How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years Later.
In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her team leader to examine a cold case from 1967. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a recognized figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a back window. Officers 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 forensics, 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 unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Subsequently, 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 right professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” 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 nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – murders, rapes, 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 moving them to a new secure storage facility.
“The case documents 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 containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my engineering mindset – 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 try?”
The Breakthrough
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 keen, 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 full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was ninety-two, 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 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 photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
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 on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, estranged from her family, but she remained social. 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 analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every detail 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 haunts you.’”
A Pattern of Crimes
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” 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.
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 feared 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 trial took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached 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 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 intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.
A Lasting Impact
For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, 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 box – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”
She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
