How a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – 58 Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her supervisor to examine a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, 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 police investigation discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says Smith.

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

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (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 quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition 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 proof that she made the correct career choice. “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 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine 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 secure storage facility.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, 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 aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases 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 in days. In actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “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 assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” 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 statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

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 on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, estranged from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, 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 Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight 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 challenged the verdict, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical 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. “With current investigations, 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 box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are about 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”