The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years After.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her team leader to review a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads 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 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,” states the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first 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 did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
An Unprecedented Case
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-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 crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “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 historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new central archive.
“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 properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an 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 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 quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”
The suspect was ninety-two, widowed, 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 accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Getting to Know 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 widowed twice, estranged from her family, but she remained social. She had a group 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular 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 History of Crimes
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to assaulting 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 suffocate 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.
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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “She 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.
“Sexual assault 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 practical purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.
A Lasting Impact
For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, 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 see it through right until the end.”
She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately one hundred and thirty cold cases 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 sending things to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
