How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – 58 Years After.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her team leader to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed 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 identification was found. The case remained open.
“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 exhibits boxes,” says Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. 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 co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary 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 professional decision. “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 interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. 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 case documents had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred 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 senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“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 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 real life, 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”
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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was 92, a widower, 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 pored over every single one of the thousands original statements and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Understanding the Victim
Smith felt she got to know 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 twice widowed, 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 spoke with the doctor, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 Violence
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case 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 resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, 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 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had assumed 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 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. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. 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 notice 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 approximately 130 unsolved investigations 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
