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The full episode, in writing.
A battered trunk sits in the dusty corner of the Redfern police station. Inside, the body of a young woman is curled in a fetal position, her limbs pressed tight. Her skin is marked by bruises, her face frozen in a final, silent scream. When the trunk is pried open on the morning of May 17, 1934, officers are met with the worst murder Sydney has witnessed in a decade. The crime is so ghastly, the newspapers call it “the most gruesome discovery in Australian criminal history.” The identity of the victim remains unknown for days. The killer is never caught.
The woman in the trunk becomes known as the “Pyjama Girl.” She’s young—most estimate between 25 and 35—with brown hair, hazel eyes, and a gold-filled tooth. Her body is found clothed in floral silk pyjamas, the only clue to her final hours. The trunk had been dumped in a culvert near Albury, a rural town straddling the border of New South Wales and Victoria. Heavy rainfall had flooded the area, carrying the trunk into view of two railway workers on their morning inspection round.
She carries no identification. Her clothes aren’t locally made, and her feet are bare. Later, a post-mortem reveals she died from blunt force trauma to the head, after suffering repeated blows. Her hands bear defensive wounds, suggesting a desperate struggle. The killer had doused her body in petrol, possibly trying to destroy evidence, but the trunk was airtight; the flames never took hold.
Australia in the 1930s is a country in flux. The Great Depression has left tens of thousands unemployed. Social safety nets are thin, and a culture of transience dominates the eastern seaboard. Boarding houses are full of men and women moving from town to town, searching for work. In rural New South Wales, the police force is stretched thin, crime-solving methods are primitive, and communication between towns is slow. Newspapers are the main source of news for the public, and stories of violent crime become lurid front-page fodder in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.
Sergeant Thomas Kelly is the first senior officer on the scene. He’s a career policeman, unflappable, with a reputation for thoroughness. With him is Dr. Thomas Morgan, the local police surgeon. Morgan notes two things immediately. First, the pyjamas: they’re expensive, Chinese silk with a distinct floral pattern, imported and rare in Australia at the time. Second, the woman’s dental work, particularly the gold-filled tooth, suggests someone with access to good dentistry—likely not a vagrant. The post-mortem fixes her time of death at about two weeks before discovery.
The trunk itself is a battered, brown leather affair, with brass corners and a broken lock. It measures about three feet long, with rope marks on the handles suggesting it had been dragged some distance before being abandoned in the culvert. Police find a faint laundry mark inside the pyjamas: the code “W2043.” This cryptic detail becomes the case’s first major lead.
Detective Inspector Harry Leary from Sydney is called in to lead the investigation. Leary is known for his doggedness and his reliance on scientific methods, unusual for the era. He orders the trunk and body transported to Sydney for further examination. The trunk is displayed at the police morgue on Darlinghurst Road, where hundreds of members of the public file past in hopes of recognizing the woman.
Leary’s team prints hundreds of posters with a sketch of the victim’s face and the pyjamas’ floral pattern. They distribute them by train and post to towns from Brisbane to Melbourne. The police also send samples of the pyjamas to importers in Sydney’s Chinatown, seeking anyone who recalls selling such a garment. They interview every dentist in the area, hoping to match the gold dental work to a patient’s record.
Several women are reported missing in the months before and after the murder, including more than a dozen from Sydney’s working-class suburbs. Police painstakingly cross-reference descriptions with the trunk victim. Each lead ends in disappointment—either the missing woman is found alive, or the details don’t match.
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald runs a daily column about the “Pyjama Girl.” The coverage is breathless, lurid, and relentless. Readers send in letters, theories, and supposed sightings. A dairywoman from Wagga Wagga claims to have seen a man dragging a trunk near the railway line at dawn two weeks before the body was found. Her description is vague: a man in a brown coat, “nervous, looking over his shoulder.” Police search boarding houses along the railway line but find nothing.
The investigation’s breakthrough comes when a tailor in Melbourne recognizes the laundry mark “W2043.” He says it was used by the Emerald Dry Cleaners, a small shop in Carlton. Leary visits the shop and, after sifting through old record books, discovers the pyjamas were cleaned and marked one month earlier for “Linda Agostini”—an Italian-Australian woman recently reported missing by her husband, Antonio Agostini.
Linda Agostini was born Florence Linda Platt in London in 1905. She emigrated to Australia in 1927, settling first in Sydney, then Melbourne. She marries Antonio Agostini, a waiter who fled Italy for political reasons. Friends describe Linda as vivacious but troubled, prone to mood swings and heavy drinking. The couple’s relationship is stormy, marked by jealous quarrels and separations.
Antonio tells police he last saw Linda in early August 1934. He claims she left their Carlton boarding house after a heated argument, taking only her handbag and her pyjamas. When she didn’t return, he assumed she’d gone to stay with friends, as she’d done before. He never reported her missing.
Police confront Antonio with the evidence: the pyjamas, the laundry mark, and the dental records. He maintains his innocence, providing character witnesses and a rock-solid alibi for the week Linda disappeared—he was working double shifts at the Café Florentino in Melbourne, a fact confirmed by his employer and several co-workers.
The forensic evidence grows. Dr. Morgan’s autopsy reveals the victim suffered a fractured skull, likely inflicted by a blunt object such as a hammer. Her ribs show signs of repeated blows. There are ligature marks on her wrists, suggesting she was bound before death. The killer attempted to burn the body, pouring petrol over her clothes and skin, but the trunk’s air-tightness smothered the flames.
The trunk’s origin is traced to a secondhand shop in Sydney, but the proprietor can’t recall who bought it. Police circulate its description to railway stations and freight yards up and down the east coast. No one recognizes it.
Meanwhile, sightings pour in from all over the country. A railway porter in Goulburn claims to have helped a man load a heavy trunk onto the Sydney Express. A hotelier in Albury remembers a couple, one of whom matched Linda’s description, checking out in a hurry two days before the discovery. None of these claims can be substantiated.
The inquest into the Pyjama Girl’s death lasts for weeks. The coroner, Mr. W.G. Ormiston, hears from more than fifty witnesses, including Linda’s friends, family, and employer. The jury returns a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.
With no suspect in custody, the body is preserved in a glass tank filled with formalin and displayed at the Sydney University medical school, intended for further study. For years, thousands visit the tank, hoping to identify the woman. The sight is so disturbing, some faint or vomit on the spot.
In 1944, ten years after the murder, a wave of new evidence rocks the case. Detective Chief Inspector H.G. Brown, now in charge, re-examines the file while working on a separate case involving Italian immigrants in Victoria. At the same time, Antonio Agostini is arrested for possession of prohibited firearms. During interrogation, Agostini breaks down and confesses to killing his wife Linda, claiming it was an accident during a drunken quarrel. He says he panicked, placed her body in the trunk, and transported it by train from Melbourne to Albury, intending to dispose of it in the Murray River.
Agostini’s confession is detailed. He describes the pyjamas, the trunk, and the railway journey. He remembers pouring petrol over the body, hoping the fire would destroy all evidence. But forensic experts remain skeptical. Discrepancies emerge between Linda’s medical records and the preserved body. The victim’s eye color, dental records, and scars don’t all match Linda’s known injuries. Some suggest the confession is coerced, the result of relentless police pressure.
The 1944 trial is a national sensation. Agostini pleads guilty to manslaughter, not murder, insisting the killing was not premeditated. He’s sentenced to six years in prison and deported to Italy on release. For the public, the case seems resolved. The preserved body is finally buried under Linda Agostini’s name.
But questions persist. Independent forensic experts question whether the body in the tank is truly Linda. In the 1970s, Professor John Glaister, a Scottish pathologist, reviews the autopsy evidence and concludes the victim is not Linda Agostini. His findings point to mismatches in the skull structure and age estimation. Some suggest the original identification was made under pressure to close Australia’s most sensational murder case.
The Pyjama Girl case reveals the limitations of 1930s forensic science. With no DNA testing, identification relies on dental records, clothing, and witness testimony. The laundry mark becomes the key link between the victim and Linda Agostini, but it’s never conclusively proved the pyjamas found in the trunk were the same as those cleaned in Carlton.
The case also exposes the role of media in shaping public perceptions of crime. Newspapers fuel hysteria, print wild theories, and pressure police to deliver a quick resolution. The public’s fascination with the preserved body—the Pyjama Girl displayed for a decade in a glass tank—speaks to a morbid curiosity rarely seen in Australian criminal history.
The Pyjama Girl mystery highlights the vulnerabilities of transient women in interwar Australia. Linda Agostini’s troubled life, punctuated by domestic violence and instability, reflects broader social problems of the era: inadequate protection for women, poor communication between police departments, and the ease with which people could disappear in a society without centralized records.
The trunk itself becomes a symbol of Australia’s unsolved crimes: battered, anonymous, and containing secrets that would never fully come to light. Linguistic evidence, scientific skepticism, and decades of debate ensure the case remains one of Australia’s most troubling unsolved mysteries.
The preserved body was viewed by more than 10,000 people over the decade it remained on display at Sydney University.