How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In June 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her team leader to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification 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 exhibits boxes,” states Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, 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 tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate 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 opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Subsequently, 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 chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding 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 here I am.”
Revisiting the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.
“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 forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” 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 absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”
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 a long time. “The forensic team 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 precedence.”
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 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, widowed, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” 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 photos, 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 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 twice widowed, separated 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, 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 History of Violence
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 assaulting 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 fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 strong the evidence 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 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “She had believed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 older women 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 unique 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 driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It started 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 certain that it won’t be 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 submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
