How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, an investigator, was asked by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point 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 one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed 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 storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

She found three. “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 scientific testing.”

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 cataloging 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 huge amount 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 final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the unit won recognition 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 proof 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 joined 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 experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “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 small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region 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 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 novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” 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 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 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. “Current investigations 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 clothing. 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 ninety-two, a widower, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands 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 witness statements. The way they portray people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 twice widowed, estranged from her family, but she remained social. 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, 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 History of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses 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 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 threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother 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 psychiatrist 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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “She had believed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape 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 Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – 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 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.”