The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her team leader to review a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Police canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand 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 scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. 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 scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial 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 pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, the unit 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 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 joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy 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 civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review 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 case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved 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 lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. 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 innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Breakthrough
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “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 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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”
The suspect was 92, 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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Getting to Know the Victim
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was twice widowed, estranged 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 interviewed the original GP, 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little question 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 insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to strangle 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.
Securing Justice
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 feared 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 proceed. 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 stigma about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is massively underreported 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 practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
A Lasting Impact
For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, 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 is not the last solved case. There are about 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 sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
