Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

An hour or so later, when Frances’s brother Frank got up, he took her in a cup of tea. Thinking she was fast asleep, he left it by her bed and went off to work. But something about his sister worried him and at lunchtime he returned to find her still in bed, just as he had left her, with the cup of tea untasted on the bedside table. It was then he realised she wasn’t sleeping but had died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

  Usually when someone dies in a family, it ushers in at least a brief period of peace in which old enmities can be forgotten and the bereaved can draw together as they mourn the dear departed. But this could not happen with the Krays and the death of Frances marked the beginning of a period of rapidly ascending bitterness, self-pity, black revenge, and ultimately bloody murder.

  The first to set the tone for much of what ensued was the dead girl’s father, Frank Shea Sr, who arrived at Wimbourne Court around lunchtime in response to a desperate phone call from his son. He had driven instantly to the flat and, seeing his daughter lying there so peacefully, his first thought, like his son’s, was that she must be sleeping. It was only when he took Frances’s hands in his and felt how cold they were that he knew the truth. Twice already he had had to deal with false alarms when he had found her after a suicide attempt and dragged her back to life. Now it was too late for that.

  ‘I could feel her arms already stiffening and there was nothing we could do. She’d been dead for hours. It is a terrible thing to say, but at that moment all I could think of was how those bastards had destroyed my daughter, and how much I hated them.’

  Wisely, his son Frankie waited until his father left before informing Reg at Vallance Road that he had bad news for him. He didn’t say what it was but Reg always claimed that he had guessed the truth, and he drove to Wimbourne Court at once. Just as her father had at first failed to realise the truth, so it was not until Reg held Frances’s hands in his and felt how cold they were that he knew for certain she was dead. And as with Frank Shea, Reg’s first reaction was a wave of bitter hatred which entirely engulfed him.

  ‘I could only blame her parents for everything that happened. They didn’t want her to be happy with me, and they kept on and on at her until she killed herself. It was as simple as that,’ he muttered.

  This is the point at which the body of sad, wraithlike Frances Kray becomes the centre of a funereal extravaganza which was something of a dress rehearsal for the mammoth East End funerals that the Krays would one day give themselves. As for Reg, throughout this period there are times when his performance as the grief-stricken husband seems so theatrical that one gets a glimpse of the natural actor concealed beneath the sharp blue suiting of the East End gangster.

  First comes the show of grief when visiting the mortuary to identify his wife. As Ron’s period in hiding still has several weeks to run, Reg goes accompanied by his young good-looking cousin Ronnie Hart, who has recently joined the Firm after a spell in the merchant navy and who does his best to console him. But for Reg this is not the time or the place for consolation as he stands beside his wife’s lifeless body, with tears streaming down his face, calling ‘Frankie, darling Frankie. Come back to me, my darling Frankie.’

  Answer, unsurprisingly, comes there none but once Frances’s body has been shifted from the mortuary to English’s funeral parlour in Whitechapel High Street Reg still visits three and sometimes four times every day to see her lying in her silk-lined coffin. In death she looks so peaceful that one might have thought that something of that peace might spread to Reg. But as he stands before the open coffin, all his thoughts are turning not to peace but to revenge. As he stands there mumbling to himself, Hart hears him saying, ‘I’ll get even with those bastards, even if it takes the rest of my life to do it. They took her from me and I’ll make them pay.’

  ‘Who took her from you?’ Hart inquires.

  ‘The Sheas, of course. Her fucking family. They were jealous of our happiness together, so they poisoned her mind against me, and I’ll kill them. I’ll kill the lot of them.’

  In his current state of mind, Reg means what he is saying and only one thing holds him back – the superstitious fear that, wherever she may be, Frances may be watching and would not forgive him if she knew he had harmed anyone she loved.

  So he vents his hatred by fighting her parents every inch of the way to the churchyard.

  Since he is still legally their daughter’s next of kin, he insists on being shown where she died, and on removing all her personal possessions, including her correspondence, her lipstick and her underwear. The Sheas beg him to allow them to bury her as she wanted – under her own name and somewhere of their choosing. He refuses angrily. Her name is Kray, not Shea, and he’ll bury her where and how he pleases. He also insists that she’ll be buried wearing the white satin wedding dress he bought her. Even in death she’s still his wife and he’s in charge of her funeral, as he is with everything else concerning her.

  What happens next is fascinating, offering the first clear intimation of how the cult of Krayhood is already forming in his mind. First comes the purchase of an expensive plot of land in Chingford Cemetery, where not only Frances but he and other close members of the family can be buried when they die. This will become their place of permanent memorial, and in time, in imitation of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, people will start calling it ‘Kray Corner’. By burying Frances there already, in a plot large enough for him to join her later, Reg will also be giving both of them one final chance to do in death the one thing they could never do in life – lie peacefully together.

  As for the funeral itself, it was certainly a great production. As Reg boasted later, ‘I’d given my wife the East End’s wedding of the year. Now I was giving her the East End’s funeral of the year.’ As if in compensation for her wretched death, Reg was posthumously giving her everything that he and his money could buy to express what really mattered to him now – his all-consuming sorrow – in a lavish show of conspicuous bereavement.

  If anyone was proved right by these events, it was their old priest Father Hetherington who had so resolutely refused to marry them three years earlier ‘because of the damage they would do to one another’. But since the damage had been done, Father Hetherington saw no point in still refusing when Reg asked him to bury Frances. He said he would conduct the funeral in St James the Great, the church where they were married.

  The Shea parents did score one sly victory, which they made sure that Reg would not discover until it was too late. Elsie Shea persuaded the undertaker to let her clothe her daughter’s wasted body in a white slip and tights, so that as little as possible of her flesh was touched by her hated wedding dress. Elsie also claimed that, just before the undertakers screwed the coffin lid down, she removed Reg’s wedding ring from her daughter’s finger and replaced it with a simple ring that she had given her as a child. Such was the spirit now presiding over the ‘East End’s burial of the year’ in which poor haunted Frances Shea was laid to rest.

  For the burial at Chingford Cemetery was clearly more in honour of the Krays than in memory of Frances. It was also clearly patterned on what Reg had read about the way the Mafia staged its funerals in America – the dozen or so statutory black limousines packed with large men and celebrities, the most expensive highly-polished coffin Messrs. English’s, the undertakers, could provide, and the avalanche of flowers which carpeted the graveside. Every member of the Firm had been ordered to send a wreath, suitably inscribed with personal condolences. (Reg told Donoghue afterwards to check the cards to see if anyone had disobeyed.) Ron, who was still dodging the police, sent a mammoth bunch of pink carnations, and yet more flowers cascaded in from every quarter of the underworld. Not to be outdone, Reg remained the undisputed winner in this graveside battle of the flowers, with three major floral tributes of his own.

  His final gesture was to throw a five-pound note onto the coffin for the gravedigger as he strode off, ashen-faced, through a sombre audience of silent mourners.

  Reg’s bitterness w
as in fact more complicated than it appeared, for it wasn’t only Frances he was mourning but himself. Of course he was fooling himself – as he often did – if he seriously believed the marriage could have worked. His genes, like Ron’s had been against it from the start, and if anyone knew this it would have had to be Frances. In the loneliness of her bed on the night she killed herself she must have faced the fact that, however considerate Reg now appeared, she and her marriage were both doomed together and she couldn’t face a repetition of that first disaster.

  This was something that Reg never could or would admit. For him the death of Frances had destroyed all his hopes of that brave new life he had convinced himself that they were just about to share, and much of the bile and bitterness boiling up inside him came from the thought of the lost paradise which ‘all those bastards’ had destroyed. It was for this that he never could or would forgive them. But there was more to it than that. Like Ron, at times like this when the rage and tension deep within him threatened to become unbearable he found his only real relief in alcohol, which he started to consume in devastating quantities. A few months later, when I was seeing quite a lot of the Twins, Reg was drinking straight Gordon’s gin from a half-pint beer glass and managing to stay upright and more or less coherent until the bottle was empty, when he’d order another.

  Had this been all, he could probably still have coped and started easing off the drinking as his misery and rage subsided. But this wasn’t all. Between his rage and wretchedness, the booze was making him profoundly vulnerable.

  As we have seen, thanks to the accident of their birth the twins were unique genetic rarities. They had always been abnormal, and with Ron’s advancing madness the tension between them had become unbearable. To understand the nightmare now beginning to engulf them one must imagine a pair of Siamese twins reaching maturity, only to discover that one of them is a homicidal schizophrenic.

  Although, of course, the Twins were not joined together physically, there were close parallels between this scenario and the nightmare that Reg was facing. Now on the edge of an alcohol-induced breakdown, his genetic legacy had caught up with him as the true nature of the Twins’ discordant twin relationship revealed itself in earnest. Ron was already mad and indulging in a homicidal orgy, while Reg was getting close to joining him.

  Much of what passed between them now was actually a repetition of the teenage battles in which they had fought for dominance, and which Ron had always won by taunting Reg until he lost his self-control and the two of them united in a splurge of all-consuming violence. What never failed to bring the Twins together was one thing and one alone – violence, either against each other or, better still, against their enemies. It was then that the addictive frenzy of a fight transformed them into one terrifying creature with four legs, four fists and one identical intelligence. That summer, after Frances died, this creature was increasingly in evidence as Ron’s madness spread and threatened to engulf them both.

  Mayhem reigned that summer with the Twins egging each other on in a rampage of continuing terror. But now, in contrast with the past, it was often Reg not Ron who led the way, urged on by his hunger for revenge not just for Frances but for the life he might have led if fate had not betrayed him. When the rage was on him and the red mist once again descended, the Twins were united in a way that they had not been since they fought their teenage battles with the rival gangs from Watney Street, merging their separate identities in the shared intoxication of untrammelled violence.

  For Reg, alcohol fuelled this madness by destroying any feeling of restraint as he stumbled round the East End streets searching out targets for revenge. But inevitably it was Ron who found him his first victim, an old friend of theirs called Frederick. A would-be villain, Frederick had been with the Twins in the days of the billiard hall, and although since then he’d settled down and started a family he kept in touch with them and often drank with them. Out of the blue one evening, Ron casually remarked that he’d overheard Frederick saying something out of order about Frances.

  ‘What did he say about my wife, the bastard?’ muttered Reg.

  ‘I’m not repeating it,’ said Ron. ‘It would upset you.’

  And although Reg kept on at him Ron would say no more, knowing he had said enough to start his brother brooding. For the rest of that night, Reg remained awake, drinking steadily and planning his revenge. Early next morning he summoned two members of the Firm to ‘come over with their van and bring a shooter’. There was work for them to do.

  It was just after seven when the van drew up outside the flat in Hackney where Frederick lived. He was still in the bathroom, shaving, and his wife was giving the children their breakfast when Reg, with his two heavies, rang the bell. Frederick’s wife answered it.

  ‘Tell Frederick that Reggie’s here and wants a word with him’, said one of the heavies.

  By now the children had joined their mother at the door to see who had arrived and Reg had to push through the group, gun in hand, shouting for the kids’ father. Frederick appeared at the head of the stairs, his face covered in shaving soap.

  ‘Filthy bastard,’ shouted Reg. ‘You’ve been saying things about my Frances. I thought you were my friend.’

  Tears were streaming down his face as one of the heavies stumbled up the stairs and struck Frederick such a blow that he came tumbling down. Then, as the children started screaming, Reg started shooting. Luckily he was so drunk that all his shots went wide, except for one that hit Frederick in the leg. He lay there, groaning.

  At the sight of blood Reg seemed satisfied. The heavies helped him back into the van and off they went with Reg beside the driver, sobbing.

  ‘That bastard had it coming to him, saying things about my wife, my lovely Frances,’ he kept muttering.

  This time it was brother Charlie’s turn to call Doc Blasker in to see to Frederick’s injuries, along with Red-faced Tommy Plumley to make sure that no one talked to the police. So no one did. But when Reg told Ron what he’d done, Ron went ballistic.

  ‘Drunken slag,’ he shouted. ‘Here we are, trying to earn ourselves a living and you risk the lot by gunning down a friend. Anyhow, you couldn’t kill anybody if you tried. You’re too fucking soft. When I did my one I made a proper job of it and Cornell couldn’t walk around no more – not like your friend, Frederick.’

  So after shooting Frederick Reg’s state of mind grew worse, instead of better. Time passed him by like a dream, which always ended with him feeling utterly alone and scared of what was happening to him. At times like this the only person he could talk to was Father Hetherington, who never failed him.

  ‘I used to feel better after seeing him,’ he told me once, and he’d usually start thinking of a different life. What about the Foreign Legion? Or, better still, a long, tough African safari? What was stopping him? But even as he asked himself these questions, he always knew the answer – Ron. ‘How could I leave my brother? How could Ron ever cope without me?’

  This was the point at which Reg’s dreams returned as nightmares and his rage began in earnest and he started drinking once again.

  Ron’s court order lapsed at the end of that July, leaving him free to emerge from hiding. He seemed madder now than ever, and once he was back on the scene the Firm’s activities became madder too. Many of the old financial standbys, like the income from ‘respectable’ protection and money from gambling and stolen securities, dwindled. Now that Les Payne and his sidekick Freddy Gore had gone, the elaborate long-firm frauds that had always brought in large amounts of money had all but vanished too. In their place the Firm was getting into more downmarket rackets like pornography and dealing in the amphetamine pills called purple hearts. Then at one stage there was talk of taking over all the fruit machines in London, which came to nothing.

  But for Ron there were also the paranoid illusions of the schizophrenic, which Reg believed that some outsider had to be encouraging since so many way-out projects were suddenly obsessing him. On his own, would Ro
n ever have hit on the idea of taking over a diamond mine in the Congo or assassinating the African leader President Kaunda? For that matter, why should he suddenly think of trying to release the Congolese leader President Tshombe who was under house arrest in Algiers?

  But Ron was in deadly earnest about all this. After claiming to have met some of Tshombe’s followers in London he was talking of a task force from the Firm flying to Algeria, where they’d use helicopters and nerve gas to storm his captors’ villa. Once freed, Tshombe would make his getaway by hovercraft. Ron had also plans to mastermind an international forged-currency syndicate with the printing plates manufactured in New York by a master forger, the notes mass-produced in Switzerland and Europe swamped with quantities of fake currency under the firm direction of the Krays.

  Needless to say, none of these James Bond-like schemes came remotely near fruition. The only one that did was an idea which Ron had picked up for himself during that visit to Nigeria in 1964. He’d never forgotten what he had learned about the leopard men, the secret brotherhood of dedicated murderers who terrorised the country and indulged in ritual murder in their initiation ceremonies. Before anyone could join the leopard men he had to prove himself by killing someone so that murder would form a bond of loyalty at the centre of this brotherhood of murderers.

  Ron was particularly excited by all this and talked a lot about turning the Firm into something similar. The Mafia required any candidate for membership to ‘make his bones’ by killing someone. Within the Firm he had passed this test himself by killing George Cornell. Now the time had come for Reg to join him. Others could come in later, but not before Reg had shown them the way. Murder was what mattered now. Only when Reg had killed could the Twins be totally united.

  So Reg was at his twin brother’s mercy, and, with Ron’s encouragement, his shootings started up in earnest. But so far nobody had died, for Reg’s aggression took the form of acts of random violence in which he indulged for their own sake, like the night he arrived at the Starlight Club in Highbury so drunk that he made little sense to anyone, himself included. Spotting a businessman called Field whom he thought he knew, he staggered over to him, waved a gun in his face and asked him for a thousand pounds. Field answered that he hadn’t got a thousand pounds. Reg shot him through the leg and ordered a member of the Firm who was acting as his bodyguard to smash his face in. Which he promptly did. But these actions accomplished less than nothing except to leave a lot of trouble and expense behind which needed to be cleared up later. Once again Ron was furious. ‘You drunken slag,’ he said on learning what had happened. ‘Ain’t it time you got your fucking act together?’