The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – 58 Decades Later.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The victim 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 grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 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 archive to look at the evidence containers,” states Smith.
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 were not. They just had old paper tags 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 first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old 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 final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Case
Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof 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 in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine active investigations 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 case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.
Those boxes, 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 made a drastic change on his professional journey.
“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
The Breakthrough
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “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 precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the period 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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray 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. “She was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, estranged from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. 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 interviewed the doctor, now eighty-nine, 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 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’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced 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 mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “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 often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, 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 Profound Effect
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 reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”
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 a number of 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.”
