘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 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 insight 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 resisted. 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 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 feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “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 living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone 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. “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 interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about one hundred and thirty cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several 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.”