The Way a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her supervisor to examine the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed 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,” says Smith.

She found a trio. “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 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 nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, 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 that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. 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 career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving 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 helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding 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.”

Examining the Evidence

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 fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred 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 lead detective 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 challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists 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 full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in another city. “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 time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house 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. “She 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 wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed 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 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’ disturbing 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 pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 were concerned 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “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 massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

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 pressure 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 certain that it won’t be the last solved case. There are approximately 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.”