On September 1, 1934, a farmer named Tom Griffith was walking his bull near Albury in New South Wales when he made a horrible discovery. He found the body of a young woman pushed into a large pipe under the road. The woman had been shot in the neck and beaten badly on the head. Parts of her body were burned. She was wearing yellow silk pyjamas with a Chinese dragon on them. This type of clothing was unusual and fancy in 1930s Australia. The newspapers started calling her the Pyjama Girl.
The case became one of the biggest crimes anyone talked about in Australia. Police looked into hundreds of tips and even checked every woman under 40 who did not vote in the Federal election that weekend. The woman’s body was first kept at the Albury morgue. When nobody could say who she was, they moved her to Sydney University’s medical school. There, the body was kept in a bath of formaldehyde and became a strange thing for the public to see. Thousands of people came to look at the body, hoping someone might know who she was.
