UK's oldest cold case solved: 92-year-old jailed for 1967 rape and murder

Judge told 92-year-old Ryland Headley he would die in prison after being convicted for the 1967 rape and murder of Louisa Dunne in England.

A 92-year-old man has been jailed for life for the rape and murder of a woman in England nearly six decades ago, in what is thought to be the UK’s oldest cold case to be solved.The judge who sentenced Ryland Headley on Tuesday told him that he would spend the rest of life in prison for raping and killing Louisa Dunne in her home in 1967. "The violation of her home, her body and, ultimately, her life was a pitiless and cruel act by a depraved man," Justice Derek Sweeting said in Bristol Crown Court.Headley was 34 when he broke into Dunne's home in Bristol and strangled her on 28 June 1967. Dunne, a 75-year-old widow and grandmother, was later found lying on her living room floor by a neighbour. During the break-in, Headley left a palm print on the glass of a window. Police at the time took the handprints of 19,000 men and boys in the area in an attempt to solve the crime, but were unable to find a match. Headley moved out of the area and went on to rape two older women in similar circumstances in the late 1970s, for which he was jailed. While he was initially sentenced to life in prison, his sentence was reduced on appeal, and he only served about two years behind bars. Despite his conviction and jail time, Headley's DNA was not collected until an unrelated arrest in 2012.Police reviewed the case in 2023, and last year, semen detected on the skirt that Dunne was wearing when she was killed was found to match Headley's DNA, while his palm print matched the one on her window. Headley was then arrested last November. 'You'll never be released'On Tuesday, Dunne’s granddaughter, Mary Dainton, told the court that her grandmother's murder and rape had cast a cloud over the rest of her mother's life."The fact the offender wasn’t caught caused my mother to become and remain very ill," said Dainton, who is now about the age her grandmother was when she was killed."It saddens me deeply that all the people who knew and loved Louisa are not here to see that justice is being done."Sweeting, the sentencing judge, said that by escaping punishment for so long, Headley had compounded the suffering of Dunne's family.He told Headley he had to serve a minimum of 20 years in prison and would typically spend time explaining the effect of such a term. But he was blunt in this case."You’ll never be released and you will die in prison," Sweeting said.