The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – 58 Decades Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, received a request by her supervisor to examine a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand 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 forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” states the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed 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 colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, 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 was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed 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 nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding 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 here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group 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 gathering all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The Louisa Dunne files had started in a precinct, 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 head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, 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 DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, 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 a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read 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 accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) 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 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 pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” 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 not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 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 granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “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.

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever tell anyone 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 Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special 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 pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. 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 following other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”