How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed eight thousand 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. 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 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. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged 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 cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, the investigative team won an award 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 proof that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience 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 regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a local police station, 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 senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Solving problems that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

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 priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was ninety-two, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” 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 time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe 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 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 remained social. 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 analyzing documents. (“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: ‘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 previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 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 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 psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 compelling the proof 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 sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter 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.

“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report 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. “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 box – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

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 several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”