What happened next: how a shocking rape and murder case was solved 58 years later

"She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood. There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window."

"When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes. She found three. I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes and case reference numbers. These weren't. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels saying what they were. It meant they'd never been subject to modern forensic examinations."

"The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his first day on the job), both gloved up, forensically bagging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another eight months. Smith pauses and tries to be diplomatic. I was quite excited, but it wasn't met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let's just say there was some scepticism as to the value of submitting something so old to forensics. It wasn't seen as a priority."

Jo Smith, a major crime review officer for Avon and Somerset police, reopened the 1967 murder investigation into 75-year-old Louisa Dunne. Dunne had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home; the original inquiry found only a palm print on a rear window despite knocking on 8,000 doors and taking 19,000 palm prints. Smith discovered three exhibit boxes in the archive that had never been forensically sealed and therefore not examined with modern techniques. She and a colleague forensically bagged and catalogued the items, but follow-up action was delayed for eight months amid scepticism about the value of testing such old evidence.

Read at www.theguardian.com