How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her sergeant to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand 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 storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (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 nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, 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 so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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 proof that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” 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 nosy and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert 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 non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – 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 moving them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

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 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 precedence.”

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 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!”

The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would usually 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 on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, 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 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 doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the 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 haunts you.’”

A History of Violence

Headley’s prior offenses 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 elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” 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 acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” 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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report 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 distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, 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 interest of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”