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

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her supervisor to examine the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse 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 well-known presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry found little to go on 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 remained 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 storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, 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 value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition 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 confirmation that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, 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 aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases 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 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 quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are interested, 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 full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, 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 all hands on deck.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 widowed twice, 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) 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: ‘In my career 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 prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women resisted. 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 less time,” 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 health crisis. “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 identified and approached by family liaison. “She had assumed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma 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 intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is confident that it won’t be 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 pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”