The Way a Disturbing Rape and Murder Investigation Was Cracked – Fifty-Eight Years After.
In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was asked by her team leader to examine a cold case from 1967. The woman was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a parent of two children, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar presence in her local neighbourhood.
There were no witnesses to her killing, and the initial inquiry found little to go on apart from a handprint on a back window. Police canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained 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 archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith hesitates 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 that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the opening chapter of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of the victim’s rape and murder and given a sentence to life.
An Unprecedented Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right professional decision. “He thought policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so I took the position.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. 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 local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective 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 career path.
“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the evidence, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Breakthrough
In cold case crime dramas, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. 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. “Live-time murders have to take priority.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist 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 living!”
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 weeks between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.
For a while, it was like living in two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The accounts. The way they describe 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 twice widowed, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle 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 analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘I’ve been a doctor 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 Pattern of Crimes
Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had admitted to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that earlier trial gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.
“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to smother the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.
Closing the Case
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 strong the evidence 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 go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by specialist officers. “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.
“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would die in prison.
A Profound Effect
For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very responsive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the pressure is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”
She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are about 130 unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and following other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”
