A British court on Tuesday gave a life sentence to a 92-year-old man for a crime committed in 1967, in one of the country’s oldest cold cases.
A jury had found the man, Ryland Headley, guilty on Monday of the murder and rape of a 75-year-old British woman, Louisa Dunne, nearly six decades after a neighbour found her body in her home outside Bristol, England, according to Avon and Somerset Police.
The judge, Derek Sweeting, said during the sentencing that Headley had shown a “complete disregard for human life and dignity,” according to a statement from the police after the sentencing hearing on Tuesday.
He added that Headley had committed a “pitiless and cruel act”.
Headley’s sentence has a minimum of 20 years before consideration for parole, which Judge Sweeting told him meant he would die in prison.
The police reopened the case in 2023. In May 2024, they sent items — including a blue skirt Dunne was wearing at the time of her attack — for forensic analysis, the police said.
Police obtained DNA that they were able to match with Headley.
Semen was found on the back of the skirt, said Heidi Miller, a forensics specialist at the Avon and Somerset Police Department, in an ITV documentary about the case released this week. “It gives me goose bumps,” she said.
Headley’s DNA was “placed onto the system in 2012 following an unconnected and unrelated incident,” according to the police, who did not give further details.
The police also matched a palm print that was left on Dunne’s bedroom window to one taken from Headley after he was in custody, they said.
Avon and Somerset Police arrested Headley on November 19, and he has been in custody since, the police said.
In a video released by the police, Headley can be seen answering “no comment” to a police officer’s questions about Dunne’s death.
In the initial investigation into Dunne’s murder, the authorities fingerprinted more than 19,000 men and took 1,300 statements.
Headley had not been part of that investigation because he lived outside of the area, according to a statement by Dave Marchant, a detective with the Bristol police.
In 1977, Headley was found guilty on two counts of rape elsewhere in England. “He attacked elderly women in Ipswich by breaking into their homes overnight and threatening them with violence,” according to the police.
He received a life sentence that was later reduced, the police said.
“I thought he would never be caught,” said Mary Dainton, Dunne’s granddaughter, in a video shared by the police, adding that she had given up hope that her grandmother’s murder would ever be solved.
Hearing the news that the police had found Headley was “quite a shock”, Dainton said.
Dainton was 20 at the time of her grandmother’s death, which deeply affected her and the rest of her family, she told reporters outside of the court on Monday.
“I don’t think my mother ever recovered from it,” she said. “The anxiety clouded the rest of her life.”
New York Times News Service