A young British migrant woman unwittingly complicated the police identification of a dead body in 1890. But that would likely never have happened had she not betrayed her fiancé and fled to Adelaide.

Suddenly, floating in Port Phillip Bay near St Kilda Pier was the body of a young woman. Shocked to discover it, as he went about his work on that April afternoon in 1890, was boatman, Thomas Higgins, who immediately called the police.

Constable Willett soon arrived on the scene, where he retrieved the body for delivery to the Melbourne Morgue. With nothing by which to identify the body, the morgue issued a description, which read:

The body is that of a woman about 26 years of age, five foot two inches (157.5cm) in height, dark complexion and brown hair. She was dressed in a black dress, and wore an imitation sealskin jacket, a purse containing £1.5.6 ($2.55) was found in her pocket, and she wore two silver bangles and a gold brooch. The body appears to have been in the water for about a week.

Over the next few days, many people visited the morgue, where they tried but failed to identify the young woman and her belongings.

Then, on the evening of April 30, two men turned up at the morgue. James Shannon and Louis Lightman were looking for 20-year-old Jewish woman, Pauline Levi, a recent arrival from Leeds, England.

But the dead woman’s body, owing to its extensive decomposition, had been buried before the two arrived. Of Levi, however, they gave a description which closely matched that of the dead woman.

And, while they could not, with any certainty, identify the clothing or jewellery as belonging to Levi, they said the items were remarkably similar to those she wore.

Lightman said he had known Levi – his brother’s sister-in-law – in Leeds before he immigrated to Victoria in 1886. A cabinetmaker, he secured a well-paid job with the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company’s Carriage Works after he arrived in the city.

In letters to his brother, who still lived in Leeds, Lightman wrote of his good fortune in Australia. His brother wrote back, suggesting he (Lightman) should consider marriage to Levi, who had said she was prepared to travel to Australia and be his bride.

Lightman delighted in the prospect of marriage to Levi, and so sent money for her passage out to Australia. He also set about preparing a home for her.

By the time Levi arrived on the steamer Iberia in mid-March 1890, Lightman had fully arranged their marriage and secured a Bell Street, Fitzroy house. The wedding day was scheduled for March 31. Until then, Mrs Breslau of Drummond St, Carlton would, by arrangement with Lightman, care for Levi.

Strangely, Levi displayed little interest in the marriage arrangements, and simply agreed to the suggestions of her future husband and his friends.

On the day before the wedding, Lightman gave his bride £15 to buy some household items. But, in the afternoon of that day, she disappeared with all her luggage from Mrs Breslau’s home. She had said she intended to take her belongings to her future Fitzroy home, so Mrs Breslau was not in the least suspicious.

Lightman later said that in various conversations with Levi she had had much to say about Alexander J Reid, a man who took the same journey she had aboard the Iberia from England. It seemed obvious that he had paid her a great deal of attention.

After the journey, she and Reid had met on several occasions in the street. So Lightman came to think Reid might know of Levi’s whereabouts, and went to visit him at the Federal Coffee Palace. There, he learned that Reid had moved and left no forwarding address.

He failed in several other attempts to find Levi and later resolved to end his search. But, just then, Lightman read a newspaper report of the woman whose body had been fished out of the bay near St Kilda Pier.

Mrs Breslau, on a visit to the morgue, identified portions of the clothing as those Levi had worn, but later said they did not belong to the missing woman.

A number Levi’s fellow passengers from the Iberia also failed to positively identify the garments, but spoke of an extraordinary similarity between them and the clothing Levi wore on the journey from England.

The police, determined to solve the identity mystery, broadened their inquiries and soon found Levi alive and well. After her disappearance from Melbourne, she had travelled to Adelaide and, later, the Riverland town of Morgan, where she and her new husband, Reid, boarded the paddle steamer Ruby and headed upstream.

They were now in Mildura, where they intended to purchase land for themselves and Reid’s relatives, who hoped to emigrate soon from England.

This solved the missing-person puzzle, but left unanswered the question of the identity of the female body recovered from Port Phillip Bay and now buried in the unmarked grave of a pauper?

In an all-out effort to solve the mystery, Inspector Webb painstakingly examined the clothing and jewellery removed from the body of the dead woman. Stamped faintly inside the waistband of her skirt, he found the name of the maker, Foy & Gibson. And some of the jewellery, he discovered, had been made by Messrs R Robertson and Sons, manufacturers of Little Collins St.

The discovery of the dressmaker’s name came as something of a breakthrough in the inquiry. It led to Mrs JE Roberts, who had arrived in Melbourne from Tasmania only a short time earlier.

She had been married for about 14 months when, tragically, her husband developed symptoms of insanity and was placed in the Kew Lunatic Asylum.

Roberts had been stopping in at the Coffee Palace at South Yarra, but no one had seen her since April 3. The Coffee Palace chambermaid positively identified her dress, jacket and jewellery.

From the evidence they gathered, the police concluded that Roberts had committed suicide by drowning, as she had suffered severe depression owing to her husband’s mental illness.

An Adelaide newspaper, in a hard-hitting editorial, openly criticized its Melbourne counterparts for:

...so freely using the term “mystery” when reporting on such cases as this, where in fact there had been no mystery at all. And if the police had examined the clothing of the dead woman earlier they would have experienced no problems whatsoever in identifying the deceased woman.

The Adelaide newspaper claimed that the Melbourne papers:

...in their attempts to promote their city, and giving it alliterate titles such as “Mysterious Melbourne” are doing an injustice to members of their own community, such as Miss Levi, whose name has been so unpleasantly brought into notoriety when indeed there was no evidence whatever to connect her with the case.

The article went on to assert that:

Now in all this mystery-mongering there is much that deserves the condemnation of Australians. Why should any capital be made out of the melancholy death of unhappy persons? One of the worst effects of giving prominence to such accidents and offences, and of dignifying them with the name of “mysteries” is that public attention is drawn to them, and morbid and even vicious propensities encouraged.