The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her team leader to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed 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 archive to look at the evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to 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, forensically bagging 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 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 value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. 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 Case

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” 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 dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith joined 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 crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, 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 non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. 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 Louisa Dunne files had started 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 containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – 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?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, 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. “Live-time murders 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 assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit 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 thousands original statements and records.

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

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” 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 wasn’t reclusive. 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 interviewed the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular 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 haunts you.’”

A History of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle 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 psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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 older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a unique 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 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 conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately 130 cold cases 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.”