How a Appalling Rape and Murder Investigation Was Solved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.
In June 2023, an investigator, was asked by her sergeant to review a cold case from 1967. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent labor activist, and whose home had once been a center of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a recognized figure in her local neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the police investigation found little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Investigators canvassed 8,000 doors and took nineteen thousand palm prints, but no match was found. The case remained unsolved.
“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.
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 old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate 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 high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of the victim’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.
A Record-Breaking Case
Spanning 58 years, this is believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the UK, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the investigative team won recognition 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 dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a decades-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m inquisitive and I was interested in people, in helping them when they were in crisis.” Her previous experience in child protection involved grueling hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a standard schedule role, so here I am.”
Revisiting the Evidence
Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The major crime review team is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, disappearances – and also review live cases 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 secure storage facility.
“The case documents had originated in a local police station, then, in the years since 1967, they moved to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. DI Dave Marchant took a novel strategy. Once an engineer, Marchant had “taken a hard left” on his career path.
“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” 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 real life, the testing procedure and testing take a long time. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Live-time murders have to take precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit on the DNA database – and it was someone who was living!”
The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the weeks 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 living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they portray people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”
Getting to Know the Victim
Smith felt she got to know the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her on the doorstep every day. She was widowed twice, estranged from her family, but she remained social. 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 spoke with the doctor, now 89, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail 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 haunts you.’”
A History of Violence
Headley’s previous convictions seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to assaulting two elderly 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 cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, supported by a psychiatrist who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.
Securing Justice
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 compelling the proof was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to proceed. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be solved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma 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 tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all intents and purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.
A Profound Effect
For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, 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 started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”
She is confident that it is not the last solved case. There are about 130 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 leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
