How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In the summer of 2023, an investigator, was asked by her sergeant to examine a decades-old murder file. The woman was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in 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 focal point of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a recognized presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry discovered few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers knocked on eight thousand doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed 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 storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” says Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a co-worker (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, forensically bagging the items and cataloging what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”

It sounds like the beginning of a mystery book, or the premiere of a investigative series. The final outcome also seems the stuff of fiction. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life imprisonment.

A Record-Breaking Case

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case solved in the UK, and possibly the world. Subsequently, the unit 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 goose bumps.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right professional decision. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” 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 assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous experience in safeguarding involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Revisiting the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine live cases 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 were transferred to multiple locations 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 head up the team. The new officer took a novel strategy. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his professional journey.

“Cracking cases 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 television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In actuality, the submission process and testing take a long time. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the back-burner,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take priority.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was ninety-two, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the luxury of time,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the period 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 photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

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 widowed twice, separated from her family, but she remained social. She had a group 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. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) 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: ‘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 Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted 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 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 acting out of character. “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 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 identified and approached by family liaison. “Mary had assumed it was never going to be solved,” 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 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 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 driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the end.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re re-examining – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”