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

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, received a request by her sergeant to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a familiar figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers knocked on eight thousand 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 the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels 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 wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Case

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the unit 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 correct professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-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 vacancy 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.”

Revisiting the Clues

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

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are challenging – 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 give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are interested, 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 message 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 DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe 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, separated 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts 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 particular 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 haunts you.’”

A History of Crimes

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother 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 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 compelling the proof 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 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be solved,” 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 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.

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 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 conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last resolution. There are approximately 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”