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The 92-year-old man was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 75-year-old Louisa Dunn inside his home in the southwestern UK in 1967, a prosecutor’s office official said.
In a news release, CPS said that Dan was found dead at his home on June 28, 1967. The 75-year-old was raped and killed by strangulation and choking.
According to the BBC, on the night of her murder, her neighbor reported hearing a woman’s “terrifying scream.”
She had twice been a widow and lived alone, but Dan was well known in her community.
At the time, investigators ran fingerprints on about 19,000 men and boys, trying to find a match against a print in the window where the killer appears to have entered Dan’s house.
Despite their efforts, no significant suspects were identified, but investigators continued to hold onto the 75-year-old’s clothing, including a blue skirt.
In 2023, detectives from Avon and Somerset Police Station requested for a forensic DNA test in a skirt that matches the profile of the man whose DNA was added to the country’s database in an unrelated case in 2012.
Louisa Dunn was seen in photographs from the 1920s and 1930s. (Avon and Somerset Police) 92-year-old Ryland Headley, seen in this undated photo from Avon and Somerset Police.
The man, Ryland Headley, served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in 1978 to rape a 79-year-old woman and an 84-year-old woman in her hometown of Ipswich.
Further investigation revealed that the print in Dan’s window matched Headley’s, leading to his arrest in November 2024, CPS officials said.
He was 34 when he raped and murdered Dan.
“Louis Dunn died in a horrific attack that she should have felt safest. Her own home,” said Charlotte Ream with the Crown Prosecutor’s Office. “For 58 years, this appalling crime has been unsolved, and Ryland Headley, the man we know now, took responsibility and shundred justice.”
By the time of Headley’s trial, all but one of the witnesses had died, and prosecutors relied on written accounts provided by the witnesses during the 1967 murder. Testimonies from the two women were read during trial, but their past statements were treated as hearsay as their accounts could not be questioned in court.
Nevertheless, detective inspector Dave Marcanto, who worked on the case, said it was “incredibly powerful and miserable” to “hear the voices of his 1977 crime victims.”
Headley is due to be sentenced tomorrow.
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