The Way a Appalling Rape and Murder Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Decades Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“When I saw 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,” states Smith.

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 identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (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 eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as 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 June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering 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 an award 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 confirmation 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 entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule 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 historical crimes – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area 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 to multiple locations 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 different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases 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 absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”

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 a long time. “The forensic team are interested, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically 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 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 great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, 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 Crimes

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 previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced 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 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 go ahead. 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 resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever report 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 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 evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are about one hundred and thirty 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 sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”