How a Appalling Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her team leader to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Police knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained 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 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 weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying 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 initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

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

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, 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 proof that she made the right professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” 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 inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases 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 Louisa Dunne files had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, 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 aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“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 evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Key Discovery

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations 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 another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, 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 thousands original accounts 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. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa 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 remained social. She had a group 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 compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, 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 Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions 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 earlier trial 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 challenged the verdict, 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.

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 compelling the proof 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 proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative 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 mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, 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 interest of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is confident that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately one hundred and thirty cold cases 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 sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”