The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her team leader to examine the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on 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,” says Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount 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 mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result 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.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary 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. “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 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” 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 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 major crime review team 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 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 arriving at the archive,” 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 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 absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” 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 match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, widowed, and living in another city. “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 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 generational differences.”

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 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to assaulting 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 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 challenged the verdict, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” 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 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 court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “Mary had believed 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 intents and purposes, he would never be released. 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. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are approximately 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”