How a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim 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 parent of two children, 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 living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Police knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“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 storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “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 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 there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles 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 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the unit 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right professional decision. “He thought 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 fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding 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 I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations 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 started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in another city. “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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating 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 usually 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 big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed 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 History of Crimes

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 assaulting two older 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 choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” 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 less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 strong the evidence 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “Mary had believed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is often not reported 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 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 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 notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 cold cases 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 following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”