Frances: The Tragic Bride (29 page)

He shook my hand with the usual bone-crunching gangster grip, greeted me warmly. ‘I’m really grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to have my side of the story out there,’ he said.

I didn’t mention that what I was actually doing was exploring how two killers could effectively be involved in a business from behind bars that was rebranding them as Robin Hoods who loved their dear old mum.

Reggie was earnest, avuncular, smiled and laughed a lot.

If I hadn’t known he’d stabbed Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie to death, I would have been completely fooled. He chatted openly about how he hoped the sale of paintings and books would bankroll a campaign to get him and Ronnie free.

There was no sense of menace from Reggie.

Through my work I’d met a few killers and they usually made me feel uneasy. Reggie didn’t. He could have been an elderly East End relation. Later, he sent me a signed book and a letter, thanking me again for the opportunity to tell his story.

Then I met Ronnie.

I’ve never met anyone since who struck me as so evil.

The meeting was at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane. I went with Kate, Ronnie’s wife at the time. Beforehand she warned me not to interrupt Ronnie and that he could come across as menacing. No kidding!

We sat at a very small table in the visiting room and Ronnie came in. I noticed Peter Sutcliffe, the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, behind him. Ronnie was wearing a suit, an incongruous look in that place.

Ronnie sat across the table from me and hissed, ‘You’re late!’

Those were his first words. No preamble, no greeting. His tongue flicked across his lips and his black eyes bored right into me. All of a sudden that table seemed very small. I could easily see Ronnie leaping over it and tearing at my throat and I had no doubt if I said the wrong thing he might be inclined to do so.

This man radiated evil.

As I said, I’d met killers before. I’d even gone undercover and met paedophiles.

But Ronnie Kray was in a class of his own.

Looking into his eyes was like looking into the eyes of a lizard. They were dark, expressionless and cold. I’d never met anyone before or since who was so malevolent.

We chatted about the documentary but Ronnie was hard to make conversation with. Kate kept prompting him to talk but he seemed distracted, disinterested. When he did speak he was softly spoken, almost girlish. Like his twin, he wasn’t a particularly big man or physically intimidating. But he was scary in a way that Sutcliffe, sitting nearby, a serial killer of nightmare proportions, simply wasn’t. Ronnie was bloody frightening. Sutcliffe was not.

I believed then, and still do, that while Reggie saw extreme violence as just the way business was done in the East End, Ronnie actually enjoyed it.

Maureen Flanagan, loyal to the family, visited the twins in prison throughout their lives. Violet Kray made her promise to continue to visit them just before she died in hospital in August 1982, age seventy-two.

‘Reggie would only talk about Frances if I was on my own, never if there was another visitor there,’ Maureen told me. ‘I’d take flowers to Violet’s grave and he’d ask when I was going and made me promise I’d put roses on Frances’s grave. The card was always the same: “To Frances, you are with me for always, Reg”.

‘In all the years I visited, Ronnie never mentioned her. Not once.’

Carol-Anne Kelly is an attractive blonde sixtysomething Londoner who met Reggie Kray in Parkhurst prison in the eighties. At the time she was visiting her former husband. She told me: ‘I was in the visiting room and Reggie came over and introduced himself. The first thing he said to me was, “You remind me of my late wife Frances, your mannerisms are the same, the way you use your hands to express yourself.”’

Later, after divorcing, Carol-Anne corresponded with Reggie and visited him for a few years. He frequently confided in her but she ended the friendship when she realised he was getting far too serious about their relationship.

‘He said he was scared of going to hell for what he had done in his life – and that given the chance, he’d have done things differently.

‘He said Frances was the most pure thing in his life and that part of him blamed his brother for what happened. It was a threesome, not a twosome.

‘“When you come from a very tight knit family, it’s very hard for other people to come in,” he said.

‘I didn’t see a monster. I saw a man who regretted everything,’ Carol-Anne told me.

Purity. It’s not a word you can easily connect with the Kray twins, is it? But from all that I had learned, Frances Shea died as she had lived in her brief marriage, a virgin bride.

She was certainly innocent of the world when Reggie met her as a schoolgirl. But by the time Frances decided to kill herself many years later, she’d seen and experienced far too much that was utterly shaming for a young girl who was already emotionally fragile: that very innocence itself, so appealing to Reggie, was brutally corrupted by her exposure to Reggie’s world.

Whether Reggie could not consummate the marriage because he preferred male sexual partners or because he simply could not bring himself to damage or defile that purity in any way has to remain an unanswered question. Most likely, it was a combination of both. Yet he succeeded in defiling Frances mentally, totally destroying her peace of mind – without any physical expression of love.

At the final count, the veil of sentimentality that Reggie Kray nurtured through his life around Frances is the last thing left to consider, some sense of his true motivation.

He insisted that she should be buried in her wedding dress and had this poetic inscription by William Shakespeare engraved on her grave: ‘If I could write the beauty of your eyes/ And in fresh numbers number all your graces/ the age to come would say “this poet lies”/ such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces’. These gestures do not seem, at first glance, to be anything other than hugely sentimental ways to mark the passing of a much-loved woman.

Or are they?

Consider the insistence that Frances had to be buried as a virgin bride: pure, untouched. There is dramatic symbolism in that: virginity before marriage is no longer an ideal in much of Western culture today, yet it still carried some meaning in Britain half a century ago.

Yet the idea of the virgin bride, pure and untouched forever IN THE TOMB would have had immense appeal to Reggie: it was
his
bride,
his
tomb. Again, this was about total control, the same control he exercised so thoroughly by scooping up all her possessions – and even buying the freehold to the plot on which she was buried.

But surely the Shakespeare sonnet on her memorial stone is a relatively innocuous, fitting tribute to Frances’s beauty?

It is. But only at first glance.

Until you realise that William Shakespeare wrote the sonnet, ‘Sonnet 17’, as an ode to procreation, to having children (as he did the preceding sixteen).

Knowing how much time Reggie Kray put into reading poetry, the Bible and so much else in prison, he’d have surely known about the history of that particular Shakespeare sonnet – and for whom it had been written.

The sonnet, you see, had not been penned by Shakespeare for a much-loved woman at all.

It had been written as an ode, a dedication to someone who had inspired the writer.

An ode to an exceptionally beautiful young man…

Ronnie and Reggie in the late forties: talented teenage boxers – yet a very different fate awaits them.

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Getty Images
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March 1965: the twins’ mother, Violet, and their grandfather, ‘Cannonball’ Lee, greet them in Vallance Road after their release following the Hew McCowan trial.

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Getty Images
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The twins and their older brother, Charlie: jailed for his part in their crimes, Charlie never aspired to follow their path of violence and intimidation.

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1965: the couple pose for the cameras after the Hew McCowan trial with Mitzi, the dog Elsie Shea refused to have in the house; weeks later, they were man and wife.

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Pat Larkin/Associated Newspapers/REX
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April 1965: Frances arrives at the church with her best man, brother Frankie Shea. Frankie lived to regret his youthful relationship with Reggie.

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Daily Mail/REX
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Just married: leaving the church in Bethnal Green.

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Daily Mail/REX
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