In what is being hailed as the oldest cold case ever solved in the United Kingdom, a 92-year-old man was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 75-year-old Louisa Dunne inside her home in southwestern England in 1967, officials with the Crown Prosecution Service announced.
In a news release, CPS said Dunne was discovered dead in her home on June 28, 1967. The 75-year-old had been raped and died of strangulation and asphyxiation.
On the night of her murder, according to the BBC, neighbors reported hearing a woman’s “frightening screams.”
Though she had twice been widowed and lived alone, Dunne was well known in her community.
At that time, investigators ran some 19,000 fingerprints of men and boys, attempting to find a match to prints found on a window believed to be where the killer gained entry to Dunne’s home.
Despite their efforts, a key suspect was never identified, though investigators held on to the 75-year-old’s clothing, including a blue skirt, that later cracked the case.
In 2023, detectives with the Avon and Somerset Police Department requested forensic DNA testing on the skirt, which matched the profile of a man whose DNA was added to the country’s database in 2012 on an unrelated incident.
That man, Ryland Headley, had served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in 1978 to the rape of a 79-year-old woman and an 84-year-old woman in his hometown of Ipswich.
Further investigation revealed that the prints found on Dunne’s window matched Headley’s, which led to his arrest in Nov. 2024, CPS officials said.
He was 34 years old when he raped and murdered Dunne.
“Louisa Dunne died in a horrifying attack carried out in the place where she should have felt safest – her own home,” Charlotte Ream, with the Crown Prosecution Service, said. “For 58 years, this appalling crime went unsolved and Ryland Headley, the man we now know is responsible, avoided justice.”
By the time of Headley’s trial, all but one of the witnesses had died, leaving prosecutors to rely on written accounts provided by witnesses at the time of the 1967 murder. The testimonies of two women were read during the trial, but because their accounts could not be questioned in court, their past statements were treated as hearsay.
Despite that, Detective Inspector Dave Marchant, who worked on the case, said that “Hearing the voices of the victims of his 1977 offenses” was “incredibly powerful and harrowing,” CBS News reported.
Headley is scheduled to be sentenced tomorrow.
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