The Way a Disturbing Sexual Assault and Killing Case Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years After.

In the summer of 2023, Jo Smith, was asked by her team leader to “take a look at” a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in 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 political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a familiar figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation discovered few leads apart from a palm print on a back window. Police knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed unsolved.

“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” says Smith.

She found three. “I opened the first and closed it again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never undergone 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, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another nearly a year. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the value of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, the defendant, was found culpable 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 closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world. Later that year, the investigative team 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 chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the right career choice. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a decades-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in helping them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also re-examine active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the region and relocating them to a new central archive.

“The case documents had started in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are challenging – that’s my analytical approach – 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 television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “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 precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – 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 time to waste,” 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 navigating two eras. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” 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 wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed 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 previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted to assaulting two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Closing the Case

Smith was present at 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 were concerned 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 living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” 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 mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would remain incarcerated. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Lasting Impact

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, 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 certain that it is not the last solved case. There are approximately one hundred and thirty cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”