A 1934 mystery of a woman in pyjamas ended when police accused an Italian immigrant. The case took a strange twist

On September 1, 1934, a farmer named Tom Griffith was walking his bull near Albury in New South Wales when he made a horrible discovery. He found the body of a young woman pushed into a large pipe under the road. The woman had been shot in the neck and beaten badly on the head. Parts of her body were burned. She was wearing yellow silk pyjamas with a Chinese dragon on them. This type of clothing was unusual and fancy in 1930s Australia. The newspapers started calling her the Pyjama Girl.

The case became one of the biggest crimes anyone talked about in Australia. Police looked into hundreds of tips and even checked every woman under 40 who did not vote in the Federal election that weekend. The woman’s body was first kept at the Albury morgue. When nobody could say who she was, they moved her to Sydney University’s medical school. There, the body was kept in a bath of formaldehyde and became a strange thing for the public to see. Thousands of people came to look at the body, hoping someone might know who she was.

According to Wikipedia, in 1935, a man said the dead woman might be his friend Linda Agostini, who went missing in August 1934. But when people who knew Linda looked at the body, they said it was not her. Linda’s husband Antonio, an Italian immigrant, also looked at the body and said it was not his wife. 

He gave police his wife’s dentist’s name, and the dental records seemed to prove it was not Linda. Another woman named Anna Philomena Morgan was brought up as a possible match. Her mother thought it was her daughter, and so did a doctor named Thomas Benbow. But police did not agree and thought Morgan had changed her name and been killed in Queensland in 1932.

The case remained unsolved until 1944

In March 1944, NSW police commissioner William MacKay was eating at his favorite Italian restaurant when he saw that his waiter, Antonio Agostini, looked worried. MacKay knew Antonio from before he was sent to prison camps during the war. He asked Antonio to come to the police station. There, Antonio said he had been in pain for 10 years and wanted to tell the truth. He said he had shot his wife, Linda by accident during a fight when she put a gun to his head one morning.

Antonio went to trial, but the jury of all men did not believe his story about it being an accident. But they still found him guilty of manslaughter instead of murder. The judge said the jury probably thought Antonio had been pushed too far by his wife’s bad behavior. He got six years in jail with hard labor but got out after four years and was sent back to Italy, where he died in 1969.

The Pyjama Girl was finally buried in Melbourne with her new name as Linda Agostini. Police said the 10-year-old mystery was solved and closed the case. Like other cold cases that were looked at again later, this one would also be checked again years later when people started asking questions about what the police said happened.

Big doubts came up about whether the case was really solved. In 2004, a crime expert named Richard Evans wrote a book called The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story Of Murder, Obsession And Lies. The book showed big problems with saying the body was Linda. The Pyjama Girl had blue eyes but Linda’s were brown. The Pyjama Girl was small-breasted but Linda was large-breasted. 

Antonio’s confession also had many mistakes, like getting the head injuries wrong and the type of gun he used wrong. This made people wonder if police, who really wanted to close a case that haunted them for 10 years, forced Antonio to say he did it when he might not have. Evans said in his book that it was “police corruption and a miscarriage of justice.” If the Pyjama Girl was not Linda Agostini, then who she really was is still a mystery today, just like other scary true crime cases that nobody has solved.