On 1 September 1934, the badly burned body of a woman with a bullet through the neck was found in a culvert running under Howlong Road in Albury, New South Wales, Australia.

As a teenager, Platt worked at a confectionery shop in Surrey before travelling to New Zealand at the age of 19 after what was rumoured to be a broken romance.

[1] There she worked at a cinema in the city and lived in a boarding house on Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross where accounts tell she entertained young, attractive men.

Agostini disappeared from friends and family in late August 1934, around a week before the unidentified Pyjama Girl was found in Splitter's Creek, near Albury, on the New South Wales side of the border with Victoria.

In a detail that came to define the case, she was wearing yellow silk pyjamas with a Chinese dragon motif – in Depression-era Australia, such clothing was luxurious, youthful and bohemian.

On 19 January 1941, the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article claiming reporters had obtained a 'secret police file'.

Detectives, whose reports are summarised in the file, were impressed by the resemblance between Philomena Rutledge and the Pyjama Girl, but they did not believe they were identical.

The police file also revealed that Philomena’s grandmother, a woman by the name of Mrs Jones, reported that her granddaughter was missing back on 1 December 1934, just a few months after the body had been found.

[1] Tony Agostini had recently returned to Sydney after being held in internment camps at Orange, Hay and Loveday from 1940 to 1944 due to his nationalist sympathies.

In his 2004 book, The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies, historian Richard Evans pointed out discrepancies with the evidence, calling Antonio Agostini's conviction the result of "police corruption and a miscarriage of justice".

Evans also points out that 125 women were originally on the police's list of possible identities, but that these other leads remained "uneliminated and untraced".

[11] Evans also suggests that Agostini was murdered around the same time as the Albury victim, and most likely in the confines of the couple's Melbourne townhouse, but that she was not the Pyjama Girl.

A film entitled La ragazza dal pigiama giallo (The Pyjama Girl Case), directed by Italian Flavio Mogherini, was produced in 1977.

[13] In issue #35 of Eddie Campbell's serial comic "Bacchus" this case is featured in a sequence titled The Pyjama Girl.

In 2013, the Hothouse Theatre in Albury/Wodonga commissioned and performed a play entitled The Pyjama Girl from Canberra playwright Emma Gibson.