Linda Agostini

On 1 September 1934, the badly burned body of a woman with a bullet through the neck was found in a culvert running under Howlong Road in Albury, New South Wales, Australia. The woman became known as the Pyjama Girl.

The body remained unidentified for a decade until an Italian-Australian man, Tony Agostini, confessed to killing his wife, Florence Linda Agostini, who had been missing since late August 1934. Police said they had matched the dental records from the body with Linda Agostini's, though she had been ruled out as the victim in the initial investigation. Tony Agostini was arrested and charged with murder. He was then brought to trial and convicted of the lesser offence of manslaughter, and was sentenced to 6 years in prison. He was paroled after 3 years and 1 month and was deported to Italy.

In 2013, historian Richard Evans published a book that concluded police decided to identify Agostini in order to close the case to avoid embarrassment, and that the body could not have actually been hers. Among many other discrepancies, their eye colours did not match. This means the body buried as "Linda Agostini" is in fact an entirely different person - the Pyjama Girl - who remains unidentified.

Life of Agostini Florence Linda Agostini (; 12 September 190527 August 1934) was an English Australian manslaughter victim found on a stretch of road in Albury, New South Wales, Australia, in September 1934.

Linda Agostini was born Florence Linda Platt in Forest Hill, a suburb of South East London, on 12 September 1905. As a teenager, Platt worked at a confectionery shop in Surrey before travelling to New Zealand at the age of 19 after what was rumoured to be a broken romance. Platt remained in New Zealand until 1927 when she moved to Australia to live in Sydney.

The victim's head was wrapped in a towel. She had been badly beaten and an x-ray revealed a bullet in her neck. In a detail that came to define the case, she was wearing yellow silk pyjamas with a Chinese dragon motif – in Depression-era Australia, such clothing was luxurious, youthful and bohemian. Present at the inquest was the man who had found the woman, Thomas Griffiths. Detective Sergeant McCrae, one of the investigators responsible for the case, said that even though police had made extensive inquiries, ‘They were unable to place any information before the inquiry about the exact time or place she met her death'. McCrae went on to say that it is his opinion that the body had been placed in the bag before rigor mortis set in and, judging from the position in which the body was found, he was convinced that the dead woman had been carried some distance in a motor vehicle before the body was placed in the culvert. The injuries to the head were caused in his opinion by a heavy and possibly a blunt instrument, such as a tyre lever.

The inquest also revealed more information about the potato-type sack, her pyjamas, and the towel that was wrapped around her head. Detective McRae noted that infrared technology revealed the letters DALM, and the burnt portion of the sack contained the letters ORE. This, he believed, refers to the Dalmore district in Gippsland, Victoria, and was not an uncommon sack at the time.

The woman's pyjamas were green and cream in colour, but infrared technology didn't reveal anything of note. The towel, of Japanese origin, was most likely imported to Sydney and Melbourne in 1933. The Laundry Owners' Associations of both Victoria and NSW were contacted, but the initials RCO or RMO had no association.

Secret police file On 19 January 1941, The Daily Telegraph newspaper published an article claiming reporters had obtained a 'secret police file'. In the file, a Mrs J Rutledge asserted the body of the then unidentified woman was her daughter, Anna Philomena Morgan. Detectives, whose reports are summarised in the file, were impressed by the resemblance between Philomena Rutledge and the Pyjama Girl, but they did not believe they were identical.

Doubts about the body's identity The case might have been left there, but some cast doubt on its conclusion. 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".

A short film by Canberra film maker Huck Tyrrell, entitled Roadside, was produced in 1998 and inspired by the murder. In the film the victim returns as a hitch-hiker who tells her story to the unsuspecting driver and eventually leads him to her remains.

In 2013, the Hothouse Theatre in Albury/Wodonga commissioned and performed a play entitled The Pyjama Girl from Canberra playwright Emma Gibson.