A 92-year-old man has been found guilty of raping and murdering a woman born 133 years ago, in what is believed to be the UK’s longest cold case to reach trial.
Ryland Headley, now aged 92, was convicted at Bristol Crown Court of killing 75-year-old mother of two, Louisa Dunne, in her Bristol home in June 1967, BBC News reports.
The case – unsolved for nearly six decades – was cracked using modern DNA technology combined with investigative material collected at the time of the murder.
Louisa Dunne Was Found Dead in Her Home in 1967
On the morning of June 28, 1967, neighbors noticed that Louisa Dunne, born in 1892, was not standing on her doorstep as usual. Concerned, they discovered her lying dead inside her home on Britannia Road in the Easton area of Bristol. She was found bruised, with blood coming from one ear, vomit in her mouth, and her underwear around her ankles.
A post-mortem examination found “extensive abrasions” on her face, with the most likely explanation being that a hand had been pressed against her mouth. Neighbors reported hearing a woman’s “frightening scream” on the night of her death,
Mrs. Dunne, who had been twice widowed, lived alone but was well-known in the community. She had been married to local Labour politician Ted Parker and later to John Dunne, a nightwatchman, before being left to live alone following their deaths.
A Massive Investigation at the Time
Detective Inspector Dave Marchant from Avon and Somerset Police described the original investigation as “massive.”
“Over 19,000 palm print eliminations were taken from men and boys in the Bristol area and beyond. Over 8,000 house-to-house records were completed and several thousand statements were taken,” he said, per Sky News.
Despite these efforts, no key suspect was identified at the time.
A palm print was found on a rear window inside Mrs. Dunne’s home, and traces of semen were found on intimate swabs and on her skirt, but DNA testing was not available for another 20 years.
The Breakthrough With DNA and Palm Print Evidence
The case was reopened in 2024, with modern DNA testing on the sperm found on the skirt that Mrs. Dunne was wearing on the night she was murdered. Investigating officers were told the results showed a DNA match on the national database that was “a billion times” more likely to belong to Headley than to anyone else.
“I had to read that email several times to fully digest the content of it and believe what I was reading. Then it was, okay, game on, let’s get this investigation going,” DI Marchant said.
Headley was arrested at his home in Ipswich in November 2024 and did not give evidence during the trial. Fingerprint experts matched Headley’s palm print, taken at the time of his arrest, with the print found on Mrs. Dunne’s window in 1967.
Headley Had a History of Similar Crimes
The judge allowed the prosecution to present evidence that Headley had previously been jailed for committing two rapes a decade after Mrs. Dunne’s murder. Both cases involved attacks against elderly women in similar circumstances.
Prosecutor Anna Vigars KC told the jury these offences demonstrated that Headley “has a tendency” to act in the same way.
“In other words, to break into people’s homes at night and, in some cases, to target an elderly woman living alone, to have sex with her despite her attempts to fend him off, and to threaten violence,” she said.
The Impact on Louisa Dunne’s Family
Louisa Dunne’s granddaughter, Mary Dainton, recalled the moment police contacted her nearly six decades later.
“She said, ‘this is about your grandmother’, and I said, ‘have they caught him?’ It came out, I never thought I’d say anything like that. Have you caught him? and she said, ‘we have a suspect’,” Dainton shared, per The Guardian. “I accepted it.
“I accepted that some murders just never get solved. And some people just have to live with that emptiness and that sadness.”
Reflecting on the arrest, Dainton said: “I think it’s appalling, absolutely appalling. The poor woman – it must have been absolutely terrifying. And the reality of a rape, I don’t like thinking about, I don’t think anybody does.”
Dainton described how her mother suffered after the murder. “My mother had a breakdown. I think she suffered from depression later – she found it very hard to make friends. We weren’t a very close family in the first place, but what there was in the family fell to pieces.”
She expressed gratitude that detectives continued to review the case, stating: “Rape and murder are horrendous. Are you saying that because somebody is old and because it’s this amount of time between when it happened and when they finally found out who it was, justice doesn’t have to be done?”
The Oldest Cold Case Solved in the UK
DI Marchant described Headley as a “dangerous serial offender” with a “shocking and abhorrent history” and said the case demonstrated the value of revisiting old investigations.
“This is a marrying of old school and new school policing techniques,” he said.
“I think this investigation shows you should never give up. You should never look at an investigation and say, ‘oh, it’s too old, it happened X number of years ago’ and have an arbitrary cut-off point. At the time we re-instigated it in 2024… there was a chance a suspect could still be alive and as it turned out – he was.”
The Crown Prosecution Service stated it was not aware of a cold case with a longer period between the offence and the trial.
Headley had denied the rape and murder of Mrs. Dunne after being charged in November 2024. He was found guilty on both counts and is set to be sentenced on Tuesday.
