Margaret and the murdered woman

Margaret Cashmere was newly married and calmly living her life in Wellington when she suddenly became embroiled in an international murder mystery.
It was a strange set of coincidences that led to her being involved in what would be a decade long case that baffled Australian police,
In 1934, the badly burned body of a woman was found on the side of a road partially in a ditch in Albury, New South Wales, Australia with a bullet in her neck. No one knew who she was.
She would come to be known as the pyjama girl because she had been wearing silk pyjamas.
Headlines in newspapers said it was thought she might have been a Kiwi and suddenly a small group in Christchurch came forward saying it might be Beryl Cashmore who they had not seen for a few years.
That didn’t help - there was no Beryl Cashmore. Her friends seemed to remember she had been educated at a convent and some had seen silk pyjamas in a suitcase of hers.
It took a quick witted reporter to find Margaret instead.
Margaret was 26 at the time and had been born in Christchurch where she attended St Mary’s Convent until she was 11 before moving away. She went into domestic service for a while, came to Wellington and married Norman Watt.
It fitted but there was one problem: Margaret was very much alive.
Police were satisfied that it was a case of mistaken identity and New Zealand bowed out of the murder investigation, which was becoming stranger by the day.
As the police failed to identify her, the poor woman’s body was taken to Sydney where it was (gruesomely) put on display to try and help identification.
She was preserved formalin by the medical school until 1942 when she was transferred to police headquarters.
There were any number of theories and suspects. In 1935, a vagrant called Robert Henderson Rae claimed he was the murderer, saying they had arrived from New Zealand together and that he had strangled her.
Then police became concerned that the body might be an Austrian sculptor Countess Coudenhove-Kalgeri - Anita Carola Neuber - who had been in Australia with a man she married there before they went on their honeymoon. That led to police from France and Vienna getting involved but it wasn’t her either.
In 1944, a woman took a court case to prove the body was that of her daughter Philomena Morgan which resulted in police ordering forensic testing of the body. Dental analysis said it was Linda Agostini. Her husband Tony admitted to her murder.
He said he had accidentally shot and killed her in Melbourne then driven the body over state lines to dump it. He had also poured petrol over her and set fire to her.
At trial he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years but only served three before being deported to Italy where he died.
A couple of films were made of the case and at least one book written.
However it is not quite over. A recent book by historian Richard Evans pointed out there were physical differences between Linda and the body and that the police had had a list of many missing women that they had not been able to eliminate.
Agostini might have murdered his wife, but it was not clear that the body found was definitely Linda.
The body - listed as Linda Agostini - was finally buried in Preston General Cemetery in Bundoora, Bunyule City, Victoria.​