Painted plaster facial reconstruction of the Pyjama Girl, modelled by Sydney policeman Cecil Jardine c1938.

Pyjama Girl Murder Facial Reconstruction, c1938

Between 1934 and 1944, the exotically titled Pyjama Girl Murder became the nation's most well known unsolved crime. A young woman’s body was discovered beside a country road in Albury on 1st September 1934. She had been bashed and shot, her body dumped and set alight. Police efforts at identifying the body proved fruitless. The body was subsequently preserved for purposes of identification in a zinc-lined bath at the Anatomy Department of Sydney University. She became known as the Pyjama Girl having been found dead in her pyjamas. The case was publicised nationally and internationally but the failure to indentify the woman’s killer became an embarrassment to the NSW police. Almost ten years after her death, the Pyjama Girl was identified as Linda Agostini and her husband confessed to the crime to the Commissioner of Police, William. J. Mackay in March 1944.

Two sculptural busts of the Pyjama Girl were modelled by Cecil Jardine, one of them painted in life-like colours in order to suggest how the Pyjama Girl – severely disfigured due to burns, facial battering and a gunshot wound – might have appeared prior to her injuries. Both of these plaster models now reside in the collection of the Justice & Police Museum. The Pyjama Girl case has now assumed an iconic status in popular memory. Many objects, photographs and documents generated by the case, including busts, death masks, a bath-tub, coffin, forensic and morgue photography, dental charts and court transcripts are currently held by the Justice & Police Museum. This material provides insight into the variety of forensic disciplines and investigative methodologies applied in order to solve this crime.