The Way a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, 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 residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police knocked on 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. 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 co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following 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

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team 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 chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – 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 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 were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – 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 in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists 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 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!”

Ryland Headley 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 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 accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would typically 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 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 group 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 compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now 89, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular 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 Pattern 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 assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. 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 less time,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted 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.

“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

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 reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It started 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 confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are approximately 130 unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”