How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her team leader to “take a look at” 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 of two, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed 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 Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to 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 beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, 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 chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started 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 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 “taken a hard left” 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 quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are keen, 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 notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, 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 period 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 living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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, 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 stays with you.’”

A Pattern 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 older 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 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 psychiatrist 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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “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 often not reported 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 practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are about 130 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”