My Story

by Ronald Kray

  If ever you were to meet and talk to Ron, you would find he’s just like you and me, he isn’t any different. Then, why is he in Broadmoor? I can hear you asking. Well, I’m not saying that Ron hasn’t got a mental illness, because he would be the first to admit that he has. You see, most of the time Ron is ‘normal’, but every now and then he gets paranoid and feels everything is closing in on him. He calls it ‘going into one’ and he always knows when it’s happening. He’s been like this since he was very young and now he always recognizes the signs. He then seeks the relevant help with his medication and he likes to be alone. These periods in his life don’t last for long and soon he’s back to his old self again. It’s at these bad times, though, when I feel useless. I wish I could do something to help him, to take away the pain. It’s not a physical pain, it’s a mental pain, and that’s the worst sort. It’s not like a cut leg or a broken arm, something which surgeons can see and heal. The person with a mental problem is a person alone, wrestling with their thoughts, trying to decide what is normal and what is not. I know, from watching Ron, that this is an incredibly lonely time. Sometimes I look at him and I see that he is a very lonely man, even though he can be surrounded by many people and dozens of letters from well- wishers. Even though he has so many friends, so many people who truly care for him, he is still lonely and isolated in his mind.

  I now realize that when I first married Ron, despite all the warnings and advice I had been given, I didn’t understand just how much my life was about to change. For instance, I am never introduced to people as ‘Kate’ any more, it’s always, ‘This is Ronnie Kray’s wife.’ Then I am always bombarded with questions.

  ‘Which one is it you’re married to?’ Ronnie, I say.

  ‘Which is the gay one?’ My husband, I say.

  ‘Which one is in the nuthouse?’ My husband, I say.

  People are normally a bit gobsmacked by this time. Then it’s always, ‘How did you meet him?’ Then ‘Why did you marry him?’

  I don’t take offence at these questions because I know people are curious. It seems everybody wants to know about Ronnie and Reggie, from lords and ladies to pop singers and ordinary Joe Publics. I know this because I’ve met all these people and they all react in the same way. Ron never ceases to amaze me with the people he has met and the people who have written to him and been to see him over the years. People may knock him but they all want to meet him and they all want to know about him.

  Being married to the Colonel has its ups and downs. One of the down-sides is not being able to get an extension on my mortgage because on the application form I have to fill in my husband’s occupation, etc. I always get stuck on the occupation question! On the other side, the plus-side, for example, I was stopped by a traffic policeman who, when he saw my name in my driving licence, started to ask me lots of questions. ‘No relation to the Kray twins, are you?’ he asked. And on it went until he eventually forgot what he had stopped me for. That was good for me - at the time my car had four bald tyres and I had no tax or insurance!

  Men, in particular, react dramatically when they learn who I am married to. I remember going with my friend Sharon to a nightclub. There were lots more women than men there but, do you know, every girl in the place was asked to dance except me and Sharon. I felt quite dejected, even though I knew the reason. When I told Ron, he just laughed and said, ‘It must have been because you and Sharon were the ugliest ones there!’

  Men will often approach me and chat to me, until someone tells them who I am. Then suddenly they will blank me. It’s quite funny, really. It’s just that name - Kray. Even after all these years people are frightened by it, wary of it, and really there is no need to be.

  Marriage to Ron also has its amusing moments. He read in a newspaper about a woman motorist being attacked by a man after her car broke down. This worried him because he knows I spend hours on motorways driving up and down to Broadmoor to see him. So he bought me a portable phone, which was a kind thing to do. Everything was fine until one day I got a message from him in Broadmoor on my portable phone. What’s wrong with that? Well, I was standing in the check-out queue at Safeways at the time! There were some very interested ladies in that queue on that particular day, I can tell you. And he only wanted to make sure I was okay. He worries about me.

  As I’ve been putting down on paper my own small part in Ron’s story, I’ve been thinking a lot about my marriage to him. And I still believe, given the chance all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I intend to stay married to Ron for the rest of my life. What I want more than anything is for him to be released, to be able to come home, to know a real home for the first time since he was just a boy. I truly believe that the only thing keeping both him and Reg inside is their name. It makes ordinary people frightened and I believe it still makes the authorities frightened. Yet I know that the ordinary people of this country believe that both Ron and Reg should be freed, I know this because I get letters about it from all over Britain. Almost without exception their theme is the same: enough is enough, the twins have served long enough. They should be freed.

  Whenever newspapers have carried out polls among their readers the result has also been the same. For example, the Sun carried out a huge poll in 1991 and found a massive vote in favour of the twins’ release. Their columnist Gary Bushell wrote about Reg:

  The average sentence for murder is eight years. Many murderers have done their time and built themselves new lives while Kray has languished in chokey …For seven¬teen and a half years he was a Category A prisoner, banged up alone for twenty-three hours a day … it is a miracle that he has still got all his marbles.

  Contrast that, as Ron does, to the perverted vermin who killed little Jason Swift … The ringleaders got fifteen years … It is unjuBt to punish Reggie Kray further. He should be released now. There’s as much chance of him leading a new crime gang as there is of Ted Heath becoming Prime Minister again.

  The headline over the article, while typically Sun, really did say it all: ‘It’s Kray-zy to keep Reg banged up.’

  And I believe the same applies to Ron. I know that his situation is different because of his medical problems but I also know, because his doctors at Broadmoor have told me, that Ron could be released, with safety, provided that he was supervised, provided that he received the correct medication and provided that he was properly looked after. Well, he would be looked after - by me. My husband is not a dangerous maniac. He is a quiet, gentle man who is no longer a young man. He will soon be officially an old-age pensioner. Honestly, what sort of gangland threat would he be now? I appeal to the Home Office seriously to review the cases of both Ron and Reg. They should be released, no matter what restrictions accompany that release. Restrictions they can cope with; being constantly locked away they can’t.

  I will continue to campaign for release for both of them for as long as it takes. I have had to take a lot of stick from newspapers and magazines because of my beliefs, and because of who I am married to. Some of the articles written about me have been actionable, according to my solicitor. But I haven’t taken any action, I haven’t attempted to fight back, because that would mean more mud flying around in the press - and mud sticks. No, all I want is justice and fairness. Is that too much to ask?

  As I’ve said previously, I would love to be able to have more contact with Ron. I know there are plans to install payphones at Broadmoor which the patients would be able to use at certain times. This will be very welcome and is a much- needed facility. It is wrong that patients - and they are patients, as well as prisoners - are not able to talk to their loved ones, particularly at times of stress. I’m sure that when Ron is ‘going into one’, when he’s got one of his bad spells gripping him, I would be able to help the hospital staff, and Ron himself, simply by talking to him over the telephone.

  I’ve read that the Home Officer minister, Angela Rumbold, believes that prisoners should be allowed much more physical contact with their loved ones. She believes, for exam
ple, that if prisoners were allowed contact with their wives it would lead to far fewer riots in prisons, fewer suicides and fewer divorces among the country’s fifty thousand inmates.

  Mrs Rumbold said: ‘What happened in Strangeways jail couldn’t just be put down to overcrowding and bad conditions. It seems to me that if you are trying to get people to learn lessons from being in prison, it doesn’t help if you break up their family and they’ve absolutely nothing to come out to.’

  At the moment, at Broadmoor any show of affection between a patient and his loved one is not welcomed and, in any case, everything there is so public that it is difficult to show affection openly. I think this is sad.

  And so life goes on. I send a phone message to my husband every night, I see him as often as they will allow me. I shall go on being Mrs Ronnie Kray, I shall stay faithful to my man and I shall continue to pray that the day will come when we can truly be man and wife.

  After all, I married my Ron ‘for better or for worse’. And things can only get better. Can’t they?

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Odds and Sods

  Over the years I’ve been inside I have met many young cons who told me they couldn’t face their sentence, couldn’t survive the long years inside. A lot of them have spoken of trying to commit suicide. I have always done my best to talk them out of it. I would never try to commit suicide. I once thought about it, when I was just a young boy, but I would never do so again.

  Me and Reg have had a pact which we agreed on many years ago. We agreed that we would never give in, we would see our sentences through to the end. No matter how long it takes, no matter how bad it gets, no matter what we have to go through.

  Me and Reg, we don’t see each other much now. We used to meet up about once every three months; they would bring Reg to Broadmoor from whatever prison he was in and we would have a chat for a couple of hours. But it was a long way for him to come, whether he was in Parkhurst or Gartree, and especially now he’s in Suffolk, because the screws here would never leave us alone to talk in private. They would always make sure several screws were listening in to our private conversations. So, we were never allowed to talk to each other like we wanted to, like brothers should. So we more or less decided not to worry about the visits. We will just have them, say, a couple of times a year. But we write to each other a lot and pass any urgent messages through various friends who come to see us. We are still very close, after all these years, and despite everything we have gone through.

  Whatever we have to face, it will never be as bad as what a young boy called James Fallon had to face. We like to feel we were friends of James, though we never met him. He was only ten but he was paralysed from the neck down after a tragic road accident. He was hit by a car. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. All he could do was signal with his eyes. He was in bed for years like that, before he died. He couldn’t do anything other people could do. It was terrible for him. But he always had a smile on his face, right to the end. Me and Reg tried to raise money for him, to make his life more bearable. I still have a photograph of him which I always keep close to me. These days I tell people who are unhappy about little James. We are all a lot better off than he was, we have to count the blessings in life.

  People should realize how lucky they are: don’t moan, don’t take life for granted. People are always moaning about their lives. But James Fallon would have changed places with everyone else, even with me and Reg, just to be able to walk and talk. It’s too terrible to think about. That’s why I always tell young cons never to give up. I also tell them not to get bitter, not to go around slagging other people off. I show them a few words which an old con once gave to me on a bit of paper: ‘There is so much good in the worst of us, so much bad in the best of us, it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.’

  I wish some other people would listen to those words, too. By that I mean certain people on the outside. People like Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, for example.

  Read, who claimed the credit for arresting us, was always just another copper in my eyes. I never knew much about him.

  But, despite what he did to us, we’ve always treated him with respect, never slagged him off. But he’s not treated us fair. He wrote a book and he had a right go at me and Reg. He said we never showed any remorse and he said we should stay locked up. That was out of order. I’m not complaining about myself, I’ve done all this time. But how can he say my brother, Reggie, shouldn’t get out? As I’m writing this he’s done twenty-five years inside. Nipper Read can’t have any idea what that is like. He hasn’t got a clue what my brother has gone through. He’s just being spiteful. He’s being a spiteful bastard.

  He’s not the only one. There’s others. We’ve done nothing to any of them, we’ve done none of them any harm, yet they’ve said some terrible things about us. One even said we sent him some dead rats in the post. We never did. We’d known him when we were young boxers, but we never really had any dealings with him. He’s got no cause to slag us off.

  Tony Lambrianou is nothing but a lackey and a grass. He grassed us when we were all locked up waiting for trial. Nipper Read went to see him when we were on appeal and Lambrianou said to him: ‘The Krays done the murders. It was nothing to do with me and my brother.’ That’s what he said - and so did his brother, Chris. And I can still get the statements to prove it. They both put all the blame on me and Reg, they both said they were innocent. They both grassed us.

  Now Tony Lambrianou is outside he’s acting like a big gangster. But he never was a big gangster, not even in the old days. He was never a real member of the Firm, he was nothing but an errand boy. He’s a ponce, he ponces off our name. He don’t care about Reggie trying to get out of prison, trying to get his release. No, he still carries on writing bad stories about us.

  I’ll tell you what Lambrianou was - he was my errand boy. He used to run around for me. That’s all he was good for, Tony Lambrianou, and that’s all his brother, Chris, was good for, too. They were nothing to us, nothing to me and Reg. They were nothing on the Firm. But Tony Lambrianou is still living off our name now to make himself money. He even wrote a book about his ‘life of crime’ with me and Reg, and that was a load of rubbish, too. The only truthful things he said in it were these:

  What the Krays did in London was keep the peace. They kept all the villainy under control. They hated grasses, sex offenders, people who committed crimes to do with women and children. And they couldn’t stand petty criminals, like housebreakers.

  They’d never have stood for the muggings and the sort of street violence that’s going on today.

  It was often said the twins could have two hundred armed men on the streets within an hour if they wanted.

  But they were an army on their own. There will never be another two like them.

  They had their own keen sense of values. They would always take the side of the underdog if they thought someone was taking a liberty with a weaker person.

  Their loyalty to members of the Firm was absolute and they expected the same loyalty in return. They gave their men a good living and a lifestyle that included all the fringe benefits you could think of.

  Tony Lambrianou was right. We hated grasses. We still do. But that’s what he was.

  And he’s right when he says the loyalty we gave to members of our Firm was absolute. We would have died for them, me and Reg. And, yes, we did expect the same loyalty in return. But did we get it? Did we fuck! Only from a few of them, people like Ian Barrie, Freddie Foreman and our brother Charlie. The rest of ’em were like rats deserting a sinking ship. We learned a hard lesson, me and Reg, from the rest of those disloyal bastards. But we knew very early on that a lot of them were giving evidence against us to save their own skins.

  What really sticks in my throat is the way some of them are still trying to make money out of us, and some of them weren’t even on the Firm in the first place. They were just ‘faces’ that we vaguely knew, but they were never anything to us.

  There are
so many idiots about, all trying to make money out of our name. There was a feller called Dr Glen Wilson, who called himself a top psychiatrist. One of the Sunday paper colour supplements paid him good money to read murderers’ minds through their art. He may call himself a top psychiatrist, but I think he’s a right idiot. He got a painting by my brother Reg, showing three pyramids in the desert and a moon shining above them. He wrote: ‘His work shows a childlike mind lacking in imagination. The pyramids, large and impressive, are probably reflections of how he sees himself.’ How can he say Reg is lacking in imagination? He’s written five books, some of them without any help from professional writers or journalists; he ran London with me when he was only twenty-four years old, he did. We ran the London underworld together. He’s travelled, he’s done lots of things, yet this mug says he’s got no imagination - and some fancy newspaper has paid him good money for his stupid comments.

  They’ve got hold of one of my paintings as well. It’s a painting of a house with a tree next to it. The house is orange with a yellow roof, and everything else is black, except the sky which is purple. They just happened to be the colours I had next to me when I did the painting. This Dr Wilson says: ‘Painted by an immature mind, this picture reveals a freedom fantasy and strong desire to be at home.’

  Now, I’ll tell you and this mug something, and it’s the truth: I never, ever worry about getting outside, so I don’t know where he gets that from. I’ve never worried about getting outside, I’m quite happy here at Broadmoor. If I get out, I get out, and that will be great. If I don’t, I don’t. I don’t worry about it. And I wouldn’t bow down to someone like Nipper Read to get out. I wouldn’t tell a load of lies about feeling sorry, just to get out. I’m not a hypocrite. I know Nipper Read and people like him want to see me and Reg down on our knees, saying how sorry we are for all we’ve done. But we’re not, so why should we be hypocrites and pretend we are, just to please people like that? They can stick their parole where it belongs.