The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years Later.
In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her supervisor to review the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the unit 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 confirmation that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” 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 inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining 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 re-examine active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.
“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. 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 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 Breakthrough
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, 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 priority.”
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 time to waste,” 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 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 accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Getting to Know the Victim
Smith felt she came to understand 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 twice widowed, 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now 89, 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 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 the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to assaulting 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 threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 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 trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed 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 older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
A Profound Effect
For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
She is confident that it is not 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 lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
