The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – 58 Years After.
In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the police investigation unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” says Smith.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first 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 pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to 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 sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. 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 chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith joined 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 crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, 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 area 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 several times 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 lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. 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 in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was 92, a widower, 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 photos, 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 changes over time.”
Getting to Know the Victim
Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” 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 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 reading and summarising. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) 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: ‘I’ve been a doctor 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty 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 threatened to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” 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 not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth 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 contacted by specialist officers. “Mary had believed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Rape is often not reported 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 never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.
A Profound Effect
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 reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”
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 re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
