In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her team leader to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered 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 residing by herself, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Police knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.
“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” states Smith.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it 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 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 listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “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 worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.
Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling 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 standard schedule role, so I took the position.”
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The case documents had originated 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 boxes, 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 different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”
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 skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”
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 all hands on deck.” In the period 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 living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” 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 wasn’t reclusive. 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, 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.’”
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 elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate 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 a shorter term,” says Smith.
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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial 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 sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is massively underreported 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 spend his life behind bars.
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 began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”
She is confident that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
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