How a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In June 2023, an investigator, received a request by her sergeant to review the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the police investigation discovered little to go on apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.

“Upon realizing 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 evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Case

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly 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 confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding 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 standard schedule role, so I took the position.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at cold cases – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations 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 secure storage facility.

“The case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders 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 assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect 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 thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like living in 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 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, separated 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 reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts 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 previous convictions 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’ harrowing statements from that previous case 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 acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

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 health crisis. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “Mary had assumed 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.

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone 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 special case. “It just feels different, 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 began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 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 submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”