Ryland Headley was convicted this week in the killing of 75-year-old Louisa Dunne. The police used DNA evidence to solve what had been one of Britain’s oldest cold cases.
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 neighbor found her body in her home outside Bristol, England, according to Avon and Somerset Police.
The judge, Derek Sweeting, said during the sentencing that Mr. 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 Mr. Headley had committed a “pitiless and cruel act.”
Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Mr. 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.
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