The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her sergeant to examine a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old 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 center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Investigators canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match 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 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 cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels 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 initial day on the job), both gloved up, 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 diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered 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 safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, 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 aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, 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 in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Live-time murders 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 rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” 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 portray people. Today, 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 prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was widowed twice, estranged 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 amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, 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 prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea 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 resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” 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 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 sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been contacted by specialist officers. “Mary 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.

“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, 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 spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, 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 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 won’t be the last resolution. There are about 130 unsolved investigations 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 unlocking the past.”