Shirley Finn

Shirley June Finn, née Shewring (2 November 1941 – 22 or 23 June 1975), was an Australian brothel keeper, nightclub operator and socialite who was shot dead at about midnight on 22–23 June 1975 in Perth, Western Australia.

Her body, dressed in an elaborate ball gown and expensive jewellery, was found at dawn in her car, which was parked on a golf course next to a busy freeway.

The murder is notable because of Finn's close relationship with Western Australia Police detectives who, in that era, controlled and regulated Perth's prostitution and gambling activities.

The crime remains unsolved.

Shirley Finn was born Shirley Shewring on 2 November 1941 in Fremantle, Western Australia.

A wartime baby, Shirley was the eldest child of a bomber pilot, and of necessity was brought up by her mother during her early years.

After the war, Shirley's family lived in comfortable surroundings in Mount Pleasant, the riverside suburb of Perth, where she became a teenager before the birth of her three younger siblings.

Though successful at her schoolwork, she was sexually active by age 14, which caused her to be committed for eight months to a notoriously cruel welfare home administered by the Catholic Church.

Biographer Juliet Wills recounts that Finn left school at age 15 and found work at a Perth frock shop, where she met her husband-to-be Des Finn, a 22-year-old air-force mechanic.

They married and went to live in Melbourne, Victoria, where he continued his service with the Royal Australian Air Force and she worked as a sales assistant at Buckley & Nunn.

Her sons, Steven and Shane, were born in 1959 and 1960 respectively.

The family eventually transferred back to Perth, where daughter Bridget was born in 1961.

(Bridget later adopted her mother's maiden name of Shewring.)

When her husband suffered a serious injury and subsequent mental instability, Finn, aged 21, chose to engage in sex-oriented activities as a means of supporting her three children, including topless-dancing and body painting.

From this she conducted such activities in association with a travelling fairground boxing troupe.

She also joined a witchcraft coven which conducted "black magic and sex" activities in Kings Park.

Finn became associated with Dorothea Flatman, a brothel operator from King's Cross, Sydney, New South Wales, who transferred to Perth in 1968 and set up a number of brothels under the symbiotic protection of Australian vice overlord Abe Saffron and a policy of "containment" upheld by the Western Australian Police.

Flatman, Stella Strong (also from Sydney) and Finn were among a privileged few allowed to operate in the prostitution business under the rigorous line management of Vice Squad chief Bernard Johnson.

In 1969, Finn was conducting a "body painting and escort business" which was raided by police, and she was charged and convicted with "keeping premises for the purpose of prostitution."

As a result, the family was socially ostracised and her children had to leave their Catholic primary school.

Finn's body was found by a motorcycle traffic officer at about 8.30 a.m. on Monday 23 June 1975, in her parked Dodge DG Phoenix near the ninth fairway of the Royal Perth Golf Club, South Perth.

The location was clearly visible from the adjacent Kwinana Freeway, from which it was then separated only by a waist-high fence and an access road (Melville Parade).

Inside the car, Finn's body was slumped behind the wheel with four bullet holes in her head.

She wore valuable diamond jewellery which had not been touched.

It has been alleged by Wills that the long-established police map of the crime scene is grossly erroneous, incorrectly locating Finn's car near the fifth tee, more than 100 m from the ninth green, near the golf clubhouse, where the body was found.

The erroneous police map was officially adopted for decades, causing evidence of eyewitnesses to be ignored or discounted as not in accord with the map.

At the time, various rumours regarding the murder attributed it to specific issues relating to prostitution and the way it was being handled by police and government in Perth, but no evidence of this was made public.

The murder, and the implied connections to the local police and sex industry, resulted in a Royal Commission being held.

Continued interest in Finn's murder, and the apparent lack of evidence, led to periodic speculation as to the murderer's identity and has been the subject of numerous articles and television pieces, as well as two books—Juliet Wills's Dirty Girl and David Whish-Wilson's crime novel Line of Sight.

There is evidence that major Sydney underworld figures were in Perth at the time, including Saffron and corrupt police officer Roger Rogerson, yet no significant line of investigation was pursued by the police.

In 1985, according to then state premier Brian Burke, a "very senior police officer" was under investigation for murder, resulting in that officer's retirement and the matter then being deemed to have been "resolved".

The West Australian newspaper reported Burke's belief that the subject killing was that of Finn.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the murder—23 June 2005—a cold-case review was announced.

An opinion was canvassed that no solution of the case was likely.

In 2014, another cold-case review was launched by Western Australian Police.

The following year, the Corruption and Crime Commission confirmed it had received new information about the murder.

News reports said a former policeman had spoken about seeing Finn with detectives in the bar of the old central police station, in East Perth, on the night she was killed.

, no further information had been released by police about their cold-case review.

A coronial inquest held between 2017 and 2020 returned an open finding with an acknowledgement that "it was most likely she was killed because she had tried to blackmail police about corruption."

On 6 March 2017, the ABC Television documentary series Australian Story aired a piece titled "Getting Away With Murder" which revealed that a coronial inquest would be conducted later that year.