The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her supervisor to review the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry found little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.
“When I saw 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,” says the officer.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. 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 scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Case
Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, 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 moved several times 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 senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.
“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Key Discovery
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team 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 priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
Ryland Headley was 92, 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 pored over every single one of the numerous original statements and records.
For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, 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, 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had attended the 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 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 the late 1970s he had admitted to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing 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 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 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 were concerned 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 go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter 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.
“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.
A Profound Effect
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 driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
She is certain that it won’t be 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 re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
