In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her sergeant to review a cold case from 1967. The woman was a elderly 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 previous spouse had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.
“Upon realizing 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,” states the officer.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode 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 Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the UK, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation 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 demanding hours. When she saw a job advert 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 Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – 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 Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“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 evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. 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 actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team 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 notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
Ryland Headley 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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Getting to Know the Victim
Smith felt she got to know 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 wasn’t reclusive. She had a group 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular 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 Crimes
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’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother 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 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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.
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 began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”
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 several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
