The Way a Disturbing Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Years Later.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, 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. Investigators knocked on eight thousand 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,” says Smith.
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 identification codes. 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 co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
A Record-Breaking Case
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Revisiting the Clues
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering 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 containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change 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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Breakthrough
In television shows, 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 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 priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. 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 92, widowed, 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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original statements and records.
For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Understanding the Victim
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She 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 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 analyzing documents. (“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 Pattern of Violence
Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. 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 a shorter term,” 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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret 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 assumed 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 60s and 70s, 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 responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency 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 resolution. There are about 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 sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”