The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years After.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in 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 focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained open.

“When I saw 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 exhibits boxes,” says Smith.

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 identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels 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 initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt 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 crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable 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 correct professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated 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 lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, 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 in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations 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 assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, 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 read every single one of the thousands original statements 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. 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. “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 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 original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime 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 stays with you.’”

A History of Violence

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping 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 smother the other with a pillow,” 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.

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 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 proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 older women would ever tell anyone 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 responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately one hundred and thirty cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”