How a Disturbing Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was tasked by her sergeant to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother, 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 local 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. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed 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 the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a great deal 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 sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Spanning fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition 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 confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding 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 I took the position.”

Revisiting the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times 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. The new officer 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 analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In real life, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” 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 clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the numerous original statements and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” 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 wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was very wrong.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the original GP, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 haunts you.’”

A History 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 raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to choke one and he threatened to smother 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 less time,” 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 were concerned that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “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 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.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

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 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 interest 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 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 unlocking the past.”