Mabel Ambrose head was put on display in bid to identify her after body was found in Yarra

After the corpse of a teenage girl was found bobbing in a trunk on the Yarra police resorted to a desperate strategy to ID her.

Madame Olga Radalyski was jailed for the murder of Mabel Ambrose.

After the body of a 17-year-old girl was fished from the Yarra River in 1898, thousands of Melburnians paraded past her head in a glass jar at the morgue to identify her.

Eventually, a policeman with a knack for remembering unusual teeth cracked the case, and a fortune teller and backyard abortionist named Madame Olga Radalyski faced trial.

Madame Olga is the subject of the 150th episode of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters, with Old Melbourne Gaol tour guide Aurora Llywelyn:

Born Elizabeth Elburn, Madame Olga forged a new career after the end of her marriage to Carl von Ledebur, a former Essendon Football Club trainer, crook and quack doctor who specialised in “electrotherapeutics” and injecting patients with crushed animal testicles.

“Madame Olga” opened up shop as a palm reader, fortune teller and masseuse, but it was her abortion services that landed her in jail for murder.

In 1898, Melbourne was gripped by a gruesome mystery known as the body in the boot box case.

A trunk was found bobbing in the Yarra at Richmond. Inside was the body of a teenage girl.

“She was found by three boys, she was crammed inside this box, she had all of her hair cut off, she was naked and bound in rope,” Mr Llywelyn says.

Carl von Ledebur from his Victorian Prison Record. Picture: Public Record Office Victoria

Old Melbourne Gaol tour guide Aurora Llywelyn.

The girl was pregnant and had poison in her system, but died from suffocation.

Authorities put the body on public display to try to identify her.

“This wasn’t unusual … however, what is unusual about this case is the body had degraded to the point that it was seen as more cumbersome and not very helpful to have the entire body on display,” Mr Llywelyn says.

“So they removed the head from the corpse and preserved it in a glass jar of methylated spirits and that’s what they put on display at the morgue for a little under a month and it attracted over 8000 visitors.

Mabel Ambrose, 17, whose body was found in the Yarra.

Olga Radalyski and Travice Tod faced trial over the murder of Mabel Ambrose.

“One evening the head was actually temporarily removed from the morgue, taken out of the jar, and put on display at the General Post Office in Melbourne, the reason being all the metropolitan postmen gathered in the evening and the hope was that one of them would be able to identify her.”

Eventually, a shrewd policeman recognised the girl as Mabel Ambrose from her pattern of missing teeth, and police tracked down Madame Olga.

It emerged Madame Olga had been using her ex-husband’s electrotherapeutic methods to perform abortions, and Mabel had been subjected to a string of horrific treatments before she died.