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.”
Arthur had affairs with Chequers showgirls while dating Shirley;
he was a known ladies’ man;