Louisa Dunne: the story of the 58-year quest to find her killer

Channel 4

13 hours ago

By Andy Davies and Marcus Edwards
Mary Dainton remembers the moment vividly. It was November 14, 2024. She was on a bus heading into Bristol when her husband called. 'The police are here,' he says. Mary, a 78-year-old former art teacher, is met at the next bus stop by two officers and driven home. 'This is about your grandmother,' one of them says. 'We have a suspect.'
It is a stunning development. They think they've identified the man who raped and murdered Mary's grandmother nearly 58 years ago. And – to the astonishment of all involved in this 'coldest' of cases – he is still alive.
Five days later, nine officers from Avon & Somerset Police gather outside a house in Suffolk belonging to a 92-year-old man.
How often had he wondered if this day might come?
Ryland Headley
had outlived nearly all who'd tried to track him down. Yet confronted in his kitchen by officers from Bristol, almost six decades of deception were suddenly unravelling. 'You're under arrest on suspicion of the rape and murder of Louisa Dunne,' he is told.
What's thought to be the longest crime-to-prosecution cold case murder inquiry in British history, finally had its suspect.
Tony Allen knows all about the murder of
Louisa Dunne
. As a teenager he lived opposite 'Mrs Dunne', as he still calls her, on Britannia Road in Bristol. It was his mother, Vi Allen, who discovered Louisa's body on June 28, 1967. Neighbours had become concerned when they hadn't seen Louisa that morning.
'Mum clambered up on the windowsill and could see her [Louisa Dunne's] body on the floor… she climbed in through the open window. Initially she thought it was a heart attack. Obviously it turned out differently.' Vi Allen felt Louisa's hand. She later told police it was 'as cold as ice'.
Louisa Dunne was found flat on her back in her living room. There were cuts around her chin, bruising to her neck and inner thigh and haemorrhaging in her eyes. She had been raped. A pathologist concluded that she'd likely died from asphyxiation – strangled with a scarf and having had a hand forcibly pressed against her mouth.
'It affected everybody,' Tony says, 'because it was such a horrible crime.'
Louisa, whose life had once been immersed in the socialist politics of her trade unionist husband, Teddy Parker, had been widowed twice by 1967. She had two daughters, but alcoholism had left her estranged from them. Mary Dainton, her only surviving grandchild, last saw her grandmother seven years before her death: 'She was tiny. She was extremely skinny and small. So, you know, it must have been absolutely terrifying.'
The murder sent shockwaves throughout Bristol. Dozens of officers were mobilised, including Dirk Aldous – one of the very few still alive who was involved in the original Louisa Dunne murder inquiry.
'I remember the intensity of it all,' Dirk says. 'It had quite an effect on Bristol at the time, and there was a real desire to get to the bottom of it.' Dirk Aldous and other detectives poured into the Easton area of Bristol.
The biggest lead they had was to be found 'lifted' from the dusted powder of a window frame at the back of Louisa Dunne's house: the residual trace of a palm print. It triggered the biggest finger and palm print operation in the history of the force.
The constabulary's annual report from 1967 records 91 officers were involved in the initial inquiry, 8,000 people were interviewed, and 1317 statements taken. But any hint of progress proved stubbornly elusive.
Despite the vast manhunt, not a single print matched the configuration of the murderer's palm. By the time of the inquest into Louisa Dunne's death the following year, a staggering 19,286 prints had been checked against that of the suspect.
By March 1970, a team of 91 officers had dwindled to just one man 'solely engaged' on the murder. The case had effectively gone 'cold'. Louisa Dunne's killer had slipped the net.
And so it remained for another 57 years.
'I accepted it,' Mary tells us. 'I accepted that some murders just never get solved, and some people just have to live with that emptiness and that sadness.' She says 'the family sort of fell to pieces after the murder'.
The tectonic moment which would utterly transform this story came 57 years, two months and seven days after Louisa Dunne's body was found.
There had been previous work done on the case in 2009 and 2014, but it was limited in scope. A new cold case team led by DI Dave Marchant and colleague Joanne Smith decided to send some of the exhibits for forensic testing, for the first time ever.
This included the knickers and skirt Louisa had been wearing that night. A swab of semen recovered at the time had subsequently been lost or destroyed. But, crucially, the fact that it had been collected in the first place offered hope. Could any traces still be found after all these years?
One of the force's forensic specialists, Heidi Miller, liaised with Andy Parry, a scientist at Cellmark Forensic Services. They decided to 'semen screen' a number of items, beginning with Louisa Dunne's blue skirt.
Parry's initial acid phosphatase test came back negative. He decided to try again. This time he cut out sections of the skirt for individual testing and used a chemical washing process to detect sperm cells . The front sections again proved negative. But then, on September 3, 2024, came a seismic moment: the patches from the back of the skirt, boxed away for more than half a century, revealed traces of semen. And those traces, in turn, yielded a full DNA profile.
'It was just goosebumps – and I still get those now, you know, from September last year when I remember that call,' says Heidi Miller. She was at home when Andy Parry rang her with the news.
The following day, the DNA profile found on the skirt was loaded onto the UK National DNA Database. It matched a name on the system. 'That's when I first heard the name Ryland Headley,' Miller says – and then almost whispers: 'It just makes me go cold.'
Soon enough, they discovered that Ryland Headley was still alive, aged 92, and living in Ipswich. Dave Marchant says that from that moment on it was 'game on…let's do this'. Operation 'Beatle' was put in motion.
A 57-year search for a suspect had finally thrown up a name. But even before the case got to court, there was more to come.
Ryland Headley said little in the police custody suite and offered 'no comment' answers to the questions asked about Louisa Dunne. The 92-year-old first came to Britain from Jamaica in 1956. In Bristol he found work on the railways. It's where he also met his wife, Maggie (now deceased), a hospital nurse from Barbados. They had three children together. 'He is very quiet,' an old family friend in Ipswich told us. 'You wouldn't notice him.'
Heidi Miller says Headley's DNA was first added to the database in 2012, linked to an unrelated offence where no further action was taken. But as Dave Marchant's team delved deeper into his background, a startling revelation emerged. And a whole new light was about to be shed on another major crime story lost in the passage of time.
It involved a huge manhunt for a rapist in Ipswich in 1977. 'Ipswich Rapist Could Kill – psychiatrist warns,' a headline in the East Anglian Daily Times read at the time. He had already raped two elderly widows, aged 79 and 84.
'It was a massive case for the force,' Trevor Mason, then a detective sergeant with Suffolk Police, recalls. He remembers officers being drafted in from Special Branch, intelligence units, the drug and fraud squads, all to assist the manhunt. 'We just about dropped everything and came in to help.'
As in Bristol ten years earlier, a huge fingerprinting operation swung into action. Five thousand local men had their prints taken. 'If necessary we will fingerprint every man in Ipswich,' CID Chief Bert Jenkins told the press at the time. But they didn't have to.
Officers eventually took the fingerprints of Ryland Headley, then a 45-year-old night shift machinist living in Ipswich. Analysts would later match his prints to those found at one of the scenes. The reaction was one of 'elation', according to Mason. 'We were really, really over the moon. What those poor women suffered was absolutely horrendous.'
Five months later, Headley pleaded guilty at Ipswich Crown Court to multiple burglaries and two counts of rape. The harrowing accounts of his victims detail how he broke in to their homes and, in the darkness, threatened to kill them before raping them. One of them tried to bite him, but her false teeth weren't in, prompting her to plead with him: 'Haven't you got a mother?'
Jailing Headley, the judge told him 'the sentence of this court must reflect the horror' of his conduct, concluding: 'I am passing a sentence on each count of life imprisonment.'
But Headley's legal team appealed the life sentence, on the grounds that it was 'excessive' for a man previously of 'good character and reputation'. His barrister claimed the rapes were 'so far out of character that it is most difficult if not impossible to explain them'. The Appeal Court lent heavily on the account of an independent psychiatrist who argued that Headley had 'acted impulsively whilst he was in a state of sexual frustration and in the act of trying to financially appease his wife by petty burglary'.
The appeal was successful. A decade after Louisa Dunne's still unsolved rape and murder, Ryland Headley's life sentence was reduced to just seven years. He walked out of prison in 1980.
The decades of deceit eventually imploded in courtroom 1 of Bristol Crown Court on June 30, 2025. Aptly, just two days after the 58th anniversary of Louisa Dunne's murder. If Ryland Headley had 'conned the justice system' (in the words of Trevor Mason) in Ipswich in 1979, his attempt to do so again was utterly exposed.
Wearing a red jumper, both hands grasping a hearing loop, he showed little sign of emotion throughout his trial. His 'not guilty' plea to the rape and murder of Louisa Dunne was roundly rejected by the jury. It took them nine hours and 53 minutes to return their guilty verdicts. He will be sentenced on Tuesday.
The trial in itself was extraordinary. As the prosecution barrister Anna Vigars KC pointed out to the jury, it was examining – in 2025 – the murder of a woman born in the reign of Queen Victoria.
And the evidence was overwhelming. From the DNA match to the palm print. Four fingerprint analysts told the jury that the ridge characteristics of Headley's hypothenar (the part of the palm beneath the little finger) matched the mark found on the window at Louisa Dunne's house in 1967.
In fact, it also emerged that when Headley was arrested in 2012 for a separate offence and had his DNA taken, they might have been able to link him to the murder then. He'd been asked to give his palm print then (potentially triggering a match on the system), but he declined apparently after claiming 'arthritis' prevented his wrists from flexing enough to do so.
'I think he's a coward,' forensic coordinator Heidi Miller tells us. 'I think he would have gone to his death bed not ever telling anyone what he had done. There would have been no closure for anyone.'
Yet as one question – who killed Louisa Dunne? – is finally answered, another leaves a deeply unsettling postscript: what else may 92-year-old Ryland Headley have buried in his past?
Dave Marchant says he 'cannot rule out' other crimes. His team are currently liaising with other English forces and colleagues in the National Crime Agency to see 'if there is an opportunity to identify further offences'.
During the trial, Mary Dainton and her husband sat a few metres away from Headley. For Mary, Louisa's only surviving grandchild, this is a moment which will take time to absorb.
She is now trying to piece together more information about a grandmother she was mostly prevented from knowing. 'I still feel days when this isn't real. I do feel connected to her, and I've got no idea why, except DNA. The thing that caught him [Headley] has caught me. I do feel deeply linked to her.'
After her murder, a close friend said Louisa Dunne spoke always of the past and never of the present. Now the present has righted a wrong from the past. 58 years on, the murder of Louisa Dunne has finally been solved.
Watch more here:
92-year-old man pleads not guilty to rape and murder cold case from 1967