Linda Agostini

Linda Agostini (12 September 1905 - 27 August 1934) was identified as the "Pyjama Girl" victim found on a stretch of road in Albury between Sydney and Melbourne in the September of 1934. The murder intrigued the Australian people and the unidentified corpse, (found to match the description of missing Linda Agostini in 1944), became the macabre obsession of thousands.

Life

Linda Agostini was born Florence Linda Platt in Forest Hill, a suburb of London, on 12 September 1905. As a teenager, Platt worked at a confectionery store 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.cite web
first=Bruce
last=Pennay
title =Agostini, Linda (1905 - 1934)
publisher =Australian National University
work=Australian Dictionary of Biography
url =http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130703b.htm
accessdate = 2007-05-02] Here, the penniless glamour girl worked at a picture theatre in the city and lived in a boarding house on Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross where all accounts tell she "entertained" more than her fair share of young, attractive men. Platt was a heavy drinker and a flighty Jazz Age party-goer who had difficulty adjusting to stability. Her marriage to Italian-born Antonio Agostini in a Sydney registry office during 1930 was the beginning of a very unhappy marriage that would see the couple leave for Melbourne to remove Linda from the influence of her Sydney friends. They settled in Carlton.

Discovery and initial investigation

The unhappy Mrs Agostini disappeared from friends and family around a week before the unidentified "Pyjama Girl" was found in Albury, on the border (of New South Wales and Victoria). Amended dental records and suspicious testimonies seemed to conveniently "surface" in 1944 to assert that the dead woman found a decade earlier was Mrs. Linda Agostini. The identification came just as public confidence in the New South Wales Police Force began to wane at their failure to catch the decade's most prolific killer and the circumstances under which Antonio Agostini "confessed" to killing his wife in their Melbourne townhouse are still very dubious today.

The victim's body was discovered by a local man named Tom Griffith. Griffith had been leading a prize bull along the side of Howlong Road near Albury when he saw the body in a culvert running under the road. Slightly concealed and badly burnt, the body would not have been visible to anybody driving by.

It soon became apparent that the body was of a petite woman in her 20s, but her identity could not be established. After the initial investigation failed to identify her, the body was taken to the New South Wales state capital of Sydney where it was put on public exhibition. The body was preserved in a bath of formalin for this purpose, at the Sydney University Medical School until 1942, when it was transferred to police headquarters where it remained until 1934 ["'Pyjama girl' murderer sentenced", "Australia Through Time" (7ed). Random House Australia: Milsons Point. ISBN 0 091 83815 0] . With the strong publicity surrounding the case, it was hoped that somebody might identify the corpse.

Several names were suggested for the identity of the dead woman, among them being Anna Philomena Morgan and Linda Agostini. Both women were missing, both bore a likeness to the pyjama girl and both were of the right age. However, New South Wales police satisfied themselves that neither of the missing women was the pyjama girl and she remained unidentified.

Contemporary belief is that Linda Agostini was murdered around the same time as the Albury victim, and most likely in the confines of the couple’s Melbourne townhouse, however it is commonly accepted that Mrs. Agostini’s remains were never uncovered.

Reopening of the case

In 1944, ten years after the body had been discovered, the forensic evidence was re-examined. The dental analysis of the victim was found to be faulty, and to have not discovered two porcelain fillings. It was then found that forensically, the pyjama girl's dental records were a match with Linda Agostini's.

The police commissioner, William MacKay, knew Linda Agostini's husband. Tony Agostini had recently returned to Sydney after being held in Internment Camps at Orange, Hay and Loveday from 1940 to 1944. Noticing that Agostini seemed to be in a nervous state, MacKay asked him what had come over him. Agostini then confessed to killing his wife.

In his statement, Agostini admitted that he had accidentally shot and killed his wife when they were living in Melbourne. Worried that he might be accused of murder, he had driven the body over the state border to Albury and had dumped it in the culvert. He had poured petrol over the body and set fire to it, to destroy the evidence.

The arrest of Agostini was a sensation, as it meant that the pyjama girl had been identified. He was charged with murder and was extradited to Melbourne, where he was tried for murder. Surprisingly, he was acquitted of murder but found guilty of manslaughter instead, and was sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He was released in 1948 and deported to Italy, where he died in 1969.

New evidence

The case might have been left there, but new evidence recently uncovered by Richard Evans, a Melbourne historian, casts doubt on the conclusion of the case. As detailed in his book "The Pyjama Girl Mystery," Evans has pointed out discrepancies with the evidence. The pyjama girl had a different bust size to that of Linda Agostini. Linda Agostini had a different shaped nose. Most tellingly, the pyjama girl had blue eyes whereas Linda Agostini had brown eyes. In light of these discrepancies, there is some possibility that the dental evidence identifying Linda Agostini as the pyjama girl was fabricated, and that the Pyjama Girl's real identity therefore remains unknown.

References

* Evans, Richard (2004). "The Pyjama Girl Mystery" (1st ed.). Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. ISBN 1-920769-36-6.
* [http://www.abc.net.au/tv/rewind/txt/s1161693.htm ABC Television: Rewind - 01/08/2004: The Pyjama Girl Mystery]
* [http://www.hht.net.au/museums/jp/collection#pyjama Historic Houses Trust, Justice and Police collection - photo of plaster model of the Pyjama Girl's face]
* [http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130703b.htm Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for Linda Agostini]

Persondata
NAME=Agostini, Linda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Platt, Florence Linda
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Australian murder victim
DATE OF BIRTH=12 September 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH=Forest Hill, London
DATE OF DEATH=1934
PLACE OF DEATH=Carlton, Victoria