July 15, 2025 • 48 mins
Ryland Headley was 34-years-old when he raped and murdered 75-year-old Louisa Dunne in her home in Bristol (UK) on June 28, 1967. The biggest lead investigators had was to be found ‘lifted’ from the dusted powder of a window frame at the back of Louisa Dunne’s house and the residual trace of a palm print. It triggered the biggest finger and palm print operation in the history of the force. No suspect was found and the case went cold. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the rape/murder of 75-year-old Louisa Dunne, the evidence left behind, as well as similar attacks 10 years later and 212 miles away credited to the 'Ipswich Rapist', Ryland Headley. Joseph Scott Morgan explains how investigators careful collection of evidence in 1967 was used to convict 92-year-old Ryland Headley 58 years after the crime.
Transcript Highlights
00:00.43 Introduction - 1967 Cold Case
05:23.79 1967 unsolved murder - SOLVED 2025
09:43.05 Neighbor checks on Louisa Dune, 75
14:43.95 The icy fingers of death
19:24.99 Neighbor calls police after finding body
24:11.77 Scarf used to strangle victim
29:09.05 The Ipswich Rapist - 1977
34:15.57 Ipswich victims were 79 and 84
35:11.95 Ryland Headley sentenced to life, sentenced overturned, released in 1980
40:06.98 Evidence lost
44:12.49 Partial Palm Print from 1967
47:03.59 DNA from 1967 matched to Ryland Headley
Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality Dytis, But Joseph's gotten more. You know, I run
my mouth a lot about science and about being a
scientist and how I rely on those methods that have
(00:22):
been developed over the years through study and practice, and
I'll stick with that. I'm not going to deviate from
that at all. But you know, there's this one theme
that runs through medical legal death investigation, and it's the
idea of documenting everything that we see. I tell my
(00:48):
students at Jacksonville State University without fail, every year I
teach a medical legal death investigation class for undergraduates twice
a year, and I tell them, I say, look, you are,
in fact going to be the documentarian of things that
are happening in the world in which you find yourself
(01:08):
in the world of death. But it's important to understand
that you're also a historian, because you're documenting the lives
of individuals that otherwise may not have even been a
blip on the radar screen of life today. Is one
such case, a case that reaches back all the way
(01:32):
to nineteen sixty seven in Great Britain. It's about a
little old lady that was found dead on her living
room floor, or as the Brits like to say, the
room of her parlor, and she had undergone brutality that
(01:54):
is almost unimaginable. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. Dave always have a uh an affinity for
British names and town names in particular, uh things like
(02:16):
Gloucester uh and uh the these these different types of
names of cities uh that you know, we have them
here in America. But you know, because of the way
we form our words and these sorts of things we
don't they don't necessarily come off the same when you
go back to the mother tongue, if you will. Yeah,
(02:40):
I know. And and so you see, like one town
that's gonna uh factor prevalently into into our sorty day
is a town called Ipswich. And there's actually an Ipswich
here in America. There might be a couple there, probably
are in the northeast. Yeah, And it's one of those
odd words or odd names. It actually sounds the same
(03:03):
here as it does there.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But that's how you can tell that leaders of a
particular county got together and said, we got a bunch
of people that want to form their own town.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
We got to give it a name. And they start
throwing it.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
By the time last call rolls around, it's like switch, Yeah,
do you.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Need a handkerchief?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Can you write it down? A good job, Dave.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, the Ipswich rapist actually comes into play here, Dave.
And that's you know, all of these cases like this,
particularly years ago, there were the press used to like
to give them names, and I think a lot of
that slinging the ink if you will, it's very salacious. Yeah,
(03:51):
I'll give you an example. You know, we had in
Atlanta a series of homicides involving elderly ladies that was
called the City Killer. It's got that ring to it,
you know. And in this particular case or cases, we
have the Ipswich rapist, you know right now they're talking
(04:12):
about and the press loves these. We've got the Lisk,
the Long Island serial killer, and now we have NISC,
the New England serial killer. They just love the stuff.
I don't know if it's an economy of word or
if it's if it's something that they're just trying to
dangle in from the public to get you coming back
from more.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Actually it's it is that it's a way to keep
people because if you can identify you know, a story
by an individual or by a location, then people recognize
what it is and you don't have to explain it
every time. So yeah, it's it's word economy and marketing.
You know much better. But in this one, you're talking
about a murder that took place of a seventy five
(04:55):
year old, tiny woman, and it happened when I was
a baby, and her town and community and what family
was left. I mean, they're all dead and gone except
for one detective and one family member. All these years later,
you're going to tell me that in nineteen sixty seven,
(05:16):
this crime took place, there was evidence left behind, including
a fingerprint, a palm print, and DNA, and did not
get it solved until right now. This is a story
that is ongoing as we speak. It has just been
to that point where we now know who the suspect
is and how long said suspect will be spending in prison.
(05:40):
But Joe, why why is it possible to it in
nineteen sixty seven you had a fingerprint, a palm print,
and you had other evidence, and no suspect can get wrangled.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I don't get that. How does something like that happen?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Well, if somebody it's I always say this, David. You know,
I have people and look there, I don't think that
they're an educated I think they're ill educated about certain things.
They believe that if you have if you have some
type of scientific marker seen, whether it be a fingerprint,
(06:14):
a droplet of blood, seminal deposition, or even a tool mark,
to say, well you've got this bit of data, once
you go compare it to something and make an arrest. Okay,
what am I going to compare it to? Because if
no one is in the database, say, for instance, for fingerprints,
(06:37):
you know what I mean, it's grand. I'm so happy
for you that you recovered a partial palm print or
you know, maybe a partial off of a thumb or
an index finger and that's you did a great job
at the saying look at this, look at all of
the detail. We can see, we can classify this, and
we can identify this manution and all this stuff. But
if you don't have anything to compare it to. And
(06:58):
the same principle applies with DNA. You know, you can
go and collect DNA, but if somebody, for instance, is
not in the code of database in America, then yeah,
you've got a great profile and it would be great
for future reference. But if you've got nobody to compare
it to, it's as Grandpappy used to say, it ain't
(07:19):
worth a gunpowder to blow it to hell.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It's just it's not.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It has no value at that particular point time. Now,
that doesn't mean it's not going to have value in
the future. Understand me there, And that's the beauty of
this Historically. You know, I talked about documenting everything that
we see and everything that we do. If it had
not been for the work of those individuals that have
I don't know by this time, long term, long long,
(07:45):
long since turned to dust, if you will, if they
had not documented it back then, we would not have
an arrest affected as of I think it was July
the first when you had somebody that was hooked up
on chargers on this thing.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
The woman's name is Louisa Dunn, seventy five year old,
small woman. That was the physical description by a neighbor.
She is so tiny and so fragile and seventy five
years old in nineteen sixty seven. That means that she
was born in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, when this is great, Britain was still an empire
right still ruled India. You know, women, these sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, Yeah, she had lived through two World Wars, she
had lived through the first man going into space.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Eric, I think about this now. Her murder was solved
by technology that today we sometimes take for granted. I
am as just as bad as everybody else about watching
SVU on TV and just assuming that once you've got
DNA boom, you got everything, it's done. You know what,
(09:04):
do not go to commercial break. We got to get
another storylined up. We already got this one. But like
you said, to start with, if it's not in the system,
if there's not something there, you're talking about going down
a different pathway. And now we do have genetic genealogy
and other things which some of us are again some
of us are not. How you feel about government intrusion
on your private life and I have There are plenty
(09:27):
of issues to discuss on a different day in time,
But the bottom line is the detectives in nineteen sixty
seven did a good job at collecting because what they
were able to collect that day, Now, what did they
find Joe at the scene of Louisa Dunn's home when
she was found because I know that it was a
(09:49):
neighbor that actually they hadn't seen her that morning, and
she had a regular routine where they knew they would
see her every morning, and when they didn't, I'm talking
about neighbors, neighbors didn't see her. And so again, now
this is at a time when I don't really recall
nineteen sixty seven. I don't know how people normally live
their lives then, but I think they were Their heads
(10:11):
were not always tilted down looking at a five and a.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Half inch screen in their palm of hand.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Oh lord, no, no, I mean you know you had
what was that showed that Tim Allen had years ago
where Home Improvement the talk to the guy over the fence.
You had a lot of fence fence talking that would
go on.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Actually had a radio show called Across the Fence every
morning at nine am.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And it's such a it's something that's missing, you know.
I know that my grandmother, she had a hedgerow at
her house in the front yard. The back of the
house was a farm, but she and she had a
neighbor that lived next door, and they would literally talk
over the hedge to one another, and it could be
shouting back and forth while they're feeding their dogs that
they kept outside and that sort of thing. But you
(10:56):
kind of you get into a routine, you know, during
that period of and those people had a routine. I mean,
it's no different thing than a life that's lived now.
It's that when somebody turns up and if you know
somebody is kind of reclusive anyway, uh, maybe you're the
one person that actually ever sees them, and when they
don't make an appearance, you know, it actually raises the
(11:19):
eyebrow a bit. But yeah, and we have to keep
in mind. Let me and I've done a disservice here
because we have to understand that where where Louise's homicide
took place was actually on the western side actually the
south western side of Great Britain, and that that comes
into play here as far as I'm concerned. In it's
(11:42):
in the town of Bristol.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Because it was a poor town. Is that why it
comes into play?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah it does because we're going to
get to Ipswich in a bit. But with Bristol, it's
it's on the southwestern side of the country and it
is a port town. Enter steely enough.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
I was.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Last September, when I was in Great Britain, I got
to visit a university Dave where they're doing excavations of
a graveyard of industrial workers in Bristol that they discovered,
and some of these people are stacked on top of
one another, and they've got all of these the skeletons
(12:24):
that they are pulling out of these graves. There had
these unique findings relative to the industrial age of Great Britain.
This is when industry was just getting getting cooking. You've
got these like huge wear patterns on the bones of
traumatic arthritis and all these other things, fractures that never
got repaired. You find evidence of malnourishment, you know, in
(12:48):
the bones. And I got to see some of these skeletons,
but those all came out of Bristol. That was a
fascinating visit.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
By the way, kind of gives you a different idea
of what rest in peace really means.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah, it really does. Particularly, you know, we do so
much resting nowadays. You know, we can't we can't really
comprehend the world that you know, that our forebears lived in.
When you've got actual evidence of tuberculoyd changes in bone,
for instance, what does that mean that really wellculosis at
some point, I mean you can actually see that manifested
(13:21):
on the bone and yeah, yeah, and it's it's all
of these little things. And we're going to do an
entire episode very shortly, my friends on forensic anthropology, and
I'm going to introduce a term in there that applies
to this. But yeah, So Bristol Seaport industrial town. She
(13:41):
was found, you know, in her home the neighbor. Actually,
if I'm not mistaken, Dave, I think they came in
through the window.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, she Actually it was the neighbor. And you've taught
me to look at the finder. I was, and I
actually titled it the Finder, I think because I was wondering,
you know, you've got an unsolved crime, who finds you know,
who is the finder? And actually she didn't see her
that morning, and so after a while I was like, yeah,
go check on her, and so she walked over to
the house and peeked in the window and saw her Louisa.
(14:12):
She said that she thought maybe it was a heart attack,
because Luisa was seventy five years old, and so she
went to a side window that she was able to
get open, and she crawled through the window, and of
course when she got upon the body, she wasn't totally sure.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
She just knew she was dead.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
She grabbed her hand and she actually described it, you know,
as her hand was cold as ice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, and that's one thing that never really leaves you.
There is cold, and we've all experienced it. But when
the icy fingers of death grip you, it's something that
you will never ever forget. Dave, you had mentioned the neighbor.
(15:04):
The neighbor's name is actually Vi v Allen. And when
Via came into miss Dunn's home and discovered that she
had this this coolness to the touch, if you will,
you automatically, it's a weird thing that we have. I
(15:25):
don't know if it's a primal thing or whatever it
is with us humans. It almost makes you, uh, it
does in certain instances. It will make you retract. You
know that it'll actually make you. It's it's it's startling,
you know, when you touch touch a body and it's
icy cold like that, because if you don't something that's expected.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I remember I asked you about this one time when
I was sitting up with the dead at a funeral home. Yeah,
And they asked me because they'd had too many people,
more people than expected to came by for an evening visitation,
and the hair needed to be fixed because the family
was coming in early for some private time with the body.
And I had never been alone with the deceased person
(16:10):
that I knew, and I knew his daughter, and so
as I'm in there, I didn't, Hey, man, comb the hair.
Not a big deal until you have to go comb
the hair by yourself in a funeral home at night,
when you're the only one there, and you're a child
before and you're a teenager. And yeah, So I ended
up looking and I saw his chest rising. Icing He's
(16:36):
wearing a pinstriped suit. I know it's an optical illusion
because we don't ever actually see anybody breathe. We see
it constantly, so our mind is conditioned to see that
chest rise and fall, even though we never pay attention
to it. Now, this was what was being explained to
me on the phone, which, by the way, this is
before cordless phones. Thankfully they had a phone that had
(16:56):
a really long cord. That I was outside. I was
outside with the door open, and I'm standing there in
the yard with the little springy thing as far as
it would go and Steve Brian Brian leef Funerr home
is Dave. I believe me, I did it myself. The
man is not a lot, Steve. He's breathing. You have
(17:17):
to be here now because I'm leaving, Dave. Don't leave,
you cannot leave.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, I got to tell you that place right into something.
I guess this morbid note has always been present in
my life because even as a kid, I remember asking
my mother at one point tom when people would dial
on television, like I used to love things like Gunsmoke.
I love to watch gun Smoke and shows like High
(17:42):
Chaparral and you know those old Wild Wild West, you
know all of those old Western series. And I remember
asking my mother if they were dead, and she said, no,
they're acting. And I have a distinct memory. As I
got older, I would always look at the chest of
the actor slaying on the ground, and I was fascinated
by how long they could hold their breath, because if
(18:04):
it was like a shot where they would hold on
the body, their chests would not rise and fall. I
did see, however, a couple of times where you could
see it, and so you know that was an editing problem.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
But you know you want to freak yourself out, I've
got one for you. Watch Deliverance, okay, yeah, right after
the rape scene, right after ned Baby gets boogered. Yeah,
look at the guy that's dead. Okay, yeah, his name's
Bill McKinney, I think, yeah, Bill McKinney.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
For two minutes, Bill McKinney laid motionless, did not breathe
kept his eyes open. A mosquito landed on the white
of his eye, and the man didn't blink.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
They didn't have to cut two minutes.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Just if you have a chance to watch that movie,
and most men do not watch that part of the movie.
If not, we usually leave crying, screaming and throwing up.
But you know, it's the reason a lot of us
don't ever want to end up in prison.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
You know, it's the reason. And so anyway, so.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
The reasons some of us don't want to take canoe
trips either. But yeah, but yeah, so you walk, You
come into a home with an individual that is deceased,
and your frame of reference for them is life. And
so the first thing that you notice when you place
your hand on them is this this iciness that they
(19:22):
have about them. But there were other things that were
not right. She could tell pretty quickly that that miss
done had endured some level of trauma. And when she
rang up ring up the local constabular areas they're called
over there, they arrived at the scene and what they saw, Dave,
(19:46):
this is I'm not saying that, you know, in Bristol
they had not had rape homicides before. That's ridiculous. Of
course they have. You know, it's a big town. They
would have seen it. But this, this is something that
really captured the town, the imagination, the press and everything
because it was It's not like this is a couple
(20:06):
who say, say in Britain, a couple of blokes that
were having at it in a local pub, pummeling each other.
You're talking about this diminutive, little old lady who's a
recluse that's found in her home and she's wearing her dress,
but it's all disheveled and it appears that a scarf
has actually been used around her neck to choke the
(20:30):
life out of her.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Dave, when I was reading over the description of Louisa
Dunn again a seventy five year old, very small woman,
and the description that she's lying flat on her back,
in her living room, cuts around her chin, bruising to
(20:53):
her neck and in her thigh, and hemorrhaging in her eyes.
What does the cuts, the hemorrhaging that what does that
tell you? Right off? The bat length flat on her
back seemed odd to me. I don't know why it did.
I would have thought she would have been in a
different position, but length flat in her back once.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
The right Well, first off, the level of violence is.
First off, you're not going to have to use a
tremendous amount of force with her. And you couple that
with the fact that the older you get, the more
obviously the more fragile you get, you know, I mean
a lot of us can reflect now, you know, like
(21:32):
our grandparents. Did you have notice how easily your grandparents
bruised and how long they would hold onto a bruise,
you know, on their arms, and their skin becomes almost
like parchment paper, you know. I remember that about my grandmother.
I remember it in a loving way. But you know,
you can see that the fragility of life, you know,
(21:53):
and so it doesn't take a lot to inflict injuries
to the elderly. However, in this particular case, there are
certain injuries that really stand out. You've got cuts, you've
got bruises, But one of the interesting manifestations here are
these injuries on the interior of the thighs. Most of
(22:15):
the time you're going to have these in a there
is a difference between raped and forcible rape. Some people
will be raped and they'll just acquiesce and give in,
and it's horrible to think about they realize what's but
some people do really fight back. You couple that with
somebody that's incredibly savage. Even if the person is bending
(22:40):
to the will of the perpetrator, they'll still want to
be violent with them. And so you'll see like on
the inner thighs. I've actually seen contusions day on the
inner thighs of women that have been raped, where you
can actually match up finger patterns now fingerprints, but you
will see the outline of a hand where a hand
has been placed on the inner thigh and the legs
(23:02):
forced open. And then you know, things become begin to
get into focus at that point in time about what
actually probably happened in this environment. You know, the assailant
is pressing himself upon her. She probably reacts, you know,
(23:23):
with some level of violence on her own to try
to own her own to try to find this guy off,
and that's not happening.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
What's he going to do? Well.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I don't know if perpetrators mail perpetrators carry around lady
scarves in their pockets. I guess they could, if there's
some kind of they have some kind of serialized fetish
with this, But it would seem to me that you're
using what I would like to refer to as a
weapon of convenience. If she's got a scarf laying around
the house, this is something that he can actually wrap
(23:51):
around her throat and use as a ligature. And the
thing when you get a scarf, and if every everybody
will just imagine your mind, what I'm not talking about
like a what do you call it? Like a knit
scarf like you wear in the winter time. Okay, toboggan,
not a toboggan, but you know, a woolen scarf. I'm
(24:14):
talking about like a decorative scarf. They're very delicate most
of the time, and but as you take them and
you kind of twist them around, they become more robust,
and they truly do become a thicker ligature. But they're
not going to lease the say marks behind say, for instance,
a rope or a wire is going to leave behind,
but what it will leave behind are these delicate little
(24:36):
contusions underneath the skin. And scarfs themselves seem very very
soft and pliable. Some of them are nylon, many of
them are silk, but did you know even with silk,
it has an abrasive quality to it, and you can
see light, little surface abrasions on the skin, and underlying
those abrasions, you're actually going to see contusions in the
(24:58):
muscles around the neck. And this can be kind of verified,
i think, by virtue of the fact that they talk
about that she had this kind of storm of hemorrhage
in her eyes, which are of course what they're saying
in these reports is that what they're describing are actually
petikia and these particular hemorrhages. And I've had doctors that
(25:21):
have referred to them as particular storms. And it's because
they're so there's so many of them that they're almost innumerable,
because they're so tiny, and they like to refer to
them as punk tate, almost like a little dot, and
you can't it's hard to describe. You've never seen them.
But when you look at the white of the eye
the sclera, you'll see them there and also on the
(25:44):
inner lid of the eye as well. It's almost like
they're matching up, so the little vessels in the lower
lid of the eye and sometimes the upper lid, and
then all over the white of the eye. The more
pressure that's applied, the more these vessels will give way.
And it's also an indication of life in a perimorum
state where they're fighting against us so robustly that the
(26:07):
eyes just become so congested with these things. It would
have been a very violent death for Louisa. But in
its wake, in its wake, that perpetrator that committed this
awful crime left behind physical evidence back in nineteen sixty
(26:31):
seven that has damned him in twenty twenty five. So
David nineteen sixty seven, Louisa Dunn is a homicide victim
(26:56):
in Bristol, Bristol, Britain, and the case is not solved.
It goes cold, kind of like her body was cold,
you know, per the description of the finder on that morning.
We jump all the way forward, I think it's nineteen
(27:18):
seventy three. Now we're going from one major port city
in Great Britain, which is on the west coast in
Bristol all the way to Ipswich, which is on the
east coast, which almost I'm going to be off of
my alignment here, which almost lines up. It's actually a
(27:38):
bit north. Ok, let me get to straight. So it's
northeast of London if you will. It's not in northeastern England.
That's way up north like York in that area, but
it Ipswich lines up closer to like being just south
of like Amsterdam, if you were to lay a straight
(27:59):
line cross it. It's north of Dunkirk, which of course
is in Belgium or France, I can't remember right on
the border there. And of course it's north of what
we know is the White Cliffs of Dover, you know,
where our boys would be coming back in. They knew
that as they saw the White Cliffs of Dover they
had made it safely back from a bombing run. So
it's north of that area. But yet it is a
(28:20):
major port city. And I find this very interesting, Dave,
that we've got this homicide that took place back in
nineteen sixty seven and that's unsolved in one port city,
and then we've got what turns out to be a
couple of rapes in a town that is on the
(28:41):
east coast of England and again a port city Dave.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Ten years later nineteen seventy seven, two older women seventy seven.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I don't I was thinking seventy three, but yeah, seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
The thing is is that when you go back to
the sixty seven rape and you mentioned the injuries and
the fight in her Yeah, because ten years later when
two older women, one sixty nine the other seventy four,
I think in Ipswich, when the Ibswitch rapist was labeled,
(29:14):
that's what they called him. Yep, seventy nine and eighty four.
That's hold the women were that were raped in Ipswich.
And just so you know, in nineteen sixty seven they
did fingerprinting and got a fingerprint and a palm print
out of the house where of the suspect. They've been fingerprinted.
(29:37):
Everybody in the area they fingerprinted. I think over five
thousand local men in Bristol. I think about that the
time it took to fingerprint, analyze and look and trying
to match up. So it was an ongoing project that
involved multiple, multiple agencies. By nineteen seventy there was one
person working on it. They'd exhausted everything they could do
(29:59):
to try to match up the fingerprint or palm print. Now,
ten years after the murder of Louisa Dunn, you have
a seventy nine and an eighty four or four year
old woman who are now.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
In Ipswich and they are both raped.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
So they do find fingerprints at the scene, and they
the investigators, they start doing the exact same thing they
did ten years earlier in Bristol. They start charting everybody.
They start charting fingerprints on every mail they could find
that had any kind of access to that area at
(30:35):
the time of those two rapes that were done by
the press labeled the Ipswich Rapist Show.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
You know, I got to tell you this is an
interesting thing, a comparative analysis between gathering of suspect data
when you compare it to the US and Great Britain.
I'm going to throw a name out to you that
sounds rather odd. A guy named Klin and Pitchfork and yeah,
and Colin Pitchfork was responsible for the rape and murder
(31:07):
of two young girls in Great Britain. Well, Colin Pitchfork's
first case where DNA was actually used to convict somebody.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Oh, wow, every Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah. As a matter of fact, it came off of
the research that Sir Alec Jeffries was doing. Alec Jefferies
is considered to be the father of modern DNA forensic
DNA technology. Okay, and brilliant, brilliant mind. But when Colin
Pitchfork and I think this was in eighty six committed
(31:43):
you know, these crimes, I think it was, you know,
like in nineteen nineteen seventy nine through eighty three or
something like that. I can't remember the exact dates the
area where he took these lives and committed these crimes.
(32:05):
Day they got a block of males in this area
and compelled them to give DNA samples. Can you imagine
them doing that in America? And you begin to think
about doing the fingerprints and compelling somebody to give up
their fingerprints. It's just a different way of policing. It's
a different way that they handle things. So this kind
of harkened back, you know, I'm thinking about this, and
(32:27):
it's it's interesting to think about, you know, how our
our two systems work. You know, and I know a
lot of people would say, well, if you got nothing
to hide, then you shouldn't you shouldn't fear anything. But yeah, well.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
I guess so. You know that's the same thing, Dave.
Why won't you let them in the house to look
for that? Because they don't.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Have a right, that's why.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
But David, he's got nothing to hide. I don't have
anything to hide, but they have no right to look.
You know, think about it, Mark Firman exists to drop
a bloody glove.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
In your hallway, That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
So you've got that specter that's out there. But either way,
with the Ipswich racist and how it applies to Louisa
Dunn is that they actually developed evidence day based upon
this partial palm print and fingerprint where they're able to
tie what they think eventually would be these cases together.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Dave, Well, I know that they were able to find
Rylan Headley is the guy's name, and Ryland Headley was
forty five years old when the rapes in Ipswich happened
in seventy seven, and he was one of the many
who actually was fingerprinted and he was matched up and
(33:46):
actually it went all the way through. He was guilty
of the crimes of burglary and rape and was sentenced.
Now here's the important part to pay attention to on
what happened to Ryland Headley when he was charged, arrested, charged,
convicted in the rapes of those two women in Ipswich
(34:09):
in nineteen seventy seven. Now he was sentenced to life
in prison. It was these crimes were considered so heinous
that this person did not need to be walking the
face of the earth. Remember, these are elderly women, seventy
nine and eighty four years old.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
They couldn't.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
One of the women actually tried to bite him, tried
to buy but you know why she couldn't. She didn't
have her dentures in. She couldn't leave a mark, that's
how hard she was struggling. And that impacted the judge
at sentencing when he heard this description, because these women
did not die, but they fought, and so Hedley was
(34:50):
sentenced to life. Well, his attorneys or barristers as they're
called there, whenever I get a letter from a barrister
that claims they've got some money for me overseas, you know, yeah,
get those emails about once a month, just send one
hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Anyway, so the barrister said, hey, these are rapes. This
sentence is excessive, and so there was an appeal of
the sentence of Ryland Headley, and the appeal court.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Actually lent heavily.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And I say this because it's really important to note
that there was a psychiatrist who came in and said,
he has no record of anything before this. He was
a good guy, of good character. We've got nothing on
him now. Granted they only know what he's been convicted
of kids as well, yes, oh yeah, married with children.
(35:48):
Forgot about that, And so you've got a guy of
good reputation. And they argued in that, and the judge
sided with the psychiatrist that this was a momentary lapse
in judgment and whatever you want to call it, and
reduced his sentence to seven years. So the Ipswich rapist
(36:09):
of nineteen seventy seven, Ryland Headley, walked out of prison
in nineteen eighty. Think about that for just a minute,
Joseph Scott Morgan.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Yeah, and that they would cut the sky loose. Yeah,
you know, I guess hindsight is in fact twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
They blamed his wife. They blamed his wife.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
They said that she was not providing the sex that
he needed and he was committing the burglaries to satisfy
her need for stuff.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
It was his wife's fault.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
That's why he stole, burglarized, and raped these old women.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
So she needed stuff and he needed sex. Yeah, so
he would pray upon the elderly, right, And that's essentially
excuse I guess, yes, well, seam, it was yeah, no kidding.
Well because of that though, because of what had occurred,
(37:13):
the story gets even more interesting as we've developed through
time and crime science, Dave, you know, databases, national databases
have been created relative to any kind of biological sample
that might come up. In the US, we have COTIS,
So codis is you have two categories. You have the
(37:33):
known offenders, Like if somebody gets hooked up, they're in jail,
they're hooked up on a rape charge or some kind
of sexual offense, you're compelled by law to give a
DNA sample and that goes into the database. The other
category is called the forensic database, which is a list
of unknowns. Well he he, the perpetrator in this case,
(37:56):
is compelled. His DNA from the seventy seven cases was
actually placed into the database that wound up with a
match on his DNA that I think that they took
from him in twenty twelve, they went back and got
this from him.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Okay, he got tangled up with law enforcement in twenty twelve.
Now we cannot be told what happened, because whatever he
was arrested for in twenty twelve, whatever the charge was,
whatever was going on, it was all dropped. And because
they worry about a person's appearance, I guess, so since
(38:36):
there was no adjudication of the case, it was just dropped.
We can't even find out what he was arrested for.
But it was involved enough that they did arrest him.
They did the whole fingerprint thing all over again, updated
the records, and got DNA.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, and so that was real. And it was because
of that that they were able to actually go back
and if I remember correctly, all the way back with
the still homicide, would Louise had done they had done
a rape kit on her back then obviously, because there's
is obvious signs of sexual assault. Dave, you know, in
(39:11):
that case, they lost the rape kit. They lost it,
they lost the samples that were taken. But for over
fifty years they kept her clothing folded up inside of
a box away from daylight and kept it stowed. Now,
just imagine this. I don't see how they were able
(39:31):
to retain the clothing but didn't retain the rape kit
for whatever reason, I don't know. It probably didn't go
to the same place, probably went by the hospital.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
We lose stuff all the time here, you know, Yeah,
we do. It's numbing to me them the number of
important cases that we have, all this information that didn't
even happen a long time ago. We get lost because oh,
we don't have the money to store things properly.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
But anyway, Yeah, and we'll spend money on other things,
but you know, we don't have I don't know. Sometimes
I think it's an absence of common sense and an
absence of compassion. These poor women have been assaulted and
you can't do your due diligence to hold on to
rape get and secure it. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
It's a real head scratcher.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
It always has been for me.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
It is for me too, And I didn't realize it
was a problem until I started doing these shows.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Yeah, in the last five years, I did.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Horrible, horrible, absolutely horrible.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Anyway, anyway, there were two interesting times of this too.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Joe two times two thousand and nine and twenty fourteen,
the case of Luis's case was brought back out. They
didn't just say in nineteen seventy we've exhausted everything we
can do.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
They didn't do that. It was a cold case, but
they would revisit.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
It, and then in two thousand and nine they actually
brought the case back to the four and looked at it.
Didn't find anything that's kind of surprising. But it was
in twenty fourteen, two years after the twenty twelve investigation,
that they brought it out again. But that's where you've
got no rape get you don't have the things you need.
(41:03):
So it's looked at multiple occasions, but it wasn't until
the last twelve months that they were able to go
to those clothing. And it was the clothing that provided
the dress. And that's what I got to ask you.
I even wrote it down here because I don't understand
what it means, Joe. What did they actually do, How
(41:25):
did they get how did they get the material out
of the clothing that they could then test.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I'm not going to mention any names, but the initials
are Bill Clinton. If you'll think back to the infamous
blue dress that Lewinsky retained. It's the same principle they
had seminal deposition on Louisa Dunn's clothing. Okay, And the
(42:00):
way this happens is that most of the time nowadays
with clothing, you might not be able to see anything
with a naked eye, or as some people refer to it,
the unaided eye. What you'll do is use alternative lighting sources,
which you know you'll be able to see because light
(42:23):
works on wavelengths, right, and so you can use ultraviolet
light for instance, where the seminal stain will give off
a very particular type of luminescence when it's certain light lightweight,
when certain light lighting is applied to it. Now that
(42:46):
is merely that is merely a qualitative test. You can't
say who semen that is or if it contains sperms.
So all you can say is that this is consistent
with seminal deposition. So then you have to go in
(43:06):
and sample those areas and they go into a further
test on that particular bit of clothing after they've identified
it with what's called an acid phosphatase test, and when
man ejaculate contained within the the ejaculate there is a
(43:27):
certain high amount of an enzyme acid phosphatasee contained in there.
And when you can identify that, then you know that
you can go deeper with your examination relative to the
specifics about the identity of the individual. And it's through
that stain that they were able to claim a biological
(43:48):
profile after all of these years. Daveable, I know it is.
It's mind blowing. And of course, because this subject had
been compelled to be entered into the database, they got
to hit. They got to hit, they got to hit.
Once they brought this thing out. Now, I think that
(44:08):
they probably suspected him because one of the things that's
going to kind of sure this thing up is this
partial pom print, And these are other compelling bits of evidence.
Remember you you no longer have any eyewitnesses or secondary
eye witnesses. You don't have any any of the people
that were going to appear in court right back in
the late sixties. Only left one detective. And I think
(44:33):
that maybe her granddaughter is still alive, but she's she's
a human being. Her case is still open. And this
guy has been living his life all of these years.
Dave has been able to have a family. Hell, he's
lived in two coastal cities. How about you. I don't
know about you. I'd love to have the opportunity to
live in a couple of coastal cities. You know. He
(44:55):
went from the West coast to the East coast, you know,
living living the life he wanted to live. Well, maybe
looking for work or doing whatever he did, but he
was able to freely move about the country. Louis Dunn
never had that chance.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Granted, she was seventy five years old, Joe, but she
wasn't dead until she came in contact with him. But
I have a question for you because something happened in
twenty twelve where they actually were trying to get the
palm print from him, and as they're rolling the fingers
or whatever, I guess that was an issue. But they
did have that palm print, you know, that was a
(45:30):
big deal that they had in the Louisa Doune case.
When they were trying to get the palm print from
Ryland Headley in twenty twelve, he actually declined to give
them the print, saying that his arthritis was so severe
that he couldn't move his wrist that way, that he
(45:54):
couldn't flex it enough to actually provide them with the
exact part of the palm that they needed, yeah, which
is how he dodged that bullet.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Yeah, and that print that was left behind, just so
folks know, it starts if you'll find if you'll go
to the base of your pinky, okay, kind of that
last knuckle there where it conjoins the palm and extends
that side of your hand, extends all the way down
to where the palm of your hand connects to your wrist,
(46:26):
all right, And if you slice that about an echine
with that's the partial palm print they had on this guy.
That's how much of the palm. Now you've got a
lot of identifiers that are contained within there. There's a
lot of specific classification identifiers, and you've got a lot
of minutia, which are the little bits that we look for,
(46:46):
like you hear us talk about things like ending ridges
and bifurcations and pores and all these other things that
we look for that are specific identifiers in printing itself.
That was there. So but the big thing here is
that they were able to go back and compare this
DNA deposition all the way back from nineteen sixty seven
(47:11):
with this guy that had been compelled to enter it
into the database at this point in time. And you know,
this is kind of a cautionary tale, I think, and
it's we're going to see this mark my words right now,
right down the date and time, because I am telling
you we're going to see more and more of these cases,
(47:32):
and a lot of it is going to be reliant
upon what kind of job the investigators did all those
years ago. And from this old investigator, I want to
send out a tip of the cap to those constables
back in nineteen sixty seven in Bristol that didn't give
(47:53):
up and did their job. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is body Back XH
Quality Dytis, But Joseph's gotten more. You know, I run
my mouth a lot about science and about being a
scientist and how I rely on those methods that have
(00:22):
been developed over the years through study and practice, and
I'll stick with that. I'm not going to deviate from
that at all. But you know, there's this one theme
that runs through medical legal death investigation, and it's the
idea of documenting everything that we see. I tell my
(00:48):
students at Jacksonville State University without fail, every year I
teach a medical legal death investigation class for undergraduates twice
a year, and I tell them, I say, look, you are,
in fact going to be the documentarian of things that
are happening in the world in which you find yourself
(01:08):
in the world of death. But it's important to understand
that you're also a historian, because you're documenting the lives
of individuals that otherwise may not have even been a
blip on the radar screen of life today. Is one
such case, a case that reaches back all the way
(01:32):
to nineteen sixty seven in Great Britain. It's about a
little old lady that was found dead on her living
room floor, or as the Brits like to say, the
room of her parlor, and she had undergone brutality that
(01:54):
is almost unimaginable. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. Dave always have a uh an affinity for
British names and town names in particular, uh things like
(02:16):
Gloucester uh and uh the these these different types of
names of cities uh that you know, we have them
here in America. But you know, because of the way
we form our words and these sorts of things we
don't they don't necessarily come off the same when you
go back to the mother tongue, if you will. Yeah,
(02:40):
I know. And and so you see, like one town
that's gonna uh factor prevalently into into our sorty day
is a town called Ipswich. And there's actually an Ipswich
here in America. There might be a couple there, probably
are in the northeast. Yeah, And it's one of those
odd words or odd names. It actually sounds the same
(03:03):
here as it does there.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But that's how you can tell that leaders of a
particular county got together and said, we got a bunch
of people that want to form their own town.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
We got to give it a name. And they start
throwing it.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
By the time last call rolls around, it's like switch, Yeah,
do you.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Need a handkerchief?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Can you write it down? A good job, Dave.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, the Ipswich rapist actually comes into play here, Dave.
And that's you know, all of these cases like this,
particularly years ago, there were the press used to like
to give them names, and I think a lot of
that slinging the ink if you will, it's very salacious. Yeah,
(03:51):
I'll give you an example. You know, we had in
Atlanta a series of homicides involving elderly ladies that was
called the City Killer. It's got that ring to it,
you know. And in this particular case or cases, we
have the Ipswich rapist, you know right now they're talking
(04:12):
about and the press loves these. We've got the Lisk,
the Long Island serial killer, and now we have NISC,
the New England serial killer. They just love the stuff.
I don't know if it's an economy of word or
if it's if it's something that they're just trying to
dangle in from the public to get you coming back
from more.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Actually it's it is that it's a way to keep
people because if you can identify you know, a story
by an individual or by a location, then people recognize
what it is and you don't have to explain it
every time. So yeah, it's it's word economy and marketing.
You know much better. But in this one, you're talking
about a murder that took place of a seventy five
(04:55):
year old, tiny woman, and it happened when I was
a baby, and her town and community and what family
was left. I mean, they're all dead and gone except
for one detective and one family member. All these years later,
you're going to tell me that in nineteen sixty seven,
(05:16):
this crime took place, there was evidence left behind, including
a fingerprint, a palm print, and DNA, and did not
get it solved until right now. This is a story
that is ongoing as we speak. It has just been
to that point where we now know who the suspect
is and how long said suspect will be spending in prison.
(05:40):
But Joe, why why is it possible to it in
nineteen sixty seven you had a fingerprint, a palm print,
and you had other evidence, and no suspect can get wrangled.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I don't get that. How does something like that happen?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Well, if somebody it's I always say this, David. You know,
I have people and look there, I don't think that
they're an educated I think they're ill educated about certain things.
They believe that if you have if you have some
type of scientific marker seen, whether it be a fingerprint,
(06:14):
a droplet of blood, seminal deposition, or even a tool mark,
to say, well you've got this bit of data, once
you go compare it to something and make an arrest. Okay,
what am I going to compare it to? Because if
no one is in the database, say, for instance, for fingerprints,
(06:37):
you know what I mean, it's grand. I'm so happy
for you that you recovered a partial palm print or
you know, maybe a partial off of a thumb or
an index finger and that's you did a great job
at the saying look at this, look at all of
the detail. We can see, we can classify this, and
we can identify this manution and all this stuff. But
if you don't have anything to compare it to. And
(06:58):
the same principle applies with DNA. You know, you can
go and collect DNA, but if somebody, for instance, is
not in the code of database in America, then yeah,
you've got a great profile and it would be great
for future reference. But if you've got nobody to compare
it to, it's as Grandpappy used to say, it ain't
(07:19):
worth a gunpowder to blow it to hell.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It's just it's not.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It has no value at that particular point time. Now,
that doesn't mean it's not going to have value in
the future. Understand me there, And that's the beauty of
this Historically. You know, I talked about documenting everything that
we see and everything that we do. If it had
not been for the work of those individuals that have
I don't know by this time, long term, long long,
(07:45):
long since turned to dust, if you will, if they
had not documented it back then, we would not have
an arrest affected as of I think it was July
the first when you had somebody that was hooked up
on chargers on this thing.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
The woman's name is Louisa Dunn, seventy five year old,
small woman. That was the physical description by a neighbor.
She is so tiny and so fragile and seventy five
years old in nineteen sixty seven. That means that she
was born in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, when this is great, Britain was still an empire
right still ruled India. You know, women, these sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, Yeah, she had lived through two World Wars, she
had lived through the first man going into space.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Eric, I think about this now. Her murder was solved
by technology that today we sometimes take for granted. I
am as just as bad as everybody else about watching
SVU on TV and just assuming that once you've got
DNA boom, you got everything, it's done. You know what,
(09:04):
do not go to commercial break. We got to get
another storylined up. We already got this one. But like
you said, to start with, if it's not in the system,
if there's not something there, you're talking about going down
a different pathway. And now we do have genetic genealogy
and other things which some of us are again some
of us are not. How you feel about government intrusion
on your private life and I have There are plenty
(09:27):
of issues to discuss on a different day in time,
But the bottom line is the detectives in nineteen sixty
seven did a good job at collecting because what they
were able to collect that day, Now, what did they
find Joe at the scene of Louisa Dunn's home when
she was found because I know that it was a
(09:49):
neighbor that actually they hadn't seen her that morning, and
she had a regular routine where they knew they would
see her every morning, and when they didn't, I'm talking
about neighbors, neighbors didn't see her. And so again, now
this is at a time when I don't really recall
nineteen sixty seven. I don't know how people normally live
their lives then, but I think they were Their heads
(10:11):
were not always tilted down looking at a five and a.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Half inch screen in their palm of hand.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Oh lord, no, no, I mean you know you had
what was that showed that Tim Allen had years ago
where Home Improvement the talk to the guy over the fence.
You had a lot of fence fence talking that would
go on.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Actually had a radio show called Across the Fence every
morning at nine am.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And it's such a it's something that's missing, you know.
I know that my grandmother, she had a hedgerow at
her house in the front yard. The back of the
house was a farm, but she and she had a
neighbor that lived next door, and they would literally talk
over the hedge to one another, and it could be
shouting back and forth while they're feeding their dogs that
they kept outside and that sort of thing. But you
(10:56):
kind of you get into a routine, you know, during
that period of and those people had a routine. I mean,
it's no different thing than a life that's lived now.
It's that when somebody turns up and if you know
somebody is kind of reclusive anyway, uh, maybe you're the
one person that actually ever sees them, and when they
don't make an appearance, you know, it actually raises the
(11:19):
eyebrow a bit. But yeah, and we have to keep
in mind. Let me and I've done a disservice here
because we have to understand that where where Louise's homicide
took place was actually on the western side actually the
south western side of Great Britain, and that that comes
into play here as far as I'm concerned. In it's
(11:42):
in the town of Bristol.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Because it was a poor town. Is that why it
comes into play?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah it does because we're going to
get to Ipswich in a bit. But with Bristol, it's
it's on the southwestern side of the country and it
is a port town. Enter steely enough.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
I was.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Last September, when I was in Great Britain, I got
to visit a university Dave where they're doing excavations of
a graveyard of industrial workers in Bristol that they discovered,
and some of these people are stacked on top of
one another, and they've got all of these the skeletons
(12:24):
that they are pulling out of these graves. There had
these unique findings relative to the industrial age of Great Britain.
This is when industry was just getting getting cooking. You've
got these like huge wear patterns on the bones of
traumatic arthritis and all these other things, fractures that never
got repaired. You find evidence of malnourishment, you know, in
(12:48):
the bones. And I got to see some of these skeletons,
but those all came out of Bristol. That was a
fascinating visit.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
By the way, kind of gives you a different idea
of what rest in peace really means.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah, it really does. Particularly, you know, we do so
much resting nowadays. You know, we can't we can't really
comprehend the world that you know, that our forebears lived in.
When you've got actual evidence of tuberculoyd changes in bone,
for instance, what does that mean that really wellculosis at
some point, I mean you can actually see that manifested
(13:21):
on the bone and yeah, yeah, and it's it's all
of these little things. And we're going to do an
entire episode very shortly, my friends on forensic anthropology, and
I'm going to introduce a term in there that applies
to this. But yeah, So Bristol Seaport industrial town. She
(13:41):
was found, you know, in her home the neighbor. Actually,
if I'm not mistaken, Dave, I think they came in
through the window.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, she Actually it was the neighbor. And you've taught
me to look at the finder. I was, and I
actually titled it the Finder, I think because I was wondering,
you know, you've got an unsolved crime, who finds you know,
who is the finder? And actually she didn't see her
that morning, and so after a while I was like, yeah,
go check on her, and so she walked over to
the house and peeked in the window and saw her Louisa.
(14:12):
She said that she thought maybe it was a heart attack,
because Luisa was seventy five years old, and so she
went to a side window that she was able to
get open, and she crawled through the window, and of
course when she got upon the body, she wasn't totally sure.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
She just knew she was dead.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
She grabbed her hand and she actually described it, you know,
as her hand was cold as ice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, and that's one thing that never really leaves you.
There is cold, and we've all experienced it. But when
the icy fingers of death grip you, it's something that
you will never ever forget. Dave, you had mentioned the neighbor.
(15:04):
The neighbor's name is actually Vi v Allen. And when
Via came into miss Dunn's home and discovered that she
had this this coolness to the touch, if you will,
you automatically, it's a weird thing that we have. I
(15:25):
don't know if it's a primal thing or whatever it
is with us humans. It almost makes you, uh, it
does in certain instances. It will make you retract. You
know that it'll actually make you. It's it's it's startling,
you know, when you touch touch a body and it's
icy cold like that, because if you don't something that's expected.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I remember I asked you about this one time when
I was sitting up with the dead at a funeral home. Yeah,
And they asked me because they'd had too many people,
more people than expected to came by for an evening visitation,
and the hair needed to be fixed because the family
was coming in early for some private time with the body.
And I had never been alone with the deceased person
(16:10):
that I knew, and I knew his daughter, and so
as I'm in there, I didn't, Hey, man, comb the hair.
Not a big deal until you have to go comb
the hair by yourself in a funeral home at night,
when you're the only one there, and you're a child
before and you're a teenager. And yeah, So I ended
up looking and I saw his chest rising. Icing He's
(16:36):
wearing a pinstriped suit. I know it's an optical illusion
because we don't ever actually see anybody breathe. We see
it constantly, so our mind is conditioned to see that
chest rise and fall, even though we never pay attention
to it. Now, this was what was being explained to
me on the phone, which, by the way, this is
before cordless phones. Thankfully they had a phone that had
(16:56):
a really long cord. That I was outside. I was
outside with the door open, and I'm standing there in
the yard with the little springy thing as far as
it would go and Steve Brian Brian leef Funerr home
is Dave. I believe me, I did it myself. The
man is not a lot, Steve. He's breathing. You have
(17:17):
to be here now because I'm leaving, Dave. Don't leave,
you cannot leave.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, I got to tell you that place right into something.
I guess this morbid note has always been present in
my life because even as a kid, I remember asking
my mother at one point tom when people would dial
on television, like I used to love things like Gunsmoke.
I love to watch gun Smoke and shows like High
(17:42):
Chaparral and you know those old Wild Wild West, you
know all of those old Western series. And I remember
asking my mother if they were dead, and she said, no,
they're acting. And I have a distinct memory. As I
got older, I would always look at the chest of
the actor slaying on the ground, and I was fascinated
by how long they could hold their breath, because if
(18:04):
it was like a shot where they would hold on
the body, their chests would not rise and fall. I
did see, however, a couple of times where you could
see it, and so you know that was an editing problem.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
But you know you want to freak yourself out, I've
got one for you. Watch Deliverance, okay, yeah, right after
the rape scene, right after ned Baby gets boogered. Yeah,
look at the guy that's dead. Okay, yeah, his name's
Bill McKinney, I think, yeah, Bill McKinney.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
For two minutes, Bill McKinney laid motionless, did not breathe
kept his eyes open. A mosquito landed on the white
of his eye, and the man didn't blink.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
They didn't have to cut two minutes.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Just if you have a chance to watch that movie,
and most men do not watch that part of the movie.
If not, we usually leave crying, screaming and throwing up.
But you know, it's the reason a lot of us
don't ever want to end up in prison.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
You know, it's the reason. And so anyway, so.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
The reasons some of us don't want to take canoe
trips either. But yeah, but yeah, so you walk, You
come into a home with an individual that is deceased,
and your frame of reference for them is life. And
so the first thing that you notice when you place
your hand on them is this this iciness that they
(19:22):
have about them. But there were other things that were
not right. She could tell pretty quickly that that miss
done had endured some level of trauma. And when she
rang up ring up the local constabular areas they're called
over there, they arrived at the scene and what they saw, Dave,
(19:46):
this is I'm not saying that, you know, in Bristol
they had not had rape homicides before. That's ridiculous. Of
course they have. You know, it's a big town. They
would have seen it. But this, this is something that
really captured the town, the imagination, the press and everything
because it was It's not like this is a couple
(20:06):
who say, say in Britain, a couple of blokes that
were having at it in a local pub, pummeling each other.
You're talking about this diminutive, little old lady who's a
recluse that's found in her home and she's wearing her dress,
but it's all disheveled and it appears that a scarf
has actually been used around her neck to choke the
(20:30):
life out of her.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Dave, when I was reading over the description of Louisa
Dunn again a seventy five year old, very small woman,
and the description that she's lying flat on her back,
in her living room, cuts around her chin, bruising to
(20:53):
her neck and in her thigh, and hemorrhaging in her eyes.
What does the cuts, the hemorrhaging that what does that
tell you? Right off? The bat length flat on her
back seemed odd to me. I don't know why it did.
I would have thought she would have been in a
different position, but length flat in her back once.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
The right Well, first off, the level of violence is.
First off, you're not going to have to use a
tremendous amount of force with her. And you couple that
with the fact that the older you get, the more
obviously the more fragile you get, you know, I mean
a lot of us can reflect now, you know, like
(21:32):
our grandparents. Did you have notice how easily your grandparents
bruised and how long they would hold onto a bruise,
you know, on their arms, and their skin becomes almost
like parchment paper, you know. I remember that about my grandmother.
I remember it in a loving way. But you know,
you can see that the fragility of life, you know,
(21:53):
and so it doesn't take a lot to inflict injuries
to the elderly. However, in this particular case, there are
certain injuries that really stand out. You've got cuts, you've
got bruises, But one of the interesting manifestations here are
these injuries on the interior of the thighs. Most of
(22:15):
the time you're going to have these in a there
is a difference between raped and forcible rape. Some people
will be raped and they'll just acquiesce and give in,
and it's horrible to think about they realize what's but
some people do really fight back. You couple that with
somebody that's incredibly savage. Even if the person is bending
(22:40):
to the will of the perpetrator, they'll still want to
be violent with them. And so you'll see like on
the inner thighs. I've actually seen contusions day on the
inner thighs of women that have been raped, where you
can actually match up finger patterns now fingerprints, but you
will see the outline of a hand where a hand
has been placed on the inner thigh and the legs
(23:02):
forced open. And then you know, things become begin to
get into focus at that point in time about what
actually probably happened in this environment. You know, the assailant
is pressing himself upon her. She probably reacts, you know,
(23:23):
with some level of violence on her own to try
to own her own to try to find this guy off,
and that's not happening.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
What's he going to do? Well.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I don't know if perpetrators mail perpetrators carry around lady
scarves in their pockets. I guess they could, if there's
some kind of they have some kind of serialized fetish
with this, But it would seem to me that you're
using what I would like to refer to as a
weapon of convenience. If she's got a scarf laying around
the house, this is something that he can actually wrap
(23:51):
around her throat and use as a ligature. And the
thing when you get a scarf, and if every everybody
will just imagine your mind, what I'm not talking about
like a what do you call it? Like a knit
scarf like you wear in the winter time. Okay, toboggan,
not a toboggan, but you know, a woolen scarf. I'm
(24:14):
talking about like a decorative scarf. They're very delicate most
of the time, and but as you take them and
you kind of twist them around, they become more robust,
and they truly do become a thicker ligature. But they're
not going to lease the say marks behind say, for instance,
a rope or a wire is going to leave behind,
but what it will leave behind are these delicate little
(24:36):
contusions underneath the skin. And scarfs themselves seem very very
soft and pliable. Some of them are nylon, many of
them are silk, but did you know even with silk,
it has an abrasive quality to it, and you can
see light, little surface abrasions on the skin, and underlying
those abrasions, you're actually going to see contusions in the
(24:58):
muscles around the neck. And this can be kind of verified,
i think, by virtue of the fact that they talk
about that she had this kind of storm of hemorrhage
in her eyes, which are of course what they're saying
in these reports is that what they're describing are actually
petikia and these particular hemorrhages. And I've had doctors that
(25:21):
have referred to them as particular storms. And it's because
they're so there's so many of them that they're almost innumerable,
because they're so tiny, and they like to refer to
them as punk tate, almost like a little dot, and
you can't it's hard to describe. You've never seen them.
But when you look at the white of the eye
the sclera, you'll see them there and also on the
(25:44):
inner lid of the eye as well. It's almost like
they're matching up, so the little vessels in the lower
lid of the eye and sometimes the upper lid, and
then all over the white of the eye. The more
pressure that's applied, the more these vessels will give way.
And it's also an indication of life in a perimorum
state where they're fighting against us so robustly that the
(26:07):
eyes just become so congested with these things. It would
have been a very violent death for Louisa. But in
its wake, in its wake, that perpetrator that committed this
awful crime left behind physical evidence back in nineteen sixty
(26:31):
seven that has damned him in twenty twenty five. So
David nineteen sixty seven, Louisa Dunn is a homicide victim
(26:56):
in Bristol, Bristol, Britain, and the case is not solved.
It goes cold, kind of like her body was cold,
you know, per the description of the finder on that morning.
We jump all the way forward, I think it's nineteen
(27:18):
seventy three. Now we're going from one major port city
in Great Britain, which is on the west coast in
Bristol all the way to Ipswich, which is on the
east coast, which almost I'm going to be off of
my alignment here, which almost lines up. It's actually a
(27:38):
bit north. Ok, let me get to straight. So it's
northeast of London if you will. It's not in northeastern England.
That's way up north like York in that area, but
it Ipswich lines up closer to like being just south
of like Amsterdam, if you were to lay a straight
(27:59):
line cross it. It's north of Dunkirk, which of course
is in Belgium or France, I can't remember right on
the border there. And of course it's north of what
we know is the White Cliffs of Dover, you know,
where our boys would be coming back in. They knew
that as they saw the White Cliffs of Dover they
had made it safely back from a bombing run. So
it's north of that area. But yet it is a
(28:20):
major port city. And I find this very interesting, Dave,
that we've got this homicide that took place back in
nineteen sixty seven and that's unsolved in one port city,
and then we've got what turns out to be a
couple of rapes in a town that is on the
(28:41):
east coast of England and again a port city Dave.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Ten years later nineteen seventy seven, two older women seventy seven.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I don't I was thinking seventy three, but yeah, seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
The thing is is that when you go back to
the sixty seven rape and you mentioned the injuries and
the fight in her Yeah, because ten years later when
two older women, one sixty nine the other seventy four,
I think in Ipswich, when the Ibswitch rapist was labeled,
(29:14):
that's what they called him. Yep, seventy nine and eighty four.
That's hold the women were that were raped in Ipswich.
And just so you know, in nineteen sixty seven they
did fingerprinting and got a fingerprint and a palm print
out of the house where of the suspect. They've been fingerprinted.
(29:37):
Everybody in the area they fingerprinted. I think over five
thousand local men in Bristol. I think about that the
time it took to fingerprint, analyze and look and trying
to match up. So it was an ongoing project that
involved multiple, multiple agencies. By nineteen seventy there was one
person working on it. They'd exhausted everything they could do
(29:59):
to try to match up the fingerprint or palm print. Now,
ten years after the murder of Louisa Dunn, you have
a seventy nine and an eighty four or four year
old woman who are now.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
In Ipswich and they are both raped.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
So they do find fingerprints at the scene, and they
the investigators, they start doing the exact same thing they
did ten years earlier in Bristol. They start charting everybody.
They start charting fingerprints on every mail they could find
that had any kind of access to that area at
(30:35):
the time of those two rapes that were done by
the press labeled the Ipswich Rapist Show.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
You know, I got to tell you this is an
interesting thing, a comparative analysis between gathering of suspect data
when you compare it to the US and Great Britain.
I'm going to throw a name out to you that
sounds rather odd. A guy named Klin and Pitchfork and yeah,
and Colin Pitchfork was responsible for the rape and murder
(31:07):
of two young girls in Great Britain. Well, Colin Pitchfork's
first case where DNA was actually used to convict somebody.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Oh, wow, every Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah. As a matter of fact, it came off of
the research that Sir Alec Jeffries was doing. Alec Jefferies
is considered to be the father of modern DNA forensic
DNA technology. Okay, and brilliant, brilliant mind. But when Colin
Pitchfork and I think this was in eighty six committed
(31:43):
you know, these crimes, I think it was, you know,
like in nineteen nineteen seventy nine through eighty three or
something like that. I can't remember the exact dates the
area where he took these lives and committed these crimes.
(32:05):
Day they got a block of males in this area
and compelled them to give DNA samples. Can you imagine
them doing that in America? And you begin to think
about doing the fingerprints and compelling somebody to give up
their fingerprints. It's just a different way of policing. It's
a different way that they handle things. So this kind
of harkened back, you know, I'm thinking about this, and
(32:27):
it's it's interesting to think about, you know, how our
our two systems work. You know, and I know a
lot of people would say, well, if you got nothing
to hide, then you shouldn't you shouldn't fear anything. But yeah, well.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
I guess so. You know that's the same thing, Dave.
Why won't you let them in the house to look
for that? Because they don't.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Have a right, that's why.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
But David, he's got nothing to hide. I don't have
anything to hide, but they have no right to look.
You know, think about it, Mark Firman exists to drop
a bloody glove.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
In your hallway, That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
So you've got that specter that's out there. But either way,
with the Ipswich racist and how it applies to Louisa
Dunn is that they actually developed evidence day based upon
this partial palm print and fingerprint where they're able to
tie what they think eventually would be these cases together.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Dave, Well, I know that they were able to find
Rylan Headley is the guy's name, and Ryland Headley was
forty five years old when the rapes in Ipswich happened
in seventy seven, and he was one of the many
who actually was fingerprinted and he was matched up and
(33:46):
actually it went all the way through. He was guilty
of the crimes of burglary and rape and was sentenced.
Now here's the important part to pay attention to on
what happened to Ryland Headley when he was charged, arrested, charged,
convicted in the rapes of those two women in Ipswich
(34:09):
in nineteen seventy seven. Now he was sentenced to life
in prison. It was these crimes were considered so heinous
that this person did not need to be walking the
face of the earth. Remember, these are elderly women, seventy
nine and eighty four years old.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
They couldn't.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
One of the women actually tried to bite him, tried
to buy but you know why she couldn't. She didn't
have her dentures in. She couldn't leave a mark, that's
how hard she was struggling. And that impacted the judge
at sentencing when he heard this description, because these women
did not die, but they fought, and so Hedley was
(34:50):
sentenced to life. Well, his attorneys or barristers as they're
called there, whenever I get a letter from a barrister
that claims they've got some money for me overseas, you know, yeah,
get those emails about once a month, just send one
hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Anyway, so the barrister said, hey, these are rapes. This
sentence is excessive, and so there was an appeal of
the sentence of Ryland Headley, and the appeal court.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Actually lent heavily.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And I say this because it's really important to note
that there was a psychiatrist who came in and said,
he has no record of anything before this. He was
a good guy, of good character. We've got nothing on
him now. Granted they only know what he's been convicted
of kids as well, yes, oh yeah, married with children.
(35:48):
Forgot about that, And so you've got a guy of
good reputation. And they argued in that, and the judge
sided with the psychiatrist that this was a momentary lapse
in judgment and whatever you want to call it, and
reduced his sentence to seven years. So the Ipswich rapist
(36:09):
of nineteen seventy seven, Ryland Headley, walked out of prison
in nineteen eighty. Think about that for just a minute,
Joseph Scott Morgan.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Yeah, and that they would cut the sky loose. Yeah,
you know, I guess hindsight is in fact twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
They blamed his wife. They blamed his wife.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
They said that she was not providing the sex that
he needed and he was committing the burglaries to satisfy
her need for stuff.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
It was his wife's fault.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
That's why he stole, burglarized, and raped these old women.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
So she needed stuff and he needed sex. Yeah, so
he would pray upon the elderly, right, And that's essentially
excuse I guess, yes, well, seam, it was yeah, no kidding.
Well because of that though, because of what had occurred,
(37:13):
the story gets even more interesting as we've developed through
time and crime science, Dave, you know, databases, national databases
have been created relative to any kind of biological sample
that might come up. In the US, we have COTIS,
So codis is you have two categories. You have the
(37:33):
known offenders, Like if somebody gets hooked up, they're in jail,
they're hooked up on a rape charge or some kind
of sexual offense, you're compelled by law to give a
DNA sample and that goes into the database. The other
category is called the forensic database, which is a list
of unknowns. Well he he, the perpetrator in this case,
(37:56):
is compelled. His DNA from the seventy seven cases was
actually placed into the database that wound up with a
match on his DNA that I think that they took
from him in twenty twelve, they went back and got
this from him.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Okay, he got tangled up with law enforcement in twenty twelve.
Now we cannot be told what happened, because whatever he
was arrested for in twenty twelve, whatever the charge was,
whatever was going on, it was all dropped. And because
they worry about a person's appearance, I guess, so since
(38:36):
there was no adjudication of the case, it was just dropped.
We can't even find out what he was arrested for.
But it was involved enough that they did arrest him.
They did the whole fingerprint thing all over again, updated
the records, and got DNA.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, and so that was real. And it was because
of that that they were able to actually go back
and if I remember correctly, all the way back with
the still homicide, would Louise had done they had done
a rape kit on her back then obviously, because there's
is obvious signs of sexual assault. Dave, you know, in
(39:11):
that case, they lost the rape kit. They lost it,
they lost the samples that were taken. But for over
fifty years they kept her clothing folded up inside of
a box away from daylight and kept it stowed. Now,
just imagine this. I don't see how they were able
(39:31):
to retain the clothing but didn't retain the rape kit
for whatever reason, I don't know. It probably didn't go
to the same place, probably went by the hospital.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
We lose stuff all the time here, you know, Yeah,
we do. It's numbing to me them the number of
important cases that we have, all this information that didn't
even happen a long time ago. We get lost because oh,
we don't have the money to store things properly.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
But anyway, Yeah, and we'll spend money on other things,
but you know, we don't have I don't know. Sometimes
I think it's an absence of common sense and an
absence of compassion. These poor women have been assaulted and
you can't do your due diligence to hold on to
rape get and secure it. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
It's a real head scratcher.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
It always has been for me.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
It is for me too, And I didn't realize it
was a problem until I started doing these shows.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Yeah, in the last five years, I did.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Horrible, horrible, absolutely horrible.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Anyway, anyway, there were two interesting times of this too.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Joe two times two thousand and nine and twenty fourteen,
the case of Luis's case was brought back out. They
didn't just say in nineteen seventy we've exhausted everything we
can do.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
They didn't do that. It was a cold case, but
they would revisit.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
It, and then in two thousand and nine they actually
brought the case back to the four and looked at it.
Didn't find anything that's kind of surprising. But it was
in twenty fourteen, two years after the twenty twelve investigation,
that they brought it out again. But that's where you've
got no rape get you don't have the things you need.
(41:03):
So it's looked at multiple occasions, but it wasn't until
the last twelve months that they were able to go
to those clothing. And it was the clothing that provided
the dress. And that's what I got to ask you.
I even wrote it down here because I don't understand
what it means, Joe. What did they actually do, How
(41:25):
did they get how did they get the material out
of the clothing that they could then test.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I'm not going to mention any names, but the initials
are Bill Clinton. If you'll think back to the infamous
blue dress that Lewinsky retained. It's the same principle they
had seminal deposition on Louisa Dunn's clothing. Okay, And the
(42:00):
way this happens is that most of the time nowadays
with clothing, you might not be able to see anything
with a naked eye, or as some people refer to it,
the unaided eye. What you'll do is use alternative lighting sources,
which you know you'll be able to see because light
(42:23):
works on wavelengths, right, and so you can use ultraviolet
light for instance, where the seminal stain will give off
a very particular type of luminescence when it's certain light lightweight,
when certain light lighting is applied to it. Now that
(42:46):
is merely that is merely a qualitative test. You can't
say who semen that is or if it contains sperms.
So all you can say is that this is consistent
with seminal deposition. So then you have to go in
(43:06):
and sample those areas and they go into a further
test on that particular bit of clothing after they've identified
it with what's called an acid phosphatase test, and when
man ejaculate contained within the the ejaculate there is a
(43:27):
certain high amount of an enzyme acid phosphatasee contained in there.
And when you can identify that, then you know that
you can go deeper with your examination relative to the
specifics about the identity of the individual. And it's through
that stain that they were able to claim a biological
(43:48):
profile after all of these years. Daveable, I know it is.
It's mind blowing. And of course, because this subject had
been compelled to be entered into the database, they got
to hit. They got to hit, they got to hit.
Once they brought this thing out. Now, I think that
(44:08):
they probably suspected him because one of the things that's
going to kind of sure this thing up is this
partial pom print, And these are other compelling bits of evidence.
Remember you you no longer have any eyewitnesses or secondary
eye witnesses. You don't have any any of the people
that were going to appear in court right back in
the late sixties. Only left one detective. And I think
(44:33):
that maybe her granddaughter is still alive, but she's she's
a human being. Her case is still open. And this
guy has been living his life all of these years.
Dave has been able to have a family. Hell, he's
lived in two coastal cities. How about you. I don't
know about you. I'd love to have the opportunity to
live in a couple of coastal cities. You know. He
(44:55):
went from the West coast to the East coast, you know,
living living the life he wanted to live. Well, maybe
looking for work or doing whatever he did, but he
was able to freely move about the country. Louis Dunn
never had that chance.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Granted, she was seventy five years old, Joe, but she
wasn't dead until she came in contact with him. But
I have a question for you because something happened in
twenty twelve where they actually were trying to get the
palm print from him, and as they're rolling the fingers
or whatever, I guess that was an issue. But they
did have that palm print, you know, that was a
(45:30):
big deal that they had in the Louisa Doune case.
When they were trying to get the palm print from
Ryland Headley in twenty twelve, he actually declined to give
them the print, saying that his arthritis was so severe
that he couldn't move his wrist that way, that he
(45:54):
couldn't flex it enough to actually provide them with the
exact part of the palm that they needed, yeah, which
is how he dodged that bullet.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Yeah, and that print that was left behind, just so
folks know, it starts if you'll find if you'll go
to the base of your pinky, okay, kind of that
last knuckle there where it conjoins the palm and extends
that side of your hand, extends all the way down
to where the palm of your hand connects to your wrist,
(46:26):
all right, And if you slice that about an echine
with that's the partial palm print they had on this guy.
That's how much of the palm. Now you've got a
lot of identifiers that are contained within there. There's a
lot of specific classification identifiers, and you've got a lot
of minutia, which are the little bits that we look for,
(46:46):
like you hear us talk about things like ending ridges
and bifurcations and pores and all these other things that
we look for that are specific identifiers in printing itself.
That was there. So but the big thing here is
that they were able to go back and compare this
DNA deposition all the way back from nineteen sixty seven
(47:11):
with this guy that had been compelled to enter it
into the database at this point in time. And you know,
this is kind of a cautionary tale, I think, and
it's we're going to see this mark my words right now,
right down the date and time, because I am telling
you we're going to see more and more of these cases,
(47:32):
and a lot of it is going to be reliant
upon what kind of job the investigators did all those
years ago. And from this old investigator, I want to
send out a tip of the cap to those constables
back in nineteen sixty seven in Bristol that didn't give
(47:53):
up and did their job. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is body Back XH
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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