How a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to “take a look at” a cold case from 1967. 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, a grandparent, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Police canvassed 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 forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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 eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, 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 high-priority matter.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

A Record-Breaking Case

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the UK, and perhaps the world. Subsequently, the investigative team won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was 24 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 grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, 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 region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“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 head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“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 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 actuality, 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 back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”

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 clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was 92, a widower, 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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two eras. “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 usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Getting to Know 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 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. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, 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 stays with you.’”

A Pattern of Violence

Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke 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 psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “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 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “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.

“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 intents and purposes, he would never be released. 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. “With current investigations, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some interest of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is certain that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about one hundred and thirty unsolved investigations 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 pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”