In September 1934, Australia was still deep in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment had reached around thirty percent, and the collapse in international demand had devastated the nation’s wool and wheat exports, the backbone of its economy. The social pressure on families was severe, and though it was rarely spoken of, domestic violence was on the rise. It was in this climate of hardship and strain that a young farmer named Tom Griffiths was leading his prized bull along the Howlong Road, just outside Albury, a city in New South Wales on the border with Victoria and the vast Murray River.

As he walked, Griffiths noticed something in a culvert running beneath the road, and the strong smell of kerosene hung in the air. Looking closer, he found a hessian grain sack covering part of a partially burnt body. Whoever had placed it there had hidden it well, out of sight of passing drivers. The victim’s head was wrapped in a towel, and the face had been badly beaten, suggesting a struggle.

Griffiths called the police, and the body was soon taken to Albury for an autopsy. The victim was a woman in her twenties with brown eyes. A small bullet was found in her throat, but the pathologist determined that death had been caused by severe blows to the head. She was dressed in yellow silk pajamas decorated with a Chinese dragon design.

Police considered this detail significant, as such clothing would have been expensive and rare, especially during such difficult economic times. They also concluded that the woman had been killed elsewhere and her body transported to the culvert. The estimated time of death was August 28, four days before her discovery. Witness statements yielded little.

One person claimed to have seen a fire in the early hours of August 29, but it had rained that night, which likely explained why the body had only been partially burned. Desperate to identify her, the police placed the body on ice and put it on public display at the Albury morgue. Despite the many people who came to view it, no one recognized the deceased. Her injuries were so severe that a police artist was asked to draw how the young woman might have looked.

The sketch was given to newspapers, which seized upon the story and embellished it. Because she had been found in silk pajamas, they called her the Pajama Girl. With no new leads, the body was transferred to Sydney, where it was preserved in formalin and put on public display at the university medical school. Thousands visited, and several names were suggested.

Two in particular interested the police: Anna Philomena Morgan and Linda Agostini. Both women were missing, were of a similar age, and bore a resemblance to the artist’s sketch. A nurse named Margaret McGrath, who had often visited Linda at her flat, identified the body as her friend. A gentleman named George Kempf also came forward, saying that the photos and sketch looked very much like Linda.

After a first viewing he was uncertain, but after a second, he was positive that the body was Linda Agostini. He said he had known her for some time but had heard nothing from her since January 1934. The police began to investigate the possibility that the Pajama Girl was indeed Linda Agostini. She had been born Florence Linda Platt in England on September 12, 1905, and raised in Forest Hill, a district in southeast London.

As a teenager, she worked in a confectionery shop. At nineteen, she left England for New Zealand, where she lived for three years before relocating to Australia and settling in Sydney. Detectives pieced together her life there: she worked at a cinema and lived in a boarding house on Darlinghurst Road in the Kings Cross area. They were told that she liked to go out and did not conform to what was considered acceptable behavior for a young woman.

She entertained young men, drank heavily, and struggled to adjust to a more respectable lifestyle. She seemed to settle down when, on April 22, 1930, she married Antonio Agostini at a Sydney registry office. Antonio was two years older than Linda, an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Australia in 1927 and worked as a barber. They met in 1928, and after a turbulent two-year relationship, they married.

The marriage was not easy. Linda continued to drink and occasionally left him, only to return weeks later. Hoping to remove her from the influence of her friends, they moved to Melbourne in 1933, settling in a suburb called Carlton, where Antonio found work at an Italian-language newspaper and Linda worked as a hairdresser. Still, the couple argued often.

The police contacted people who had known Linda, but none thought the body or the photos resembled their friend. Neither did Antonio Agostini. He did, however, provide the name of his wife’s dentist. When the dental records of the Pajama Girl were checked, they did not match Linda’s, and she was eliminated as a possible victim.

Despite the best efforts of the police, the Pajama Girl remained unidentified. Time passed. The Second World War began in 1939, and the case was largely forgotten. In 1942, the body was taken from the university and placed in the police headquarters.

The case was filed as unsolved, though occasionally worked on. In 1944, Police Commissioner William Mackay turned his attention to it again. The reputation of both the commissioner and the New South Wales police force had suffered, so to improve public opinion, he assigned two new detectives to examine the evidence. Once again, they investigated the identity of the victim, eliminating names one by one.

Linda Agostini had previously been dismissed due to her dental records, but the detectives decided to look at them again. Incredibly, the initial dental report was found to be incorrect. The records did in fact match those of the Pajama Girl, who had been found ten years earlier in Albury. Now that the victim had a name, the police needed to find her killer.

Linda’s husband seemed the most likely suspect. Antonio Agostini had spent the previous four years in internment camps due to his political sympathies toward the Italian government, which had entered the war on the side of Germany in June 1940. The Australian government considered him an enemy. He had been released in February 1944 when it was decided he was no longer a threat.

He then found work in Sydney as a waiter at Romano’s, an Italian restaurant coincidentally frequented by Police Commissioner William Mackay. Mackay asked Antonio to come to the police station to talk about the murder of his wife ten years earlier. Antonio was nervous, but at the station he gave a full confession, though he claimed his wife’s death was an accident. In his statement, he said that while living in Melbourne, Linda had threatened him with a revolver.

He tried to take it from her, the gun went off, and she died. Fearing he would be accused of murder, he put the body in his car and drove across the state border to Albury, where he placed it in a culvert, poured petrol over it, and set it alight to make the corpse unrecognizable and destroy evidence. Soon after, he left Melbourne and, after a brief spell in Perth, returned to live in Sydney. The arrest of Antonio Agostini and the apparent conclusion of one of Australia’s most famous unsolved cases was a sensation, making headlines across the country.

He was taken to Melbourne, where an inquest was held. The judge needed to establish the identity of the Pajama Girl, how she had died, and who had been responsible. Although Antonio admitted to shooting her in the flat they had shared at 589 Swanston Street in Carlton, not everyone believed the body was actually Linda Agostini. A woman named Mrs.

Jeannette Routledge from Bombadery, New South Wales, insisted the Pajama Girl was her daughter, Anna Philomena Morgan. This was supported by Dr. Thomas Benbow, who had helped police on the case in 1939. Detailed photographic comparisons of the facial features of both women were presented to the inquest.

There was much discussion about the deceased’s dental records, which after ten years had somehow been identified to match those of Linda Agostini. The victim had blue eyes, while witnesses had said Linda’s were brown. The body proportions caused concern. The shape of the nose did not match, nor did the sides of the breasts.

Expert witnesses were called to explain how eye color could change after death. Mrs. Routledge, however, proved to be an unreliable witness, admitting that after her daughter’s disappearance she had given the police false information to avoid implicating herself. At the end of the inquest, the coroner announced that he believed the Pajama Girl was indeed Linda Agostini and that her husband had been responsible for her death.

Antonio was committed for trial on a charge of murder. The trial began on June 19, 1944, in the Supreme Court in Melbourne. Antonio pleaded not guilty. He did not deny taking the body to Albury and setting it on fire, but he maintained the shooting was an accident.

He told the court that his wife had threatened him with a gun and that it went off while he tried to retrieve it from her. When asked where the weapon was, he said he had thrown it into the Yarra River. The defense outlined the couple’s turbulent relationship, how Linda drank and would disappear for weeks without telling her husband where she was. Antonio had already told police that the head injuries, which pathologists said caused the Pajama Girl’s death, had occurred when he accidentally dropped the body while carrying it down the stairs.

The proceedings ended on June 28, 1944, and the jury retired. After deliberating for two hours, they returned a verdict of not guilty of murder but guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Antonio Agostini was sentenced to six years imprisonment and sent to Pentridge Prison in Coburg. He did not serve the full term.

He was released after just four years, but as a free man he was not allowed to stay in Australia. On August 23, 1948, he was deported back to Italy. He later married a widow named Josephine Garcony and died in 1969 at the age of sixty-six. Linda Agostini was finally laid to rest at Preston Cemetery on July 13, 1944, with her funeral paid for by the state government of Victoria.

The mystery of the Pajama Girl was finally solved. Or was it? In his 2004 book, The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession, and Lies, historian Richard Evans pointed out discrepancies with the evidence, calling Antonio Agostini’s conviction the result of police corruption and a miscarriage of justice. At the trial, Police Commissioner William Mackay had said he had not really participated in the investigation, but in truth he had personally supervised a case that had been periodically reviewed since 1938, and he had interviewed witnesses.

He also maintained that he had never previously known Antonio Agostini beyond his role as a waiter at Romano’s, yet he had been in charge of the New South Wales police department that oversaw the internment process in 1940, and Antonio Agostini was one of those interned. There were also questions about when and how the confession was taken. The police had known that Antonio’s wife had gone missing at the same time the Pajama Girl was found. It seemed strange that Antonio was released from internment and only a few weeks later the mystery of the Pajama Girl’s identity was resolved, despite the physical differences between the victim and Linda.

The victim had a different bust size, a different shaped nose, and a different eye color. There had been 125 women on the police list of possible identities, and despite naming the Pajama Girl as Linda Agostini, many of those leads remained uneliminated and untraced. Antonio claimed to have shot his wife with a revolver, but the bullet retrieved from the Pajama Girl’s throat had been fired from a pistol. He was a well-educated man who had served in the Italian army and should have known the difference.

He claimed to have poured petrol over the body, but it was kerosene found on the victim. He said he shot his wife on Monday, August 27, and dumped her body in the early hours of Tuesday, August 28, yet the witness had seen the fire the following day, Wednesday, August 29. Despite all this, shortly after his release from internment, Antonio conveniently confessed to killing his wife and disposing of her body on the state border. For a crime he had apparently kept secret for ten years, he received a very light sentence.

Some would conclude that all of this was a bit too coincidental and a bit too convenient. So if the Pajama Girl was not Linda Agostini, who was she, and what happened to Linda? It is probably the case that Antonio Agostini did accidentally kill his wife as he stated, and he probably disposed of her body.

But whether it was under a culvert in Albury or somewhere else still undiscovered is something for which we may never be entirely sure.