The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her team leader to examine a decades-old murder file. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Investigators knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained open.

“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 exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on 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 indicating 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 wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right professional decision. “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 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling 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 civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” 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 engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems 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 try?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” 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 a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was ninety-two, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “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 pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

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 outside her home 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 very wrong.”

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 89, who had attended the 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 haunts you.’”

A Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by family liaison. “She 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.

“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report 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 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 started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – 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 about one hundred and thirty 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 unlocking the past.”