The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her supervisor to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. The woman 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 mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained open.

“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 evidence containers,” says Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations 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 colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following 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 fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, 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 tangible,” 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 dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – 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 region and moving them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times 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 lead detective 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 challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, 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 in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations 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 clothing. 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!”

The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had attended the 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 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 pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial 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 appealed, supported by a mental health professional 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 strong the evidence 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 sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by family liaison. “Mary had believed 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 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 spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

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 proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about one hundred and thirty unsolved investigations 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.”