In June 2023, Jo Smith, was tasked by her supervisor to review a decades-old murder file. The victim 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 first husband had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed unsolved.
“Upon realizing 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,” says Smith.
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 barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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 cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “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 value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
An Unprecedented Case
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable 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 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 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.
“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 senior investigating officer 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.
“Cracking cases 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 obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists 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 complete genetic fingerprint of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”
Ryland Headley was ninety-two, widowed, 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 pored over every single one of the thousands original statements 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 portray people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Getting to Know 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 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 great TV.”) 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 stays with you.’”
A History of Crimes
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 assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” 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 medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “She had assumed 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 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 distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, 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 end.”
She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 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 reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
