The Way a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, an investigator, received a request by her supervisor to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman 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, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a prominent 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 murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 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 scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence containers,” says the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”

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 eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the investigative team 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 proof 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 interested in 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.”

Revisiting 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, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases with fresh eyes. 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 case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases 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 try?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the submission process 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 message 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 DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”

Ryland Headley was ninety-two, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “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 time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know 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 outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, separated 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, who had attended the 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 Violence

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’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to strangle one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case 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 stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies 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 Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, 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 conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last resolution. There are about 130 unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”