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The Corpse That Couldn't Rest

Her hair was cut in a fashionable 1930s bob. She was dressed in oriental-style crepe yellow pyjamas that had a green dragon motif on the top. In her late 20s, full-figured and with an oval face and generous lips, she would have been a vision of some beauty, had she not been found lying dead in a stormwater culvert with half her head staved in.

In the months and years to come after her discovery, this woman came to be known throughout Australia simply as the ‘Pyjama Girl’ because of the clothes she had died and was found in. But the life and death of the Pyjama Girl was no bedtime story. Rather, it’s a tale of broken dreams, abusive relationships, alcoholism, violent murder, red herrings, police incompetence, apparently unfathomable mysteries and – because of all this – an ignominious, bizarre and macabre existence for a corpse that was never allowed to rest in peace.

The Pyjama Girl may have only been around for less than 30 short years, but her myth lived large for decades in the annals of Australian crime. That myth was born on 1 September 1934, the day a young man named Tom Griffiths stumbled upon a body just off the Albury-Corowa Road in south-western New South Wales.

Griffiths was a local farmer. He was leading a prize-winning bull home from a cattle show in Albury when he spotted the body sticking out from the drain under the road’s embankment. The body was charred. The thighs and buttocks were bare. A partly burned sack covered the head. Griffith stopped a passing cyclist, who happened to be an acquaintance from the area. The cyclist minded the bull – and the body – while Griffith, on the borrowed bike, cycled into town to report his grisly find.

Soon after, the Albury police inspector, Mr Goodsell, arrived with a constable and a detective. After assessing the scene, a number of things were immediately apparent. He determined that the sack had been set alight after the body had been placed there. He found scorch marks on the brickwork over the drain and noticed there were tyre skid marks in the earth nearby that had been softened by several days of rain. Inspector Goodsell’s years of experience told him that the woman had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped in a panic. Ironically, these observances, deducted from the most preliminary of investigations, were to make up a large part of the few hard facts officials would have to work on for years to come.

Once Goodsell was convinced the crime scene had been adequately documented, the body was taken to Albury Hospital for closer inspection. When the sack was removed, the woman’s head was found to be wrapped in a towel. After doctors carefully removed the towel they discovered a badly beaten face and head. The left side of the head had been severely smashed with a blunt object. The eyebrows and eyelashes were untouched, as was the movie-star hair. The injuries were ferocious and extensive, but if they hadn’t killed her, the small bullet hole in the right temple would have. A plaster cast was taken of her mouth. This was photographed and sent to dentists in the hope of establishing an identity. There were six fillings, two of them gold.

A certain amount of publicity is involved in all murder investigations. First, there is the information police and officials put into the community in the hope of receiving leads and information back. Then there is what the newspapers flesh out, or colour in, around these facts. In the case of the Pyjama Girl’s murder, there was a lot of colouring-in to be done. And in the end, the ‘publicity’ surrounding the death would go to almost ridiculous extremes.

The newspaper stories of the Pyjama Girl, with all the attendant whiffs of violence, sex and mystery, were stories that wrote themselves. There was the attire, the burnt sack, the tyre marks, the bath towel, the blonde hair and the bullet hole, which forensic experts from Melbourne determined had been made by a .25 calibre Webley-Scott automatic pistol. Beyond these clues there was nothing else to point to the woman’s identity.

Eight days after the body’s discovery, the New South Wales commissioner of police, Mr W.H. Childs, held a police conference in Albury. Because Albury is on the border between New South Wales and Victoria, both state’s police forces combined their resources into the investigation.

The four clues – the sack, the towel, the pyjamas and the bullet – were studied with all the forensic science that technology at the time allowed. There was no manufacturer’s tag on the pyjamas, however, infrared photography highlighted the words ‘1st Grade’ and the initials ‘D.A.L.M.’ on the sack. The initials ‘R.C.O.’ were embroidered on the towel.

Photos of the towel and its initials were circulated to laundries across the state. Nothing of substance came back, apart from the fact that it was one of tens of thousands that had been imported from Japan over the last few years.

Despite extensive coverage of the body’s discovery in the local and metropolitan newspapers, no one came forward to give it a name. And despite the combined resources of two state’s police forces, nothing of any consequence turned up. All pistol licences for .25 calibre Webley-Scott automatics were checked and registered owners questioned. This also came to nothing. As months went by and the radio and press coverage of the mystery continued, the Pyjama Girl quickly became Australia’s best-known murder victim.

Eventually police decided they had reached an impasse. Months had gone by and because of the growing infamy of the case they would have increasingly felt under pressure to deliver a result. Perhaps it was this pressure which led to their next, most extraordinary, step. They would put the body on public display and encourage people to view it in the hope that someone might recognise it and give it a name.

The body was first ‘exhibited’ at Albury Hospital, where it had been put on ice since being brought in. The leads started to come, but once again amounted to nothing. After six weeks the body was moved up to Sydney where, at Sydney University, it was placed in a specially constructed zinc-lined bath filled with formalin – a mixture of formaldehyde and water used for preserving organic specimens.

The Professor of Anatomy at the University, Professor Burkitt, oversaw the process and examined the body closely. He noted idiosyncrasies about the ear, especially that the outer helix was malformed and the lobes non-existent. These facts were fed to the papers, and then the body was put on general display for one and all to come and see.

And that they did – in their thousands. Large queues formed at the university each day to get in and see the body of the Pyjama Girl. In the same way people went to the fun pier and aquarium at Coogee Beach, viewing the dead girl’s body at Sydney University became quite the thing to do of a weekend in the 1930s. The only remaining dignity for the corpse was that they didn’t charge an entrance fee.

In addition to the macabre ‘sideshow’ method of investigation the police and the New South Wales government offered two separate rewards: £200 for information leading to the identity of the Pyjama Girl, and £500 for information leading to the conviction of the person or persons responsible for her death.

Not surprisingly, police were swamped with leads, most of which were useless. Husbands whose wives had done a runner came looking for their missing spouses. The police even checked the list of women between 21 and 35 years old who had failed to vote in the 1934 Federal Election.

Despite the colour and all the publicity, the investigation still amounted to naught. Until, that is, a name started to crop up several times in people’s suggestions. That name was Linda Agostini. It wasn’t much, but at least it was a consistency in a case with so many variables. The corpse’s name was Linda Agostini. That was what several people, eagerly seeking the reward money, told police. They had met, or known, her during her life in Sydney and Melbourne. But what they didn’t mention was another life altogether, in another world altogether, with a different name altogether.

Kent, England, is a long way from a stormwater ditch in Albury, Victoria, and it was there, in happier times, that Linda Platt owned a sweet store with her sister. She was in love with an army captain, but when the relationship ended Linda decided a fresh start was needed. In 1927 she sold her share of the store and immigrated to Australia.

She found her way to Sydney, and the inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst, where she flatted with some girlfriends. Platt paid the rent with work as an usher in the Strand Theatre in Pitt Street. With work and accommodation secured, Linda Platt started to enjoy her fresh start. She had a growing circle of friends, and started to meet men. Among them was another newcomer, an Italian called Tony Agostini. They fell in love. It set their lives on a course neither could ever have imagined.

Agostini owned the lease for the cloakroom at what was then Sydney’s flashiest restaurant, Romano’s. It was the place to be seen in the 1930s and the tips Linda received for cloaking a hat or a coat made for a comfortable living. Things seemed on the up, and life was good.

On 22 April 1930 Tony and Linda were married. They moved into Kellett Street in King’s Cross and Linda took on work as a hairdresser in a nearby salon. However, she also took to working on what had become a significant drinking problem. It had never been a secret that Linda liked a drink or that she got fiery under the influence, but regardless Tony truly loved her. A few years after their marriage, and with Linda’s drinking becoming more chronic, Tony decided to move to Melbourne, in the belief that a change of environment might be good for them both and save their faltering relationship. He got a job at an Italian newspaper. That was the last their Sydney friends would ever see of them together.

Just over five years after he had married Linda Platt, Victorian detectives knocked at the door of Tony Agostini. It had been ten months since the discovery of the Pyjama Girl’s body and thanks to their bizarre ‘show-and-tell’, police had finally made their way to Agostini’s home in Swanston Street, Carlton. He told police he hadn’t seen or heard from his wife since she walked out on him a year earlier. She was going to work on the Union Steamship line and take up her old job as a ship’s hairdresser. Or at least that’s what she had told him on her way out the door. Agostini told police he wasn’t surprised he hadn’t heard from her. The ships were at sea for a long time, he said, and after all, she had walked out on him. When the detectives showed him a photograph of the Pyjama Girl, Agostini told police that the body was definitely not that of his wife.

The turn of events that followed, by today’s standards, seem laissez-faire – extraordinarily so – but nonetheless they are what makes the story of the Pyjama Girl so intriguing. Despite Agostini’s denying he knew where his wife was, he was told to report the following morning to the Russell Street police station. He did just that, but after being made to hang around for hours and not being shown much interest by the duty officers, he decided to leave. On two separate occasions after that, the same thing happened. He was summoned, then ignored. Eventually, he stopped turning up – and the police stopped asking him to come in.

In spite, or perhaps more appropriately, because of this seemingly perfunctory investigative work, on the third anniversary of the Pyjama Girl’s discovery, police admitted they were stumped. Then, on 18 January 1938, a coronial inquiry was held at the Albury courthouse. In summing up, Coroner C.W. Swiney revealed that little else that was new had been determined. The scant facts remained: somewhere between 28 and 31 August 1934 a woman whose name could not be determined, and whose partly burned body was found near Albury on 1 September 1934, died from injuries to the skull and brain that were inflicted on her by persons unknown. For all the officials involved, no news was bad news. The file was kept open and the body kept on display, though visitor numbers were dwindling.

One of those visitors, however, was Agostini himself. Around the same time as the coroner’s report, he visited Sydney and an old friend, Gertrude Crawford. He told Gertrude what he had told police, that he hadn’t seen Linda for months. Crawford told Agostini that she had been to see the body at the university, but that she didn’t believe it was Linda’s. The following day, at Agostini’s suggestion, they both went to view the body and confirm matters once and for all. They both stood there in front of the formalin-filled bath as though it were a museum exhibit. Agostini turned to Crawford and said he had no idea who the woman was.

If the cast of characters involved in the mystery of the Pyjama Girl murder weren’t already big enough (especially with the combined homicide departments of two state’s police forces) and the turn of events not already strange enough, then things were about to get even bigger, and stranger.

While the case had captured the public imagination, it had absolutely fascinated others. Macquarie Street heart specialist, Dr T. Palmer Benbow, was, to say the least, obsessed with the mystery of the Pyjama Girl. Considering himself somewhat of an amateur sleuth, he took to solving the mystery himself, having spent years studying every aspect of the case and talking to everyone that had a theory or some kind of connection with the case. Given the bizarre public nature of the whole thing, this was no small number of people.

Benbow, like many people at the time, believed the body was that of Anna Philomena Morgan, who had disappeared in 1933. In 1939 he began to investigate this theory, around Albury, in earnest. His leads took him to an elderly woman called Lucy Collins, who lived just outside Albury and had a compelling story she wanted to unload. Collins told Benbow that, a few weeks before the discovery of the Pyjama Girl, she was living with a man called Ginger Quinn. One cold, wet morning, Collins said, when Quinn was out, a panicked and crying woman came to the door asking for directions to the road to Sydney. Collins asked the woman in, got her dry in front of the fire and told her to take her time to calm down. Collins says she then went out the back to milk the cows.

When Collins came back in, she said she found Quinn had returned and he was in a raging argument with the woman. Then, Collins said, Quinn picked up a piece of wood from a broken bed and began to viciously beat the girl around the head with it. When the body lay limp, he wrapped the head in a towel and took the girl outside and dumped her in the back of his sulky and drove off into the mist and rain.

Using Collins’s story as a basis, Benbow deduced that the girl was Anna Morgan, the illegitimate daughter of Jeanette Routledge, whose daughter had left home in 1932 at the age of 21, never to be seen again. The work of the amateur sleuth also resulted in Routledge claiming that items of clothing found at Collins’s house had belonged to her missing daughter. This link, although extremely circumstantial, was as good as anything else turned up in almost seven years, and Benbow was convinced he had solved Australia’s most famous murder – and was no doubt also keenly anticipating the limelight his sleuthing skills would bring him.

However, once the theory was put into the hands of the professionals, the police soon discovered that Collins was a drunk and it was common knowledge locally that she couldn’t be taken seriously. It also became quickly apparent that Routledge was simply keen to attribute a body to her missing daughter and get her hands on the £75 in her daughter’s estate. Despite the cynicism of the police, Benbow and Routledge stuck by their story – after all, it fitted their needs – and, in yet another indignity for the corpse, applied to have it delivered to Routledge’s house. Police refused the application. The body stayed where it was. Benbow and Routledge were dismissed for what they were: grifters.

In 1940 Tony Agostini went into custody, of sorts. Not for physical crime but for ideology. Under Mussolini, Italy had entered World War II as allies of the Germans. Agostini, it was decided, had been publishing pro-Mussolini propaganda in the Italian publication he worked for, and as such, was placed in a South Australian internment camp.

He spent four years there until 1944, when he made his way back to Sydney and his old hospitality industry contacts. Romano’s was still the place to go in town, and he soon landed a job there as a waiter. As a haunt for the town’s movers and shakers, one of Romano’s regular lunch customers was the New South Wales police commissioner, Bill Mackay. Mackay knew Agostini from his former cloakroom concession, and as the two men had a good rapport, Agostini became Mackay’s favourite waiter.

Mackay, however, wasn’t only keen on lunching. He had been commissioner for almost ten years, since 1935, and was developing a formidable name for cleaning up all the unsolved murder cases handed to him by his predecessors. If he could solve it, the Pyjama Girl case would be the biggest feather in his cap. To achieve a result, Mackay decided fresh minds should be given the job and that they should pursue it with a renewed vigour.

It wasn’t before long that Mackay’s new taskforce kept coming round to the same name – Linda Agostini. Eventually he had the body transferred from the university to police headquarters and, in yet another macabre twist, had the body lifted from the preserving bath, dried out and then made up to look as much like a living person as possible. Specialists from mortuaries tended to the indentations in the skull and wounds on the forehead. A female officer even applied make-up to the face and, ironically, a hairdresser was called in to restore the fashionable bob. The Pyjama Girl’s body was being prepared for another viewing.

The audience this time, however, wasn’t the weekend hordes but a select group of sixteen. They had been rounded up by the new CIB detectives as people who had known Linda Agostini when she lived in Sydney, and they had been invited to see the freshly made-up body. Seven said they recognised their old friend, nine told police they couldn’t be certain. A success rate of below 50 per cent wasn’t good enough for Mackay, so he phoned his favourite waiter at Romano’s and asked him to come down to police headquarters.

Mackay explained to Agostini his identification problems, and that were he to positively identify his wife, there was absolutely nothing that would implicate him in the murder. He explained that only seven of the sixteen had known the body as either Linda Platt or Agostini, and that he really needed a positive identification if at all possible. What followed next could have been simple dumb luck on the commissioner’s behalf, or the result of some cunning mind games. Either way, it brought a decade of limbo for a corpse to a head.

Before showing Agostini the body, the commissioner had noted in passing that the upbeat demeanour of the Italian cloakroom attendant he once knew had changed. ‘You don’t seem the same smiling Tony from years ago,’ he said. In response, Agostini broke down. His confession came out in a rush. ‘I have been through hell for ten years,’ he said to the startled commissioner. ‘No matter what happens to me now, I am going to tell the truth.’ And then it all came out: about his marriage to Linda Platt, about what started as his unconditional love for her, about her ceaseless drinking, about her violent fits of jealous rage punctuated by her dark pits of depression, and about how her behaviour had forced them to move eight times while in Melbourne. Caught between love and a hard place, Agostini said, his life had become a misery. That misery, he said, finally became intolerable on the night of Sunday 27 August 1934. That was the night Linda Agostini died and the Pyjama Girl was born.

The couple, Agostini said, was living at 589 Swanston Street, Carlton. Agostini was driving to Shepparton on business the next morning. He invited his wife to come with him. She said she wasn’t going, and neither was he. Agostini ignored his wife’s remark. It was par for the course for someone so continuously suspicious and angry. What wasn’t par for the course, however, was the barrel of the revolver he found pressed against his temple when he was woken by the alarm at 7 o’clock the next morning.

Agostini alleged that Linda was standing over him with the gun, her finger on the trigger. As she was so volatile, all he could do, he said, was swing around on the pillow, grab her wrist and force the gun away from him. The pair, he said, wrestled on the bed for control of the gun. There was a shot. The bullet had gone straight into Linda’s head. He couldn’t believe what had happened. Agostini said that he sat on the bed next to his wife’s body for hours, his mind totally blank with shock. Panic bubbled up inside him. He went downstairs to his office, the answer for what to do becoming more and more blurred as the panic in him rose like bile. Though he knew the death was an accident, his paranoia increased with the panic. He feared that if he told the truth, no one would believe him, despite his good reputation and standing in the Italian community through the newspaper. He worried about the publicity, and how it would reflect poorly on the entire Italian community, which was still suffering in Anglo-Australia’s eyes because of Mussolini’s alliance with Germany.

After much thought, he said, he decided that he would be charged with murder, regardless of his word, and that the only option was to dispose of the evidence and his wife’s body. That evening he loaded the body into the back of his car and drove into the bush. It was sheer coincidence that he was headed to Albury. Before he reached the town he turned off the highway and, consistent with being a man with no plan, drove several kilometres down a dark track. He just happened to come to a stop over the stormwater drain. In the dark, he said, he dragged his wife’s body from the car and down into the ditch. He pushed it as far as he could into the drain, and returned to the car for the hessian sack and a jerry can of petrol. The headlights illuminated the rain that had started to fall as Agostini placed the sack under the body, doused it in petrol and set it on fire. Worried that a passing car would spot the flames, Agostini poured the remaining petrol into his tank, jumped back in his car and fled the scene immediately. He didn’t stop, he said, until he reached Carlton.

One would imagine that a man who has just killed his wife would feel like he didn’t have a friend in the world. For two days, Agostini said, he couldn’t eat, sleep or even think. Agostini claimed that the local grocery store owner, Mr Castellano, called in and commented on his neighbour’s poor state. Castellano suggested a drive, during which he asked after Mrs Agostini. Tony cracked – for the first time. He explained the accidental killing and sought Castellano’s opinion. Should he go to the police? The answer was no. Castellano said the police wouldn’t believe Tony’s story and that he should act as if nothing happened. If he wanted to talk, Castellano said, he would be there, to keep the secret safe, but otherwise say nothing. And that, said Tony Agostini, is what he did.

The police commissioner listened intently to the whole story and was curious only about one thing. What had happened to the gun? Agostini explained he had thrown it into the Yarra, though he couldn’t be sure where.

That night, having been told that he wasn’t under arrest, and physically drained from the emotional outpouring, Agostini slept on the couch in the police commissioner’s office. The next morning he and Mackay, and the two detectives in charge of the case, travelled to Albury. There they were joined by senior Victorian detectives and the whole crew went out to the culvert where Agostini again relived the events of the night he became a killer. He was cooperative. The Victorian detectives quizzed him more on the way back to Melbourne. Everything matched up – except one thing.

The police surgeon who had examined the body just after it was discovered said that it was likely Linda Agostini was killed by the blows to the head, not the bullet to the temple. From where, asked one of the senior detectives back at Melbourne Police Headquarters, did Tony think the injuries to Linda’s head may have come?

In another rush of guilt, Agostini admitted that when he was carrying his wife’s body downstairs he dropped her and she went crashing face-first into a flowerpot, which, due to the force of the impact, shattered. Distraught by the amount of blood coming from the wound, he said he then wrapped her head in a towel to staunch the flow. The police had heard enough. Antonio ‘Tony’ Agostini was charged with the murder of his wife and remanded in custody.

Like her decade in living-dead limbo, the inquest into the death of Linda Agostini was long and colourful, macabre and bizarre, in equal parts. It took nineteen days and involved 62 witnesses.

Like the bad smells that accompany death, Dr T. Palmer Benbow and his supporting cast of Jeanette Routledge and an allegedly sober Lucy Collins were present. In another comical turn of events Benbow continued to try to prove that the body was that of Anna Philomena Morgan, not Linda Agostini. Jeanette Routledge took the stand with a series of evidence that, she said, proved the dead girl was Anna Morgan.

Then it was the turn of Collins, who, without the benefit of a fortifying drink, stone cold denied that the episode in the hut involving Ginger Quinn ever took place. The good doctor’s case looked dead in the water; the only person yet to reach the diagnosis was the medical man himself.

Despite Dr Benbow’s best efforts to turn the inquest into high farce, the coroner tried staunchly to put an end to the Anna Morgan hijinks. And while it was noted that the two women did indeed share similar characteristics, he found that on or around 27 August 1934 Linda Agostini, nee Platt, died from severe head injuries that were feloniously and maliciously inflicted upon her by her husband. Antonio ‘Tony’ Agostini was committed for trial in the Victorian Supreme Court.

Tony Agostini’s only chance of defence to beat the murder rap was exactly what he had told the police in his confessions: that his life was a misery; that he lived in fear of his wife’s drunken rages; that he was tormented endlessly by the piles of empty whiskey bottles that lay omnipresent around the house and his wife’s jealous accusations. And that is exactly what he told the court in a calm and reasonable manner when his trial opened on 19 June 1944, presided over by Mr Justice Lowe.

Agostini was defended by Mr Fazio, and Mr Cussen appeared for the Crown. It wasn’t until the seventh day of the trial that Agostini took the stand, but because of his ability to relate his torment in a reasonable manner, and the fact that it gelled with what he had told the police, Fazio’s line of defence was an effective one.

When Cussen began his cross-examination, naturally he did his best to paint Agostini as a crazed monster who beat his wife to death, and it was under cross-examination that Agostini’s composure began to wilt. Cussen homed in on the weaknesses of Agostini’s recollection of his reasoning at the time. He said, ‘You believed your wife was dead. Why did you not go to the police and explain there had been this dreadful accident?’ Agostini replied, ‘I was so distressed and unbalanced.’ Cussen countered, ‘But I thought you told Mr Fazio this morning you were afraid of a big scandal?’

Cussen also zeroed in on the part of Agostini’s story with the biggest inconsistencies: the account of his wife’s body falling down the stairs and the cause of the head injuries. He quizzed Agostini on the smallest of details, such as the way in which he came down the stairs, where his feet were placed, and the manner in which he carried his wife’s body. Agostini said he couldn’t remember, and Cussen came in for the kill, reminding him that he had told Mr Fazio that he tripped when his left foot became caught in the carpet. How, he asked Agostini, could he remember details such as that yet not others? And how, asked Cussen, if Agostini said he was carrying his wife feet-first down the stairs when he tripped, did she end up falling face-first into a flowerpot?

Cussen had highlighted serious flaws in the accounts of the so-called torment and actions of Tony Agostini, and on the morning of the ninth day of the hearing, the jury finally left the room to make their decision. After 90 minutes they returned. Tony Agostini, they said, ‘was not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter’. Fazio’s tactics had paid dividends.

In his summing up, Justice Lowe said that he agreed with the verdict and that Tony Agostini had indeed been stretched to the limits of his endurance by the erratic behaviour of his wife. However, in regards to the weakest part of Agostini’s story, the stairs and head injuries, he added, ‘The weapon you used must have been a heavy one and must have been used with great violence, such as constitutes a serious crime.’

Justice Lowe sentenced Agostini to six years in jail with hard labour. In the end, he only served three years and nine months. On 21 August 1948, just after his release, a deportation order was issued for Tony Agostini and he was sent back to Italy on board the Strathnaver. One of the main protagonists in one of Australia’s most memorable murder mysteries had left the country for good.

The close of the trail also signalled the beginning of the end for the corpse of Linda Platt. There was to be closure, at last. Just over two weeks after the completion of the trial, and almost ten years after her death, Linda Platt was finally laid to rest in Melbourne’s Preston Cemetery on 13 July 1944. After all the indignity, publicity and debate, all the time spent as a public curio, and all the newspapers she had helped to sell, the body of Linda Platt was finally given a skerrick of recompense. Not much, mind, not to match the indignity of travelling the earth as the living dead, but, as Tony Agostini refused to accept the body for burial, Linda Platt, Linda Agostini and the Pyjama Girl were all finally laid to rest at the expense of the state. And when the lid came down at last on the coffin, the lid also at last came down on one Australia’s most enduring murder mysteries.