How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her sergeant to review a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol 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 focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to 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, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened 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. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. 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 Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the unit 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 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 resolving 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 experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy 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 non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with fresh eyes. 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 local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace 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 innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”

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 living!”

The suspect was ninety-two, 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 a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original statements 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 witness statements. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “She 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 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 compelling television.”) 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: ‘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 Violence

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 assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate 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 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 most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had assumed 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 mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. 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 interest of that evidence – 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 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 leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”