The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her team leader to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, 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, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained unsolved.

“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” says Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags saying 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 initial day on the job), both gloved up, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate 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 high-priority matter.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Case

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

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 resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding 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 regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – 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 region and moving them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, 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 made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – 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 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 laboratory scientists are keen, 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 notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint 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 living!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the period 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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now 89, 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 Pattern of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted 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 pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” 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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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 elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. 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 started 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 certain that it won’t be the last resolution. 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”