Revealed: 10 Australian Unsolved Murders

When a crime is never solved, it can become both tantalizing and maddening.

The victim never gets justice, their family never gets closure, and law enforcement officers run the risk of turning into haunted, True Detective-style-obsessives even though it is not through lack of effort. Despite thousands of hours of police work and offers of rewards, murder cases can be notoriously complex, and some killers may never be caught.

Below, therefore, we take a look at 10 Australian unsolved murders as follows:

1. Linda Agostini

Born Linda Platt in London in 1905, the young teenager first worked at a confectionery store in Surrey before travelling to New Zealand aged 19. She remained in New Zealand until she was 22 before moving to Australia to live in Sydney. Platt was a Jazz Age party-goer and a heavy drinker who had trouble adjusting to difficulty. However, her 1930 marriage to Italian-born Antonio Agostini saw the couple leave Sydney for Melbourne where she would soon disappear from family and friends in late August of 1934. This was around a week before an unidentified Pyjama Girl was discovered in Splitter’s Creek, on the border of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria.

The victim’s body was found by a local man who had been out leading his prized bull along the side of the road near Albury when he saw a body in a culvert that was slightly concealed and badly burnt. It soon became apparent that the body belonged to a petite woman in her early 20s although her identity could not be established at first. Several names, including Linda Agostini and Anna Philomena Morgan were suggested for the identity of the dead woman as both had been missing around the same time and bore resemblance to the Pyjama Girl. However, NSW police satisfied themselves that neither was the Pyjama Girl and she remained unidentified.

2. Bowraville murders

These were a series of murders that took place between September 1990 and February 1991 in Bowraville NSW. There were several similarities in the disappearances of the victims (Colleen Walker, Evelyn Greenup, and Clinton Speedy-Duroux) which led police to believe that they were committed by the same killer(s) i.e.:

• All the victims were Aboriginal
• The murders took place within a short timeframe of 5 months
• All 3 victims disappeared after parties in the Aboriginal community in Bowraville
• Autopsies of 2 bodies that were found indicated that both suffered blunt trauma to the head.

Despite two trials and a coroner’s inquest, no one was ever successfully prosecuted for these murders.

3. Easey Street murders

These refer to the killing of Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong who were both stabbed to death on 10th January 1977 in their Easey Street home in the suburb of Collingwood, Melbourne. They were stabbed several times although Armstrong’s 16-month old son was unharmed. Their bodies were discovered three days later after neighbors reported hearing a baby whimpering. The crime remains unsolved to date.