How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – 58 Decades Later.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her sergeant to examine the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed 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 focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a recognized figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained unsolved.
“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.
She found three. “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 undergone modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial 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 eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the unit 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 professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in 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 cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, 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 – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.
“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Breakthrough
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 priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
Ryland Headley was ninety-two, 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 a full team effort.” In the period 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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Getting to Know 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 twice widowed, separated 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 very wrong.”
Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed 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 haunts you.’”
A Pattern 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 pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced 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 appealed, 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 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 assumed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. 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. “With current investigations, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
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 several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”