The Way a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – 58 Decades Later.
In the summer of 2023, an investigator, received a request by her team leader to review 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 of two, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Investigators knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.
“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 exhibits boxes,” says the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. 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 co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. 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 scepticism as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable 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 right professional decision. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”
Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new central archive.
“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred several times 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 lead detective arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an 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 new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the submission process 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 message 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 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 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 accounts and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Getting to Know 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 twice widowed, estranged 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 great TV.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular 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 stays with you.’”
A History 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 pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that earlier trial gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. 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 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 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 Profound Effect
For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. 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 confident that it is not the last resolution. 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 sending things to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
