The Way a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police 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 evidence containers,” says Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases 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 been subject to modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened 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 doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In 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 fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and possibly the world. 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 chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith joined 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 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 engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Revisiting the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area 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 moved to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.
Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations 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 another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
Ryland Headley was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 weeks 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 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.”
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 widowed twice, 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 amiss.”
Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 Pattern of Violence
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping 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 strangle one and he threatened to suffocate 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.
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 feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “She 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 tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and 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. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”
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 leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
