A new direction on the 1934 Pyjama Girl mystery
In September 1934 a badly burnt body was found in a culvert under Howlong Road near Albury, New South Wales.
She became known as the Pyjama Girl because she was wearing Chinese dragon motif pyjamas. Her burnt and battered head was wrapped in a towel, her neck shot through with a bullet, her body was in a hessian sack and her legs were severely burnt. Her body was only discovered because a man walking by could smell kerosene and he investigated it.
The dragon motif pyjama top:
Note this visual appearance is disputed by the original descriptions in the 1944 inquest where the pyjamas are described as white with a canary coloured top and the dragon design is in white silk on crepe. Doctor Palmer-Benbow pointed this out around 1940 after seeing a film they had made for the cinema.
The hessian sack was from the Dalmore farming district. It was agreed by the witness and police it was a potato sack.
This is a side note which may be linked to the crime. The Italian Genoni family operated a Dalmore farm in the 1930s was subject to flooding. Angelo Genoni ran the farm and was fined in 1933 for operating a wireless receiver illegally in Young Street, Albany, Western Australia. His sister Rosa was a famous fashion designer in Milan. They also believed in a form of spiritualism — called Anthroposophy. It is likely that Angelo Genoni and Antonio Agostini were interned during the war. Agostini had been a journalist before and after the war. Though farmer Genoni applied for naturalisation and may have become an Australian citizen just in time. But within 40 days of leaving the internment camp in 1944, Agostini was reported as working as a waiter or cloakroom attendant and charged with murdering the Pyjama girl back in 1934. But in other accounts, he was renting the cloakroom as a journalist to get stories.
But back to the plot — most people who have reviewed the case from dentists to criminologists have arrived at the same conclusion that the Pyjama Girl was Linda Agostini. The wife of Antonio Agostini. The evidence lined up: she was missing since 1934, dentists identified the fillings as matching hers and finally her husband Antonio confessed to killing her. He said he shot her with a revolver and then burnt her body under the culvert. Case closed.
Except there were a few dissenting voices. Between 1934 to 1944 there were two important voices that dissented: the mother of Philomena Morgan (or Franki) who said it was her daughter. Her mother was Jeanetta Constance Routledge or Jeanetta Brittz (at birth). Jeanetta kept requesting a new inquest to prove the body was her daughter; also Dr Thomas Alexander Palmer Benbow started to investigate the case. But Philomena’s dentist also identified her as the body explaining he gave her two gold fillings as a teenager. The body had two gold inlays.
Benbow brought forward evidence he found in or near a shed (a burnt handbag, a crystal earring, a silk belt, a coat, a suitcase with a photograph of Philomena and a metal part of a bedstead that he thought was the object she was struck with). He also did some complex analyses of the face of the body and the face of Philomena Morgan. He tried to say with his Benbow facial ID measurement system — the measurements between facial landmarks of the body were the same as Philomena Morgan. But nobody was listening. He was barred from giving evidence at the final trial. He was denounced publicly in the media as a vain publicity-seeking fraud. The police were also tipped off in 1939 about items dumped in Splitters Creek. They found fragments of a dress, shoes and slippers.
It was not until the 1960s that facial ID was considered to be a valuable tool. That the distance between facial landmarks could identify a person. Benbow was forgotten by history as the potential innovator of a form of facial ID. Though he attributed his methods to crime writer Harry Ashton Wolfe who was trained by criminologist Bertillon. The naked body of the Pyjama Girl lay in a bath of formaldehyde for 10 years for the public to view on some pretext that a member of the public might identify her. Though prurient interest may have been a bigger factor. Antonio Agostini was convicted of the manslaughter of Linda Agostini, but not murder. He served under four years in jail and was extradited to Italy. He died in 1969.
In 2004 criminologist Richard Evans looked at the case and came to the conclusion that Linda Agostini was the unlikely victim. He believed the police had conspired to prosecute her husband and pointed out discrepancies with the evidence, calling Antonio Agostini’s conviction the result of “police corruption and a miscarriage of justice”. The Pyjama Girl had brown eyes whereas Agostini’s were blue. The victim also had a different bust size than Agostini and she had a different shaped nose. Though since 2004 he may have changed his opinion with so much professional evidence pointing to Linda as the victim.
This was his view in 2005:
https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/doubts-raised-about-pyjama-girl-identity-0
In 2022 I have looked again at all the newspaper accounts of witnesses and the police. What struck me was that one police sergeant Gallivan provided key and contradictory evidence about Philomena Morgan claiming he had seen her alive in 1934 to her mother then denied it in court. But by the trial of Agostini in 1944 Gallivan was no longer in the police force. He had falsified evidence in cases and used violent methods to intimidate both witnesses and criminals. In other words, police sergeant Gallivan was an unreliable witness. A Royal Commission described Gallivan as “a sinister figure: brutal, vindictive and lawless”.
The autopsy concluded the victim had 6 fillings in her teeth but then magically after 10 years two more fillings were found in the bottom of the bath of formaldehyde. For some reason, it was accepted these had fallen out of her mouth. Multiple dentists and modern scientific journals have accepted this as reasonable evidence. Pyjama Girl now had 8 fillings which meant she was Linda Agostini. Benbow also argued as a medical professional that the body he was looking at was aged less than 23 whereas multiple medical experts came forward to say she was aged over 27 to match Linda Agostini.
But returning to the methods of Benbow, but using modern facial ID software we can start to see what he intended to show in court.
Using Betaface an average image was created of the corpse and clay death mask it had been colourised to make it detect with facial ID software. This allowed an average image of Philomena and the corpse of Pyjama Girl to be created. But it is now easy to see why Benbow thought that the corpse was Philomena Morgan. She matches the body. The other identity is Jean Morris also thought to be Philomena Morgan a woman supposedly murdered in 1932 by multiple stabbings. But we can return to that later.
In court, Benbow overlayed three enlarged photographic transparencies to show the same as I did above to create a photographic average image in an X-ray lightbox. He showed that the face of Philomena Morgan overlayed perfectly on top of the corpse images — images that were taken 10 years apart. But he also went one step further than facial ID he analysed her hands. He said hands were more distinctive than faces. He showed a photograph of the left hand of the body (with measurements between hand landmarks) that matched a photograph of the left hand of Philomena. He said that Philomena Morgan was Pyjama Girl “beyond doubt”.
He also examined the teeth of the corpse versus Philomena and concluded that 21 measurements he had made that matched meant the body was Philomena.
Though Detective Sub-inspector Frederick Hobley refuted his evidence.
But it is up to the Australian police to think again about having an inquest for the Pyjama Girl but use DNA to show she was Philomena Morgan and to prove her mother and Dr Benbow were right. To show that the woman stabbed 33 times with a stiletto (knife) was possibly Linda Agostini or another woman and not Philomena Morgan who was the real Pyjama Girl.
One other facial ID surprise — even for me — is that Linda Agostini is more like Jean Morris than Philomena Morgan. All the green box matches to Jean Morris below are Linda Agostini. It would imply that Linda was stabbed by Antonio Agostini in 1932. Then he was interned. Then when he got out in 1944 the police decided to charge him for the 1934 crime. No one was making a fuss about Jean Morris the woman stabbed 33 times in 1932. But they could clear up the crime the Australian nation was obsessing about — the Pyjama Girl.
One possible suspect could be in this story where a hammer was the murder weapon:
My most recent account of this murder:
