How a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her sergeant to examine the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in 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 focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 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 exhibits boxes,” says 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 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 co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Case

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling 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 I took the position.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases 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 originated in a precinct, 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 senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – 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 give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists 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 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!”

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 a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

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

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged 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 spoke with the original GP, now 89, 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 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 admitted to assaulting two elderly 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 suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. 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 less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “She 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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, 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 die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

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 pressure 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 conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 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.”