Inside the oldest cold case murder solved by UK police

Sunday World

4 days ago

Enquiries led police to Cork, but ultimately their killer was a lot closer to home
The man they were there to arrest, 92-year-old Ryland Headley, was not expecting them. It had been 57 years since he raped and murdered an elderly woman in her home, and he thought he'd gotten away with.
As the police officers knocked on the white front door, they heard stirring inside.
'What do you want?' the frail pensioner asked.
'Could you open the door, please? We'd like to speak with you,' she told him.
'No, no, no, you can't come in, what do you want to come in for?' the voice replied.
'It's a bit sensitive, so we'd like to come inside and speak to you properly,' she told him.
Mrs Dunne's front window was found open by neighbours on the morning of June 28 1967 (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
Further refusing, Headley tried to convince them to leave, telling cops he was a sick old man. But Naomi and Jo weren't taking no for an answer.
After opening the door to his early morning visitors, he eventually invited them in.
As he stood in his cluttered kitchen, with sleep in his eyes and still wearing his pajamas, the confused, elderly man was arrested for what would become the oldest murder case in British history to be solved.
'I'm arresting you on suspicion of the rape and murder of Louisa Dunne, which happened in Bristol in June 1967,' Detective Gane told him.
'The reason I'm arresting you is because police have investigative material that indicates that you're responsible.'
The Victim
Louisa Dunne nee Jarrett, was born in Barton Regis, Gloucestershire in 1892.
She was an active member of the Labour Party, alongside her husband Edward 'Teddy' Parker.
The couple were prominent members of their community and enjoyed busy social lives as part of their political activism.
After Teddy's death in 1945, the circle of friends Louisa had built around her faded, and she ultimately became estranged from her two daughters, Iris and Edna.
Headley murdered Louisa Dunne in 1967
Louisa's life became lonelier than it had ever been, and she fell into alcohol addiction.
But she wasn't completely alone..
Louisa forged close friendships with her neighbours, and eventually she remarried Irish widower John H. Dunne nine years before his death in 1961.
She led a quiet life, and among her few treasured possessions were her books and the deeds to her home.
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On the evening of 27th June 1967, Louisa visited her best friend of 30 years, Alice Clarke.
Once a week, Louisa would drop in on Alice, who was immobile due to illness, to check in on her.
That evening, she left to walk the short distance home, telling Alice she was heading to bed.
The following day, another neighbour, Violet Fortune, noticed Louisa didn't collect the newspaper she had left for her on the garden wall, a regular part of her morning routine.
Her neighbours also noticed that despite being security-conscious, her downstairs sitting room window was wide open, and she had not been seen that day.
Concerned for her well-being, one young neighbour went into her house to check on her, only to be met with a grisly scene.
The 74-year-old was lying dead on her living room floor. She was fully dressed but for her underwear which was found around her ankles. A scarf and tights were tied around her neck, and there was blood coming from her ear.
Louisa Dunne was killed in 1967 (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
Numerous neighbours had heard muffled screams the night prior, and later they realised the cries for help must have been from Louisa.
The police were called, and a murder investigation was launched.
Headed up by Detective Chief Superintendent Reginald Hicks, the police quickly established that the grandmother had been raped and her home robbed.
Her cause of death was recorded as asphyxia due to strangulation and pressure on the mouth.
As police sealed off the home, they methodically collected evidence from the scene, including a palm print on an upstairs bedroom window
In the immediate aftermath, 19,000 men and boys aged between 15 and 60 within the Easton area were fingerprinted as part of the investigation, but no matches were found.
With more than 8,000 people interviewed, the investigation even widened to Ireland.
Palm prints found at the property in Britannia Road (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
Gardai assisted police with their enquiries as they searched Cork for a 20-year-old Army Absentee who lived near Mrs Dunne, but fled about a fortnight after her death.
'We want to know where the man was on the day of the murder and why he left suddenly,' Reginald Hicks told the Bristol Evening Post in August 1967.
'It is essential that everyone who acted in this way should be eliminated, if possible, from our inquiries.'
But just like every other lead in the case, the enquiry went nowhere, and the case eventually went cold.
Reinvestigation
In 2023, the murder was reopened for a third time by the Major Crimes Review team at Avon & Somerset Police.
It was initially examined in 2009 and again in 2014, but it wasn't until the head of the cold case unit, Detective Inspector Dave Marchant, began reviewing the case with fresh eyes that they got the breakthrough they were waiting for.
Titled 'Operation Beatle', it was one of the force's 30 unsolved murder cases, and had 18 boxes of evidence stored away at a high-security warehouse in the hopes of one day solving the murder.
Detectives sorted through the exhibits in their archives, searching for an intimate swab that was collected during Louisa's autopsy, but it wasn't found.
DNA evidence linking the murder of Mrs Dunne to Ryland Headley was recovered from her blue skirt (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
Instead, investigators singled out the skirt Louisa was wearing at the time of her murder, which had never been tested for DNA.
When scientists examined the blue calf-length a-line skirt, they uncovered a semen stain which gave them the complete DNA profile of an unknown male, and with it, a break in the case they could have only hoped for.
But it would take some time before they would be able to put a name to their suspect, that's even if their DNA was already in the National DNA database. Hoping that their perp had previously had their genetic information entered into the system during another police investigation, they sent off the DNA and waited for a hit.
With luck on their side, they got it.
A man who had his DNA taken by police in 2012 as part of an investigation into an unrelated crime was found to be a 'billion to one' match. It was Ryland Headley.
But they didn't have a case just yet.
The Killer
Police began investigating their suspect, and found that at the time of the murder, the then 34-year-old was living on Picton Street, only 2.7 km from Louisa Dunne's home.
A railway worker originally from Jamaica, Ryland Headley emigrated to the UK in 1952, and married in 1958. An old family friend described the father-of-three as someone that was so quiet he was 'barely noticed'.
Picton Street was located just outside the radius in which police collected the prints of 19,000 men and boys, meaning Headley narrowly avoided detection. It wasn't the first time he dodged handing over his prints to the police, either. During another unrelated incident, he was asked to give his prints to police, and while he gave fingerprints, he told police his wrist was 'too sore' due to arthritis to give them a palm print.
Shortly after the murder, Headley uprooted his family and moved to Ipswich, where he went on to commit more heinous crimes.
Re-Arrest
An hour after his arrest in November 2024, Headley was booked into police custody.
During processing, he was asked if he had ever been arrested before. Headley thought for a moment before nodding his head.
Ryland Headley in custody last year (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
10 years after the murder of Louisa Dunne, police were on the hunt for a sex attacker targeting elderly women. He was dubbed the 'Ipswich Rapist', and the public were warned to lock their doors amid fears the predator could kill if he wasn't stopped.
Little did they know, he had already done so.
Two women, in their 70s and 80s, both widowed and living alone, were raped in their homes in October 1977 by an intruder who broke in during the night and threatened to kill them.
Fingerprints were left at both scenes, and 5,000 men had their prints taken as part of the inquiry.
This time, one of those men was Ryland Headley, and he was arrested and tried for rape.
Following a trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Citing that the penalty was 'excessive' for a man of previous good character and reputation with no convictions, his legal team appealed the sentence.
Headley was interviewed in November last year (Avon and Somerset Police/PA)
His barrister claimed that the rapes were impulsive and committed during a time of 'unusual circumstances' in his marriage, blaming his sexual frustration on being unhappily wed to an 'ambitious and demanding' wife.
The court agreed and found he was unlikely to reoffend, so in 1979 his sentence was reduced to seven years, of which he served two.
Ryland Headley left prison in the early 1980s, and remained a free man for more than forty years.
Evidence & The Trial
Now that he was back in police custody, the prosecution prepared for trial.
Police were finally able to take his prints, and he was matched to the palm print left on the back bedroom window at Louisa Dunne's home.
Despite this, and all the other evidence they presented to him during an interview, Headley repeatedly replied 'no comment', much to the frustration of detectives.
Murderer and rapist Ryland Headley
The pensioner denied knowing Louisa, being at the scene, or committing the murder. He coldly refused to give any indication as to why he did what he did.
While the defense fought for the evidence of his previous rape convictions to be omitted from the proceedings, the prosecution fought for their inclusion as the victims were so similar to Louisa Dunne.
All three were elderly women who lived at home alone, all three were raped, and while Louisa Dunne was killed, the other two were threatened with murder by their attacker.
The judge eventually ruled that the evidence could be heard, and the two-week trial began at Bristol Crown Court on June 16th 2025.
The court heard further evidence about a series of burglaries Headley committed between 1973 and 1978.
Ryland Headley has been told he will die in prison (Elizabeth Cook/PA)
After 3 days of deliberations, by a majority verdict of 10-2, the jury found Ryland Headley guilty, and on July 1st 2025, he was sentenced to life behind bars, with a minimum term of 20 years.
At sentencing, Mr. Justice Sweeting branded the murder a 'pitiless and cruel act by a depraved man.'
But while Headley is now behind bars, the case doesn't end for the police; in fact, they've been left with more questions than answers.
Headley raped and murdered Louisa Dunne in 1967, before going on to rape two women ten years later - but is that all he ever did?
Police in Suffolk and Norfolk don't think so, and now they wonder if he could be responsible for more unsolved murders.
At 92 years old, Ryland Headley will die in prison, that's for sure. But for police, the race is on to try and find out what else he may have done, to get justice for the victims, before his time runs out.