Frances: The Tragic Bride (25 page)

The twins’ last months of freedom were spent playing country squires on the weekends and in their parents’ flat on the ninth floor of the high-rise building overlooking the City during the week. Their spies kept them well informed. Reports came through to them all the time that Read and his men were on their heels, yet they were both delusional: Ron, of course, relishing a new enemy, wanted Read’s head on a platter. He even went out and bought two boa constrictor snakes from the famous Knightsbridge department store, Harrods, and named them Read and Gerrard, after the two detectives who were now his main adversaries. David Bailey took photos of the twins with the snakes.

As for Reggie, he was convinced the key witnesses to the murders would not dare betray them and speak out.

He was so wrong: Leslie Payne, terrified by the whispers of repeated threats he and his family were facing after the McVitie killing, finally agreed to conduct a series of interviews with Nipper Read. He and he alone had helped the twins make a lot of money and buy into Esmeralda’s Barn. So he knew an awful lot about what the twins and the Firm had been doing for the last twelve years. Details. Names. Times. Places. It was a breakthrough the police desperately needed.

By this time, Reggie had recovered somewhat from his tormented grief and found a new girlfriend, a twenty-three-year-old called Carol Thompson. Chris Lambrianou described Carol as ‘very pretty, a nice ordinary girl, nothing flashy, just a decent girl’.

According to John Pearson in his book,
The Cult of Violence
, in the weeks before the police net closed in on the twins, Carol had briefly confided in him about her relationship with Reggie.

Just like Frances, she found the endless drinking and the fact they were never alone very difficult to handle. She told Pearson she and Reggie were having ‘bitter arguments just as he had had with Frances’.

‘Carol told me he was often on the edge of violence,’ recalled Pearson. ‘She said, “So I used to tell him: hit me if you want to, show me what a brave man you are.” But of course he never hit me.’

It was less than a year since Frances had died. By taking up with Carol, who briefly tried living with him but finally gave up, it seems Reggie was still pursuing the same impossible dream of a normal life away from the nightmare world of betrayal and lifetime imprisonment he was now facing.

At precisely 6 a.m. on the morning of 8 May 1968, Nipper Read’s team of detectives finally pounced. One group, headed by Read, arrested the twins at 12 Braithwaite House; others went to the homes of the leading players in the Firm to arrest them in a meticulously planned operation. They found Reggie in bed in the flat with a girl called June. Ron was in the next room with a young man. No resistance was made at all when Nipper Read, their Number One enemy, finally slipped the handcuffs on the pair.

Ron is reported to have said, ‘Alright, Mr Read. I’ll come quietly. But I’ve got to have my pills.’

The news of the Krays’ arrest galvanised everyone. Could this really mean the end of their reign? Would they go down for a long stretch? After all, they’d been arrested before and wound up triumphant.

At 95 Geffrye Street, just a stone’s throw from their former home in Ormsby Street, now scheduled for demolition, the news of the twins’ arrest reached Elsie and Frank that same day.

The couple were doing their best to adjust to life in their newly built two-bedroom flat, recently allocated to them by the local authority, a home with all the conveniences they’d lacked for so long. Hearing about the Krays’ arrest seemed to come right out of the blue – even the East End rumour mill hadn’t known very much about the details of Read’s top secret operation to bring the twins down once and for all.

And Elsie Shea didn’t waste a minute. She’d been praying for this day for a long time. Without even considering the eventual outcome of the news, Elsie decided it was time she made that phone call. She rang the superintendent’s office at Chingford Mount Cemetery. Could they please tell her what the procedure was for having her daughter’s remains removed from her grave at Chingford Mount to a resting place elsewhere? Did she have to fill in a form? Fine. Could they please send it to her as soon as possible?

‘They’ll never get off this time,’ she told her husband.

‘They’ve got to let us do it.’

CHAPTER 12

THE LAST LETTER

T
hat phone call to the cemetery in May 1968 marked the beginning of Elsie Shea’s quest to have Frances’s remains removed from the Kray plot and buried elsewhere in her own name, the name she had so determinedly changed back to Shea in the year before she died.

A note of that phone call was the first entry I discovered in the Home Office file for 1968 that covers Elsie’s formal application to move Frances’s body from Chingford Mount, a file first released in 2004.

The file contains a detailed history of Elsie’s attempts to remove Frances’s remains from ‘Kray corner’.

Its contents are set out below. They are important because they include Elsie’s version of the trajectory of Frances’s relationship with Reggie, though some of the smaller details written in the file are incorrect and it seems Elsie herself was unable to clarify certain aspects of the story.

Yet what I also discovered amidst the papers in the Home Office file were some other documents, letters I never expected to find. This unexpected discovery revealed a great deal about Frances and her state of mind around the time of her death.

A week or so after her initial call to the superintendent at the cemetery, Elsie received a form to fill in. She duly sent the form off on 14 May 1968. But it was not until 31 March 1969 that Elsie was able to phone the Home Office officials to discuss her application.

This gap of several months was, of course, because she was waiting for the outcome of the Krays’ arrest and the final, much-publicised hearing of their case at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey.

The Krays’ trial at the Old Bailey had started on 7 January 1969. It lasted for thirty-nine days, a ‘show trial for the sixties’, the longest and most expensive criminal trial to be held in London at the time.

It ended on 8 March 1969. The twins each received sentences of life imprisonment, recommended by Mr Justice Melford Stevenson to be not less than thirty years without parole, for the murders of Jack McVitie and George Cornell.

Elsie’s phone call to the Home Office was generated by this news. Now, she reasoned, the authorities would be more sympathetic to her request. Reggie Kray was a convicted murderer, locked up, probably for good. He’d been given the longest prison sentence legally permitted.

The Home Office file on Elsie’s application, written by Home Office official, R. Varney, reads as follows:

‘She was concerned that the mere filling in of a form would not sufficiently convey what she felt to be the strength of her case.

‘Mrs Kray explained that her daughter’s marriage to Reggie Kray was “in the process of being annulled at the time she took her own life and that a memorial stone was now being erected over the grave showing her daughter’s married name and not the maiden name in which she had expressed her wish to be buried.”

‘She indicated there was no prospect of her feeling herself able to approach Reggie Kray and I was left with the impression there was no chance of him giving consent to the removal.’

R. Varney did not encourage Mrs Shea in the belief an interview at the Home Office would serve any useful purpose. Yet an interview was arranged at the Home Office, Romney House, Westminster, for 9 April 1969.

A note taken from this meeting at Romney House explains that Elsie brought her partially completed application forms and a number of other papers with her. It further states:

Mrs Shea seemed to be a sensible sort of person, no more emotional than the circumstances warranted and to be genuinely motivated by concern for the good name of her family and desire to execute the wishes of her daughter.

At the same time she seemed not to be very clear about some of the details of the events she described and said much of what she said about her daughter’s married life was reconstructed after the event.

‘Married in May 1965 at age twenty-one having been friendly with him since sixteen.’ [The marriage took place in April 1965 but this error may have been Elsie’s incorrect recall of events, as was the statement that Frances was sixteen when first going out with Reggie.]

The marriage was never really much of a reality. After a week’s honeymoon in Athens, Reggie Kray sent her to live with his mother. For the rest of her married life she stayed variously with her own family, alone in hotels and in flats provided by Kray, in hospitals and occasionally with women friends of the Krays, on trips abroad but never, apparently, together with Kray.

Her history through this time seems to have been one of growing addiction to drugs.

In March 1966 she changed her surname by deed poll to Shea. It was apparently around this time she formed the intention of pressing for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds of non-consummation.

According to Mrs Shea, Reggie Kray persuaded Frances to allow him to make the petition instead which, in her anxiety for the success of the annulment, she was willing to do. Kray then used every means to delay the process, which only arrived at the stage where it was ready to go to courts just before she died. And was therefore never completed.

Frances killed herself 7th June 1967 at her brother’s home. It was her third attempt.

The death was reported to the coroner and the inquest was held, Mrs Shea thought, at Hackney [it was Clerkenwell]. Death certificate issued in the name of Frances Elsie Shea, otherwise Kray.

Frank’s initial negotiation with undertakers Hayes and English of 148 Hoxton Street N1 was interrupted according to Mrs Shea by the arrival of Reggie Kray with a priest whom Mrs Shea described as ‘crooked’ who later gave evidence at his trial.

Kray then made all the arrangements for the funeral including distribution of the booklets to accompany the service – in the name of Frances Elsie Kray.

Mrs Kray was not sure what denomination of religious rite the ceremony was accompanied – or whether her daughter was buried in consecrated ground.

She said the Krays ignored her at the funeral and evidently felt it to be a source of grievance that a friend of the Krays came after the ceremony to remove the names of donors from the funeral wreaths.

Elsie told the Home Office that the flowers her family placed on the grave had regularly been removed. She had seen the headstone Kray intended to erect over the grave costing £500 which was felt to be offensive and hypocritical, i.e. ‘in loving memory of my darling wife Frances Elsie Kray’ with verse. Mrs Shea seemed to be under the impression that the words on the headstone were conceived out of spite for her family and that she and her husband were upset to be seen visiting the grave linking them with a murderer.

Asked about her husband, Elsie said he shared her concern that his daughter’s grave should not bear the Kray name but was not entirely happy with the idea of removing her body. She said he was very upset by the whole business and was not well enough to come to the Home Office with her.

It was not clear that Elsie’s overriding concern was the headstone, i.e. that it should bear the name by which she (Frances) was now legally known and which she believed at the time she wrote her last letter would be the name which would go on her grave.

If the headstone could be changed, Elsie told the Home Office, she would no longer wish to remove the body. She had not written to Kray to ask for his consent: she said it was inconceivable he would agree.

Kray was both legally the next of kin and he owned the freehold rights to the plot. It was explained that the scope of the Home Office was limited in view of Reggie Kray’s objections and the objection of the burial authority for Chingford Mount. Elsie did not own the grave, therefore her rights were limited.

However, she told the Home Office, ‘It was our daughter’s dying wish that she should be buried in our name. She wrote a note to this effect shortly before taking phenobarbitone tablets. My husband and I are desperately anxious that this should be so.’

The file also revealed Home Office correspondence with the Registrar of the Abney Park Cemetery, the burial authority for Chingford Mount Cemetery. They, in turn, confirmed on 31 July 1969 that Reggie Kray was the owner of the grave: he was said to have purchased the freehold rights. The grave contained only the remains of Frances Shea – but there was room for three more burials. The ground was not consecrated. Abney Park Registrar Martin Clark reaffirmed that the burial authority would not allow the grave to be opened without Reggie Kray’s consent: it was written into the cemetery regulations that the grave could not be opened without the owner’s permission.

On 30 July 1969 the file noted that the public relations branch of the Home Office had suggested that Mrs Shea be invited to visit again and suggest that she defer her application for a year or more ‘in the hope that RK’s views may have mellowed by this time’.

They went on to say: ‘The case for deferring the decision is surely that one would not wish to see a strong story in the newspapers about this at a time when sympathy for Mrs Shea is likely to be at a maximum.’

(The public relations people also suggested closing the file IF the Home Office could say in a letter and/or in an interview that under the law the Home Secretary had no power to act.)

The file also contains a Home Office letter sent to Elsie on 14 August 1969 saying that the Secretary of State could not help in this matter.

Another letter, dated 11 August 1969 from Reggie Kray’s solicitors at the time, Sampson & Co at 11–13 St Bride Street, Ludgate Circus, London, EC4, confirmed that: