The Way a Shocking Rape and Murder Case Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Decades Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her sergeant to examine a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading 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 well-known presence in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Police knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained open.

“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,” states Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “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 worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It was not considered a priority.”

It resembles the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the first episode of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case closed in the UK, and possibly the world. Later that year, the unit won recognition for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, rapes, disappearances – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, 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. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are keen, 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 complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in another city. “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 weeks 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 photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they portray people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she got to know 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 twice widowed, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. 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 compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the original GP, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular 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 question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted 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 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 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.

Securing Justice

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 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 go ahead. The court case took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

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 reactive. 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 notice of that box – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are about one hundred and thirty 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”