The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her team leader to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. The woman was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.

“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 the officer.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates 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 doubt as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Later that year, 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 proof 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 in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review live cases 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 case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times 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 engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Key Discovery

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists 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 rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 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 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. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, 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 Violence

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt 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 idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke 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.

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 feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Sexual assault 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 intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a unique 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 proactive, 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 follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”