In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her supervisor to “take a look at” a cold case from 1967. 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 grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.
“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” states Smith.
She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags indicating 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 initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “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 value of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”
It resembles the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, the unit won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me goose bumps.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving 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 grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.
“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times 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.
“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 evidence, 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 in days. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists 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 priority.”
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 skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was living!”
The suspect was 92, 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 period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original statements 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. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She 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 group of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was very wrong.”
Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, 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 doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted 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 menaced to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. 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.
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 strong the evidence was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been identified and approached by family liaison. “Mary had believed 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 mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
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 driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It began 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 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.”
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