How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.
In June 2023, a major crime review officer, received a request by her sergeant to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification 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 evidence containers,” says Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. 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 initial 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 pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. 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 chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-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 crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”
Revisiting the Evidence
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved 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 lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” 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 box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
The Key Discovery
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. 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 priority.”
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 clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was ninety-two, widowed, and living in another city. “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 weeks 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 navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Understanding the Victim
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “Louisa was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, separated 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 compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘I’ve been a doctor 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s living relative 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 stigma about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical 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 reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”
She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. 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 re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
