In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her sergeant to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The victim 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 trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed 8,000 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 scientific analysis, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states 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 barcodes. 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 initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal 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 mystery book, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable 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. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role 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 regular hours role, so here I am.”
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine active investigations with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting 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 moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.
“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 box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
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 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 precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit 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 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 navigating two eras. “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 typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
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 widowed twice, 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had attended the 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.’”
Headley’s prior offenses 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 older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.
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 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial 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.
“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, 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.
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 reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”
She is confident that it won’t be 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 several murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
Elara is a seasoned gaming journalist with a passion for slot mechanics and player strategies.
