How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her supervisor to examine the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation discovered few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Police knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. 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 colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging 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 huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the unit won an award 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 correct career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined 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 distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – 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 central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times 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 lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, 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 lower priority,” 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 complete genetic fingerprint 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 living!”

The suspect 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 all hands on deck.” In the weeks 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 navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 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 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 spoke with the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime 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 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 pleaded guilty 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 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 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 compelling the proof 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 go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had believed 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 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 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 proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it won’t be 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 several murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”