How a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years Later.
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 home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a hub of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match 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 storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing 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 did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”
It resembles the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Subsequently, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-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 helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience 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 here I am.”
Examining the Clues
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, long-term missing people – and also re-examine live cases with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new central archive.
“The case documents had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” 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 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 engineering mindset – 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 try?”
The Key Discovery
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 keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint 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 92, 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 all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Understanding the Victim
Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, 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 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping 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 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 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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team feared 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 trial 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.
“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the 60s and 70s, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
A Lasting Impact
For Smith, it has been a unique case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, 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 box – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”
She is certain that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately 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 submitting evidence to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
