The granddaughter of Louisa Dunne never believed her killer would be brought to justice, with her family having to live with the “emptiness and sadness”.
Mary Dainton, 78, has told how she “accepted” that the man who raped and murdered mother-of-two Mrs Dunne in June 1967 would never be found.
But last year she was on a bus travelling to get art supplies when her husband called to say police officers had arrived at their Bristol home.
Mrs Dainton met the officers at the next bus stop and they drove her back home, where they broke the news that a suspect had been identified over the rape and murder of her grandmother more than 57 years ago.
That man Ryland Headley, now 92, went on trial for Mrs Dunne’s rape and murder at Bristol Crown Court on June 16. He was convicted of both charges by a jury on Monday.
Mrs Dainton attended each day of the case, listening to harrowing evidence of what happened to her grandmother in 1967 and the testimonies of two women, also elderly widows, raped by Headley in 1977.
In an interview released following Headley’s conviction, Mrs Dainton said she was still “stunned” that he had been caught.
“I accepted that some murders just never get solved and some people have to live with that emptiness and sadness,” she said.
“The family sort of fell to pieces after the murder. We weren’t a close family in the first place but what there was of the family fell to pieces. I didn’t realise that was happening at the time but I do now.”
She added: “I never thought it would be solved. I thought he would never be caught. I never believed they would be able to trace him.”
Describing the moment police told her Headley had been arrested, Mrs Dainton said an officer revealed they had come to speak to her about her grandmother.
“I said ‘Have you caught him?’,” she recalled.
“I never thought I’d say anything like that, ‘have you caught him?’ And she said, we have a suspect. So I sat there completely stunned.
“I just thought ‘This is not real’. When it sunk in, finally, there’s not a word in the English language to actually encapsulate that.
“I was stunned, I think it is the only word, after all these years.”
The family had not been informed that a cold case team had begun examining the case in 2023, nor that they had sent Mrs Dunne’s blue skirt to a forensic laboratory the following year.
Headley’s DNA was identified from semen extracted from that skirt – with forensic scientists stating it was a billion times more likely to be his DNA than that of someone else’s.
When asked what her reaction was when told Headley was still alive, she replied: “I said something to the effect of ‘oh my goodness’.”
Mrs Dainton is the daughter of Mrs Dunne’s daughter Edna. Her aunt was Mrs Dunne’s other daughter, Iris.
They were the children of Mrs Dunne and her then-husband Teddy Parker – a leading figure in the early Labour party. He died and Mrs Dunne later married John Dunne, a night watchman in Bristol.
Mr Dunne then died in the early 1960s, leaving Mrs Dunne a widow for the second time and living alone in her home in Britannia Road in Easton.
She struggled with alcoholism and became estranged from her family, with Mrs Dainton remembering meeting her only once as a teenager.
“I remember my grandmother being very keen to be friendly with me and to make some kind of contact,” Mrs Dainton said.
“She held my hand very, very tightly and she frightened me. We left quite quickly after that.”
Mrs Dainton was a 20-year-old art student in Bristol and flicking through a copy of the Bristol Evening Post when she spotted her grandmother’s obituary.
She described taking the bus to see her mother, who confirmed that it was her grandmother who had died. Mrs Dainton found out details of the case from the local press, as her parents would not speak about it.
“It’s absolutely appalling, the poor woman,” she said.
“He was in his 30s and he was a reasonable-sized man from what I see. And she was tiny, she was extremely small and skinny. It must have been absolutely terrifying.”
