The sound of a gunshot echoed along Sydney’s Pitt Street, ricocheting off the neon and marble facade of Chequers nightclub, and drawing the natty-suited doorman’s gaze to a car parked a few doors away at the corner of Pitt and King.
On the pavement beside the car, a streetlight illuminated the body of Arthur Griffith, son of a bookmaker and notorious ladies’ man. A bullet had entered his forehead.
In the back seat of the car sat 22-year-old model, Shirley Beiger, his girlfriend. Alongside her was a .22 Browning repeater rifle.
So began one of the most controversial murder cases of the 1950s.
Shirley, despite the evidence, protested her innocence.
The prosecution painted her as a desperate, jealous, scarlet woman. The defence painted Arthur as a low-life, womanising cad.
And the women of Australia savoured every minute of it, snapping up newspapers and queueing every day with cut lunches and thermoses, sometimes babies on their hips, for a seat in the public gallery.
No one was more surprised by the verdict, which we will come to later, than Shirley herself.
“I loved him, loved him more than anything,” she told The Sun newspaper in a £1250 (roughly $50,000 today) exclusive tell-all. “I would have shot myself before I would have shot him.”
So who was Shirley Beiger, and was she innocent or guilty?
This summer at the Sydney Festival, the trial will be reimagined in a production called A Model Murder, staged in the same Darlinghurst courthouse where, in 1954, Shirley was tried.
Co-writer Sheridan Harbridge has been trying to come to terms with just those questions and sees Shirley as a young woman caught between eras, between social classes, and between dreams of independence and a white-picket-fence marriage.
“She seemed very vulnerable,” Sheridan says.
Shirley was born on March 20, 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. Times were desperately tough.
She had two older brothers, Jack and Bill, and her parents Edith and Maurice’s relationship was violent.
Her mother took her father to court for physical abuse (a rare and courageous move in those days) when Shirley was 11. He was convicted and fined £1. Her parents divorced soon after.
Edith ran a sandwich shop in Redfern and sold black-market alcohol out the back. At one point she was arrested and fined £100 for the sly grog racket. Unable to pay, she did prison time.
However, she persisted and eventually managed to save enough money to send Shirley to the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School in Darlinghurst.
Shirley quit school at 14, which wasn’t unusual in 1940s Sydney. She was spotted working as a florist’s assistant at David Jones and given her first modelling job. After which her mother enrolled her in June Dally-Watkins’ deportment school.
Edith had high hopes for her pretty, blonde, and by some accounts, emotionally delicate daughter.
“We know she had witnessed her father punching her mother in the face,” Sheridan explains, which must have left scars. “And we know that, eventually, she moved out of her mum’s flat [above the sandwich shop] because there was lots of fighting around Redfern Station and a doctor said her nerves were shot.”
Shirley moved into an airy attic apartment at 3 Kellett Street, Kings Cross. By then, she’d been a semifinalist in the Miss Australia pageant and was modelling in fashion parades and for Pix magazine and The Sun.
Around that time, she met the dashing, 23-year-old Arthur Griffith. A mutual friend, who was a waiter at Chequers nightclub, introduced them. Chequers was where the fashionable new couple spent romantic evenings, drinking chilled sweet wine and watching the showgirls, some of whom Arthur seemed to know inordinately well.
Arthur all but moved into the apartment on Kellett Street. He had a key, kept clothes and spent most nights there, although his official address remained with his parents in suburban Rosebery.
His father was a trotting and greyhound bookmaker, and Arthur worked alongside him.
To live together out of wedlock was risqué in 1950s Australia. Later, Shirley would say she was not ashamed of the couple’s living arrangements but she understood that they were pushing social boundaries.
“Because I am not ashamed, it doesn’t mean I don’t recognise it was morally wrong,” she wrote in The Sun. “I have not led a perfect life. Who can truthfully say they have?”
At first, the relationship was everything Shirley had dreamed of. “He liked having his hair brushed and a cup of tea in bed,” she confessed. “I guess I spoilt him.”
But it wasn’t long before Arthur began, quite brazenly, to date other women, crushing Shirley.
“She had the dreams of a private school girl,” Sheridan postulates. “She imagined he was going to marry her. But then he started sleeping around and … ” It developed into an archetypal coercive relationship. He separated her from friends and support networks. Shirley was living with a man who did not treat her with respect.
“I was just the girl who washed his clothes, cooked his food and ran after him doing all odd jobs,” Shirley wrote later, “even cleaned his shoes so he would be nice for other girls … and I waited for him to come home when he had nowhere else to go — I guess I just loved him too much.”
“I think all those things,” says Sheridan, “could lead to a woman pulling a trigger.”
On the night of August 9, 1954, the couple were at home in Kellett Street when Arthur suddenly claimed he had a dental appointment (no one said he was bright) and left. Shirley learned he was actually at Sammy Lee’s nightclub.
Shirley met her mother, and together they went to find Arthur. By then, the man about town had left Sammy Lee’s, but they found his utility truck parked not far from Chequers. Around 11pm they spotted Arthur strolling along King Street with a woman on his arm.
It transpired he had been at the Embassy cinema with a Chequers showgirl. Shirley was, she admitted, “livid”.
She followed the pair into the nightclub and confronted Arthur, demanding he return her keys. He was dismissive. Shirley and Edith returned to Kellett Street, where Shirley had decided to pack up Arthur’s clothes and “throw them on the dancefloor”.
Shirley also went to her neighbour’s room, where she found his rifle. She assembled and loaded it and took it in the car back to Chequers. She was hoping, she said, to use the rifle “to frighten him … I was thinking that I would tell him, if he didn’t come home with me, I would shoot myself.”
The Beigers parked not far from the nightclub. Edith ventured inside to ask Arthur to come with her, while Shirley sat in the back of the car wearing a grey overcoat — the night was cold — and elbow-length white gloves.
“When he came up to the car,” Shirley said, “as he always did when we had a tiff, he ruffled my hair, gave me a playful push and said, ‘Silly kid’. That is when the gun must have been knocked up somehow. I must have heard it go off, but I don’t remember hearing it. I do remember looking at Arthur. His face had a shocked look as he was falling away from the car.”
Shirley called out, “Oh Mummy, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hurt him.” Then, she says, “I got out of the car and bent down over him … I wish the gun had turned the other way and that I had been shot dead instead of Arthur.”
Shirley rushed into the nightclub to find help. The police were called and she was taken into custody. She spent three months in Long Bay jail.
“The first few days I didn’t think I would go on living,” she wrote. “I had no wish to live. Death would have been much easier.”
Her counsel applied for bail three times but it was denied. High-profile barrister Jack Shand, QC, represented Shirley. He was supported by canny underworld defender Phil Roach and Lionel Murphy, who was then a young industrial lawyer.
One can only imagine how much sly grog would have changed hands to foot that bill. Shirley’s trial opened on Monday, November 22. There was a day-long queue outside the court for the public gallery and those who didn’t make it through the doors for the first session spread out their picnics and waited for the second, which began after lunch.
The trial, before Justice Henry McClemens and an all-male jury (Australian juries were largely all-male affairs until well into the 1970s), lasted just two days. Central to the trial was the position of the rifle, which Shirley insisted was lying across her lap, but which experts testified could not have accidentally discharged a bullet into the victim’s head from that position.
Early in the trial, both Shirley and Edith fell into faints, after which Edith retreated to her car, apparently overwhelmed by the emotional trauma, while Maurice remained in the court watching over his daughter.
“I think they put on a show,” says Sheridan. “There’s even a description of Roach going up to the box and saying, ‘Pull yourself together, Shirley’. But she and her mum, they were always fainting. So there’s this very performative femininity, which the jury seems to buy.”
Shirley remained in the witness box for nearly an hour, and according to The Sydney Morning Herald, “answered questions in a soft, almost inaudible voice — a speech stifled by sobs and great emotional strain”.
In Justice McClemens’ two-hour summing up, he instructed the jury that: “There is no such thing as a crime of passion in our jurisprudence”, and cautioned that because Shirley was a “not unattractive young woman”, they should “not be swayed by motives of compassion”.
He told the jury they could choose between three verdicts: guilty of murder, guilty of manslaughter or not guilty. The jury retired for just two hours. Shirley herself was certain the jury would convict her of manslaughter.
“Manslaughter,” she wrote. “The word beat against my brain all the time the jury was out.” When they returned at 7.40pm, Shirley stood with her eyes closed to hear their verdict. The jury’s foreman spoke so quietly that the judge had to ask him to repeat it.
“Not guilty,” he said again. The 150 people in the public gallery cheered and clapped wildly, much to the judge’s consternation. Then a woman ran from the court shouting, “She’s not guilty!” And the 200-strong crowd outside began to cheer. One woman called out, “Good on you, Shirl.”
Edith was waiting for the verdict in her car. When she heard the commotion, she ran towards the court in tears, calling out, “I thank God, I thank God.” She met Shirley in an antechamber and mother and daughter fell into each other’s arms.
Arthur’s father said: “It makes no difference … Had she been given life imprisonment, it would not have brought our boy back.” And a close friend of Arthur’s apparently told The Sun-Herald:
“Arthur would have wanted it this way — he would have wanted Shirley to be acquitted.” After the trial, aside from penning her tell-all, Shirley vanished without a trace. There was talk she was fleeing to England on the Orontes passenger liner and the press chased it from port to port, until finally the captain announced that she had never boarded.
Years later, there were rumours Shirley changed her name and settled in Melbourne. However, nothing was ever confirmed. Sheridan is hoping someone from Shirley’s family might quietly come to A Model Murder.
She would like to know how her life turned out. And while she admits that, if she were on the jury, she would absolutely have voted for manslaughter, she wishes Shirley well.
“It was a different time for women,” she says, trying to understand both the public sympathy and the verdict. “It was this funny little moment between the end of the war and before the sexual revolution. Men had returned from the war, damaged, and wanting everything to go back to the way it was. Women had just experienced the freedom of working in factories, on farms, as intelligence officers. Now they were back in the kitchen … and they must have been walking the linoleum like caged animals.”
All that, she thinks, played into the verdict. And the last word goes to Shirley who was, after all, just 22 and head over heels in love with the wrong man:
“I think every one of us, no matter how good our lives, have had regrets,” she wrote. “They may be small and unimportant or big ones — so big they seem to sap the strength from your whole being. There are some things in my life that I would not do again, but most of them I would. If Arthur were anywhere today, I would go back to him — unhesitatingly.”
This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue from your local newsagent or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
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