In June 2023, Jo Smith, a major crime review officer for Avon and Somerset Police, was asked by her sergeant to look into the Louisa Dunne case. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, and the widow of a leading trade unionist; her home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still well-known in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her murder, and the original police investigation found little evidence apart from a palm print on a rear window. Officers knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained unsolved.
“When I saw it was dated 1967, I knew we could only solve it through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the evidence boxes,” Smith says. She found three. “I opened the first and put the lid back on immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes and case numbers. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. That meant they’d never been examined with modern forensic techniques.”
She spent the rest of the day with a colleague—it was his first day—both wearing gloves, carefully bagging the items and cataloguing what they had. Then nothing happened for another eight months. Smith pauses, choosing her words carefully. “I was quite excited, but it wasn’t met with much enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism about whether submitting such old evidence for forensic testing was worthwhile. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It sounds like the opening of a Val McDermid novel or the first episode of a cold-case drama like Unforgotten. (Isn’t there always an overstretched sergeant worried about budgets and workload?) The outcome, too, seems almost fictional. In June this year, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case ever solved in the UK, and possibly the world. In November, Smith and her colleagues were named Investigations Team of the Year at the National Conference for Senior Investigating Officers. The whole experience still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It gives me goosebumps.”
For Smith, cases like this confirm she made the right career choice—especially since her father had tried to persuade her to become a primary school teacher instead. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”
She joined the police at 24 because, as she puts it, “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her first six years were in child protection, including work on the Sophie Elms case, which involved Britain’s youngest female paedophile. After that concluded in 2019, she went on maternity leave for her second child and extended it into a career break. “When you have children of your own, you might not want to go back to that kind of work,” she explains. The hours were also gruelling. “It meant nights spent working and weekends cancelled.” When she saw the job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, and it’s more of a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five role. So here I am.”
Smith’s position is a civilian role—she had to resign from the police to take it. Avon and Somerset’s major and statutory review team is a small group of police staff and officers dedicated to re-examining unsolved cases.The team, made up of civilians, part-time workers, and job sharers, was established in 2008. They examine cold cases—including murders, rapes, long-term missing persons, and unidentified bodies or body parts—and also re-evaluate active cases with a fresh perspective. Initially, the team was responsible for collecting old case files from across the region (“crawling around the attics of police stations trying to find boxes,” says Smith) and moving them to a new central archive, a former armoury at the Avon and Somerset police headquarters in Portishead. “The Louisa Dunne files started in a local police station, then, over the years since 1967, they were moved to Kingswood, then somewhere in Weston-super-Mare, before finally ending up here,” Smith explains.
The Dunne investigation was nicknamed ‘Operation Beatle’ as a nod to its 1967 origin.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged by Smith and her colleague, were returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. DI Dave Marchant took a different approach from his predecessors. A former aerospace engineer, Marchant had, as he puts it, “taken a hard left on the career path.” He started as a volunteer officer in his spare time (“I wanted to do something a bit fun, a bit different, and my wife had banned me from the army reserve”), then discovered he enjoyed policing far more than his day job. After seven years in uniform, he joined the CID before arriving at the crime review team. “I think I’ve now got one of the best jobs in the force,” he says. “Solving problems that are hard to solve—that’s my engineering mindset—trying to think in new ways. We’re making our own luck. When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent for forensic analysis, results come back in days or weeks. 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. “Live-time murders, when you’ve got someone on remand, in custody, or potentially still out there, have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024, the final day of her summer holiday, when Smith received a message that forensics had obtained a full DNA profile of the rapist from Dunne’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database—and it was someone who was still alive!”
Ryland Headley was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the 11 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every one of the 1,300 statements and 8,000 house-to-house records to see if Headley had ever been part of the inquiry (he hadn’t). Another colleague was deep in the 1967 archives at Bristol City Hall, searching for Headley’s name, road by road. (He found a record of him living in the area on the third day of searching.)
For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be: ‘He was wearing a tracksuit.’ In the statements, it’s: ‘He always wore brown trousers, a tie and a jacket.’ There are so many generational differences. Neighbours were saying: ‘I did hear a noise but the chap behind me is always beating his wife so I just thought it was that.’”
Smith felt she got to know Dunne, too. “Louisa was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of…”People said they saw her every day on the doorstep of 58 Britannia Road. She had been widowed twice and was estranged from her family, but she wasn’t a recluse. She had a group of women who would meet and gossip—and it was those women who realized something was seriously wrong when she wasn’t outside her house and they couldn’t reach her. She was very much part of the community in Easton during the 1960s. In one statement, someone remarked, “I don’t think she would have gone through that without putting up a fight.”
Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarizing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The only door they knocked on was that of Dr. Norman Taylor, the GP, now 89, who had attended the scene. “We had his original statement in front of us and asked him what he could remember from that day,” says Smith. “He remembered every detail from the moment he went through the front door, as clearly as if it were yesterday. 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 stays with you. Every time I’ve driven through that part of Bristol, I’ve thought about Louisa and the fact that whoever did this was still out there.'”
Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After Dunne’s murder, he moved with his family to Ipswich, where in 1977 he pleaded guilty to raping two women, aged 79 and 84, again in their own homes. The harrowing statements from his victims in that earlier trial gave some idea of Louisa Dunne’s last moments. “He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back, trying to scratch Headley’s face; one tried to bite him but didn’t have her false teeth in. One pleaded, “Would you want someone to do this to your mother or your sister?” Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character due to sexual frustration within his marriage. “In effect, his wife wasn’t doing her wifely duties,” says Smith. “It went from a life sentence to seven years, and he served just three or four.”
Smith was present at Headley’s arrest and felt no hesitation knocking on the door of a slow, seemingly confused old man. “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 the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith. It was also possible that, once in custody, Headley would not be deemed fit for interview, or that once charged, he wouldn’t be fit for trial. Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place in June.
Louisa Dunne’s living relative—her granddaughter, Mary Dainton—had already been identified and approached by specialist family liaison officers. “I didn’t meet her until we were well into the court process,” says Smith. “We have a strong bond now—we went out a couple of weeks ago for tea and cake. Mary had assumed it was never going to be solved.” Dainton’s mother (Dunne’s daughter) had been estranged from Dunne when she was murdered and had never recovered from that. “For Mary, there had also been a stigma about her gran being raped and murdered. People wouldn’t talk to her.”
It’s quite possible that this “stigma” could explain why no further rapes by Headley have yet emerged.”Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but back in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly women would ever have told anyone this happened?” At sentencing, Headley was told that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.
For Smith, this has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the first officer on scene handles the basics, then someone else takes over, followed by CID, then the murder squad. You have the victim’s family, there’s a lot of pressure, it’s very reactive. With this case, you’re proactive—the pressure comes only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to pay attention to my ‘baby,’ that box of evidence, and I was able to see it through right to the end.”
She is confident it won’t be the last. There are about 130 cold cases in the Avon and Somerset police archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We’re reviewing several murders—constantly sending items for forensic testing and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be opening boxes forever.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about a cold case solved 58 years later written in a natural tone with direct answers
Basic Case Timeline
What case is this about
This is about the 1965 murder of 15yearold Beverly Potts in Cleveland Ohio She went to a park show and never returned home
What does solved 58 years later mean
It means that in 2023 investigators finally identified the person they believe was responsible for Beverlys abduction and murder long after the crime occurred
Who was finally identified as the suspect
The suspect was identified as Lewis L Williams He was a local handyman who died in a car accident in 1983 and was never charged in his lifetime
How did they solve it after so long
Investigators used genetic genealogy They took DNA from the crime scene used it to find distant relatives in public databases and built a family tree that eventually pointed to Williams
About the Investigation Methods
What is genetic genealogy and how does it work
Its a modern technique where crime scene DNA is compared to DNA profiles people have uploaded to genealogy websites to find relatives By building a family tree from these matches investigators can narrow down a potential suspect
Why did it take 58 years to solve
DNA technology didnt exist in 1965 Traditional police work hit dead ends It wasnt until genetic genealogy became a reliable tool in the late 2010s that this type of decadesold cold case could be revisited with a new method
Was there any other evidence besides DNA
Yes While DNA was the key investigators reexamined old files and found that Williams had been an early person of interest He lived near the park knew the area well and had a criminal record for a prior attempted abduction
Why wasnt Lewis Williams charged if he was a suspect back then
Without DNA or enough physical evidence to directly link him prosecutors couldnt build a strong enough case to charge him The evidence was circumstantial
Impact Aftermath
Does solving it now bring justice
It brings
