63

The Pyjama Girl Murder

On 1 September 1934, the charred body of a young woman clad in oriental-style yellow crepe pyjamas was found just off the Albury-Corowa Road in southwestern New South Wales. The victim had been badly beaten and shot. A hessian sack beneath her had been set alight.

When the body was examined, it was discovered that a bath towel had been wrapped around her head. Doctors removed the towel and saw that a blunt instrument had smashed in the left side of her face. There was also a bullet hole in the right side of her temple. The woman had blonde hair, a full figure and appeared to be in her mid- to late twenties.

After a couple of months, authorities had exhausted all avenues of identification. In an unprecedented move, they put the body on public display, in the hope that someone might recognise the woman who had become known as ‘the Pyjama Girl’.

The body was displayed at Albury Hospital, where it had been kept on ice since its discovery. Despite numerous leads, the display led to nothing. After six weeks, the body was moved to Sydney and placed in a zinc-lined bath filled with formalin – a solution of formaldehyde in water – at the University of Sydney.

The Pyjama Girl became an attraction. Thousands passed by the embalmed body. Finally, someone suggested she might be Linda Platt, whose married name was Agostini. Linda had emigrated to Australia from England and settled in Sydney, where she lived with girlfriends in Darlinghurst.

She fell in love with an Italian immigrant named Tony Agostini. He held the lease of the cloakroom at Sydney’s flashiest restaurant, Romano’s. Although Linda had a drinking problem and was troublesome when drunk, Tony loved her. They married on 22 April 1930.

A few years later, the couple moved to Melbourne, reportedly because Linda’s drinking had become worse and Tony thought a change of environment might make the situation better. This was the last their Sydney friends saw of them.

When detectives knocked on his door in Carlton, Melbourne, almost a year after the body’s discovery, Tony Agostini answered. He said Linda had walked out on him a year earlier. When shown photos of the Pyjama Girl, Agostini said it wasn’t his wife. Over the next seven years, the Pyjama Girl’s identity remained a mystery.

In 1940 Italy entered World War II against the Allies. Agostini was considered an open supporter of Mussolini, so he was held in an internment camp in South Australia. Finally released in 1944, he returned to Sydney, where he took a job as a waiter at Romano’s. One of the restaurant’s regular customers was the NSW police commissioner, Bill Mackay. Tony Agostini was his favourite waiter. Mackay was intent on solving all outstanding murder cases, including the Pyjama Girl murder.

Mackay assigned a squad to the case. Their new inquiries kept coming up with the same name – Linda Agostini. Mackay had the body transferred to police headquarters, where a team of specialists went to work making her look as she did the day she died. In March 1944, detectives rounded up 16 people who had known Linda Agostini before she left Sydney for Melbourne. Seven recognised the face. The others were unsure.

Later that day, Commissioner Mackay phoned Tony Agostini and asked if he could come to police headquarters. When Agostini arrived, Mackay explained that even if the body was Linda, Tony himself was no way implicated in her murder. To the commissioner’s surprise, Agostini broke down and confessed to the murder. ‘I have been through hell for 10 years,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens to me now, I am going to tell the truth.’

Agostini said life with Linda was hell on Earth. He loved her, but her drinking binges – which resulted in fits of jealous rage, followed by long periods of deep depression – finally drove him to despair.

Agostini told investigators that what was to become the Pyjama Girl murder mystery started on 27 August 1934, a Sunday night.

The couple was living at 589 Swanston Street, Carlton. Tony was preparing to make a business trip to rural Shepparton the next day. He had invited his wife along, but she refused, adding that he wouldn’t be going either. Agostini ignored the remark – it wasn’t unusual for Linda to fly into a fit on the eve of one of his trips. He awoke early the next day to find Linda holding a revolver against his temple. Agostini claimed that he swung around on the pillow, grabbed Linda’s arm and forced the gun away from him. A shot rang out. Linda fell dead on the bed, a bullet in her head.

Agostini said that he sat on the bed for hours, panicking as he looked at his dead wife and wondered what to do. He said he feared that if he told the truth and no one believed him, he would be charged with murder.

Finally, Agostini decided to dispose of his wife’s body and all the evidence. The next night, he bundled Linda into the back seat of his car and headed to the bush. As he approached Albury, he turned off onto a side road. After a few kilometres he stopped the car over a large stormwater pipe beneath the road. It was raining. He took a hessian sack from the car, then placed Linda’s body on it, concealing the body as far inside the drain as he could. Then he poured petrol over the body and set it on fire.

The police commissioner was curious as to what happened to the gun. ‘I threw it into the Yarra River,’ Agostini confessed, adding that he wasn’t sure exactly where.

That night, Agostini slept in the commissioner’s office. The next day, he was taken to where the body was found. Agostini re-enacted everything that had taken place almost 10 years earlier. He was very cooperative with the detectives, who interrogated him on the train back to Melbourne. But there was one thing that troubled them – it was most likely that Linda Agostini had died from multiple injuries to the skull inflicted repeatedly by a blunt instrument, not from the gunshot wound.

Agostini was confronted with this by police. He was quick to explain that as he was carrying his wife’s body downstairs, he fell and she slipped from his arms and bumped down the stairs, eventually crashing into a flowerpot. He had wrapped Linda’s head in a towel as it was bleeding profusely from the wounds. The police didn’t believe him. Agostini was charged with murder and remanded in custody.

At the subsequent standing-room-only inquest, 62 witnesses appeared. The coroner decided that on or about 27 August 1934, Linda Agostini died from severe head injuries that were feloniously and maliciously inflicted on her by her husband. Antonio ‘Tony’ Agostini was committed for trial in the Victorian Supreme Court.

Mr Justice Lowe presided over the hearing, which commenced on 19 June 1944. Agostini’s main defence was that he was a tormented man who lived in fear of his wife’s drunken rages and that he feared one day she might kill him. He stood by her because he believed she would kill herself if he left. Agostini told of a house littered with empty whisky bottles and his wife’s persistent accusations of infidelity. His life, he explained, was a nightmare.

Despite a determined effort by the prosecution to portray Antonio Agostini as a monster who beat his wife to death, after a 90-minute deliberation, the jury chose to believe the defence and returned a verdict of not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter. In summing up, Mr Justice Lowe said he agreed with the verdict and that Antonio Agostini had been tormented to the limits by his wife’s behaviour. But he added: ‘The weapon you used must have been a heavy one and must have been used with great violence; such conduct constitutes a serious crime.’ The judge sent the prisoner to jail for six years with hard labour.

At the state’s expense, Linda Agostini was finally laid to rest in Melbourne’s Preston Cemetery on 13 July 1944 – Antonio Agostini refused to accept the body for burial. Agostini served three years and nine months of his sentence and was then deported back to Italy on 21 August 1948.