Uneasy Corpse

For nearly ten years the burned and battered body of an unidentified, pajama-clad young woman lay in a tank of Formalin in Sydney University's Pathological Museum. When the streetcars rumbled past, she bobbed gently.

For nearly ten years the neat, determined pen of 68-year-old Mrs. Edith Flemington of Littlehampton, Sussex, England, scratched countless letters to the world's police, demanding solution of her daughter's mysterious disappearance.

Last week the two mysteries merged: astonished Antonio Agostini, bereft husband of the "Pajama Girl," wriggled desperately, impaled upon the point of Mrs. Flemington's relentless pen. Police charged the beefy sometime silk merchant, now a waiter, with murdering his wife, Linda Platt, daughter of Mrs. Flemington by an earlier marriage.

Years ago Australian police had sent Mrs. Flemington photos of the Pajama Girl. She had denied that the mangled face could be her daughter's. But she kept on having dreams that her daughter was afloat. Last month a weary Sydney detective, rereading a Flemington appeal, had a hunch: a dentist was found who could say positively that the Pajama Girl's dentistry tallied with Linda's. After that, everyone remembered details--how the pretty, sharp-featured Linda had clerked in a store, ushered in a cinema, shipped as hairdresser on Red Star liners; how Antonio had bought her a passage home instead of an engagement ring, how her sister had given her, as part of her trousseau, the yellow silk pajamas with the green dragon embroidered on the back.

Said Mrs. Flemington, as her son-in-law waited trial in Melbourne: "The Australian police told me they would solve the mystery ... if it took a lifetime. They kept their word."

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