Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  The first of them to enter the witness box was Mrs X, the barmaid from the Blind Beggar. She was a mousy little woman and was clearly terrified at first by this whole ordeal. As principal witness to the shooting of Cornell her evidence was crucial but she was also highly vulnerable, having previously sworn on oath at Cornell’s inquest that she hadn’t recognised Ron Kray as the killer on the night Cornell was murdered.

  Ron’s defence rested on an out-and-out denial that he’d been there at all. This had been backed up by an alibi from Scotch Jack Dixon that he and Ron had been together at another pub in Bethnal Green on the night Cornell was shot. Since then Scotch Jack had joined the happy band of penitents who, in return for their freedom, had turned against the Twins. He was now claiming he had lied about the alibi and was finally prepared to tell the truth – that he had actually driven Ron from the Blind Beggar back to Vallance Road after the shooting of George Cornell.

  But since Dixon was obviously a ‘tainted’ witness everything depended now on Mrs X’s supporting evidence. Platts-Mills made every effort he could muster to discredit her and break her down.

  Since she admitted to having lied on oath, how could any jury believe her now?

  ‘I think you’re just making all this up, aren’t you?’ he said.

  He should have known better, for her whole demeanour changed as she stood up against him; and as she spoke, one heard the voice of countless East End women who had suffered and kept quiet in the past.

  ‘You’re calling me a liar but I’m not one. If you’d had the nightmares I’d had afterwards, you’d understand why I acted as I did. I was frightened for myself and for my children.’ More accusations from Platts followed but Mrs X stood her ground, and by the time she concluded her evidence Ron’s so-called alibi was in tatters and it was obvious that he was guilty. So was the young, heedless Gorbals gangster Ian Barrie who had been stupid enough to go along with him. After this the court was free to turn its full attention to the killing of Jack McVitie.

  Throughout the trial Nipper Read was constantly in court like an anxious stage director, and I guessed that, as usual, he knew exactly what he was up to when he decided who should be the first witness in the case of the murder of McVitie. But to begin with nothing could have seemed less threatening to the Twins that this waiflike woman standing so nervously before the court in a pale blue dress. She was addressed as ‘Sylvie’, although she was actually McVitie’s widow. At first she seemed to have nothing very much to say, apart from nervously explaining how Jack had told her that he was meeting the Twins for a drink and how he never came back, although she looked everywhere to find him. Then she paused and stared for a moment in silence at the figures in the dock before she screamed out, her voice echoing around the court: ‘You murdering bastards. It was my husband that you killed.’ Then she burst into tears.

  Until this moment Jack the Hat had been a faceless, feckless character whose importance lay in his having been murdered by the Twins. But suddenly Jack was there before us, the husband of a wife who missed him and who had loved him, and who was never going to forgive the bastards who had killed him.

  There would be far worse accounts than this to come but in its way Sylvie’s evidence remained the most electrifying moment in the trial. Even the judge was momentarily at a loss for words as Sylvie was led, weeping, from the witness box. And it was now that the trial itself appeared to change. No longer were the barristers simply scoring points off one another, but they too seemed suddenly involved in this killing of another

  human being and the suffering that had followed.

  It was now that another female witness, Blonde Carol Skinner – who had been living in the flat where Jack was murdered – also came into her own in the witness box. She was no longer the unimportant creature whom the Twins had entirely ignored in the aftermath of Jack McVitie’s murder. As she spoke, she conveyed the sense of outrage of a woman whose home had been turned into a slaughterhouse and communicated vividly the horror of knowing that McVitie’s bleeding body had been wrapped in her own bedspread, then dumped on the bed beside her sleeping children.

  None of the male witnesses achieved anything like the women’s sense of authenticity in their evidence, but then, each one of them was only standing in the witness box to save his own skin. Never before in the history of the old East End can so many villains have betrayed each other in a court of law. There was Ron’s former bodyguard, Billy Exley, barely recovered from a major heart attack, who entered the court in a wheelchair to testify against the Twins. There was their father’s oldest friend and fellow deserter from the army, Harry Hopwood, explaining how he had looked after the Twins after they had murdered Jack by disposing of their bloodstained clothing and throwing the jammed .32 automatic into the canal. And there was ‘Big Albert’ Donoghue, as large as life, explaining in detail how he got rid of all traces of McVitie’s blood from Blonde Carol’s flat. If any of them felt any shame at betraying their former friends to gain their freedom they certainly didn’t show it.

  At times like this, it was as if all the villains from the past were on trial with the Twins as their former followers turned against them. So much for the first commandment of the Old East End – ‘thou shalt not grass’. So much too for the sense of solidarity that had once bound East Enders to their local criminals, as rebels against an unjust society.

  But the greatest betrayer of them all was still to come – the Twins’ own cousin, Ronald Hart. I’d been seeing quite a lot of him when working on The Profession of Violence before the Twins’ arrest and was surprised to hear that he too had ‘gone over to the other side’; but nothing had prepared me for the sight of the tall, good-looking figure in the pale blue suit, standing up in court with a bible in his hand and promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while knowing as he did that every word he spoke was saving him from at least twenty years in prison.

  Inevitably it was his description of McVitie’s murder that dominated the proceedings. It has remained in my memory ever since as the most nightmarish first-hand account I’ve ever heard of cruelty inflicted for its own sake by one human being on another.

  Presumably Hart felt obliged to describe every detail of the Twins’ behaviour to justify betraying them. By the time he’d finished, he’d left nothing to the court’s imagination; Jack’s screams for mercy, Ron’s frantic encouragement to his twin to kill him, and the way Reg thrust the knife not once but twice through McVitie’s throat, leaving him pinioned to the floor and flailing in his death throes like a dying animal.

  By describing the murder in such horrendous detail Hart was doing something more than just providing evidence against his cousins. He was also acting out in court a gripping tableau of sadistic wickedness and it was now that the image of the Twins as exceptionally evil murderers was born.

  Evidence like this was a hard act to follow and by 30 January, the seventeenth day of the trial, the plodding voice of Kenneth Jones QC summed up for the prosecution, and the case against the Twins and their accomplices was over. It was time for the defence, but the truth was that by now, after so much drama from the witness box, there wasn’t a great deal left to defend.

  There a certain black humour in the fact that the only person the defence could find to go into the witness box and speak in the Twins’ favour was the last man in England who had had the cat-o’-nine-tails for assaulting a prison officer and who was at the time in prison with other members of the Richardson gang – ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser.

  After Mad Frankie, since no one else would speak in the Twins’ defence, Ron Kray decided he would do so.

  He had had his Stematol and he had probably heard his voices for he was clearly on a high. That very morning he had noticed one of his heroes the American film-star Charlton Heston was in court. He had never forgotten Heston’s performance in the 1966 film Khartoum about another of his heroes, General Gordon, and was determined now to face his enemies as Gordon had faced the Mahdi and his men
.

  Ron was, of course, completely mad – and like many psychopaths and paranoid schizophrenics he was devoid of any sense of guilt or remorse for anything he’d done. When Kenneth Jones tried to cross-examine him, Ron denied everything and was probably convinced that every word he spoke was true. For him, the real victims in this case were neither McVitie nor Cornell, but he and his family because of the way the police had treated them and made their friends betray them.

  As Ron continued what did come over was the importance he attached to the Twins’ self-image. Betrayal plays a part in many legends and soon he was saying how everyone had turned against them, and how in spite of all the lies being told in court about them, he and his brother Reg were public benefactors who had spent thousands on the poor of Bethnal Green and had been honoured with the friendship of the great and famous.

  ‘I took Joe Louis up to Newcastle, and Rocky Marciano and Sonny Liston to the Repton Club.’ And he couldn’t resist adding, ‘If I wasn’t here I could be having tea with Judy Garland, or having a drink with Lord Boothby.’ Quick as a flash this brought an instant reprimand from the judge – and one saw that just by mentioning the name of Boothby, Ron was venturing into forbidden territory.

  Apart from this, what seemed to interest Ron was no longer the outcome of the trial but the number of celebrities who came to see them. I had a letter from him at around this time informing me that he and Reg had had fifty-four visitors while they’d been in prison, including Cliff Richard and Diana Dors. What pleased him most of all was when Francis Wyndham brought along the young actor James Fox to see him and discuss a film that Mick Jagger was planning to make on the subject of a famous celebrity who became a criminal. The criminal was to be based on the Krays and the script was being written by David Litvinoff.

  Unlike Ron, Reg seemed to have completely lost the plot by now as he sat in court and rarely spoke. The only time he did was when Kenneth Jones made a passing reference to the brother of his dead wife, Frances. He suddenly broke down and tearfully shouted out ‘you fat slob’ at the lawyer. In contrast with his swift reaction to Ron’s reference to Lord Boothby the judge let this pass.

  By this point I can remember thinking that in the absence of any credible defence the Twins really had no alternative to changing their plea to guilty with a serious plea in mitigation. For throughout the trial certain things had puzzled me, particularly the way that in spite of all the witnesses against them the Twins themselves had remained such enigmatic figures; and how so much about them had been left unsaid. During the whole trial no one had spoken of the fact that they were identical twins. Still less had anyone mentioned that Ron was once certified insane and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. And of course, there was no reference at all to the way that the cover-up of the Boothby case had made them virtually ‘untouchable’ as far as the police were concerned, which had effectively given them a three-year licence to kill.

  But instead of pleading guilty, with their lawyers arguing what could have been a fascinating case in mitigation, the Twins continued to deny all the charges against them to the last. Afterwards, when I visited them in prison, and asked them why they’d acted as they did they always changed the subject; and it was not until many years later that I learned the answer.

  Although he was in his sixties at the time of the trial Ron’s counsel, the indomitable John Platts-Mills, had gone on practising the law until well into his nineties, and not long before he died in 1999 I chanced to meet him in his chambers in the Middle Temple. We talked about the trial and I finally inquired about the weakness of the Twins’ defence. Why was it never mentioned that Ron had been a certified paranoid schizophrenic and that when Reg killed McVitie, not only was he on the edge of a nervous breakdown following his wife’s suicide, but he was also dominated by his homicidal twin brother? And why did no one in court even mention the fact that they were identical twins?

  ‘Oh, but we wanted to’ replied Platts-Mills. ‘Before the trial started, Wrightson (Paul Wrightson QC, who defended Reg) and I had both decided it was the obvious line for their defence. It would have been difficult arguing a case like that before old Melford, who wasn’t the most liberal of judges, but the facts were there and they were undeniable. As Ron had been certified insane in the past he would have been sent to Broadmoor. And as for Reg, any sentence he received would have been considerably reduced on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Folie a deux between identical twins, with one of them a homicidal madman; it would have made a fascinating case. Certainly I’d never heard of anything remotely like it, which is why Wrightson and I were both so keen to argue it out in court.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Why do you think? Because of the Twins, of course. They wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Their reputation. They thought that once we said that Ron was mad, it would destroy their credibility as criminal celebrities and along with it their precious legend. Besides, Reg believed that it would be a terrible betrayal of his brother to condemn him to a mental institution, which of course is where he finally ended up anyway. To be fair to Ron, to my certain knowledge, on several occasions during the trial he urged Reg to do so. ‘Save yourself, Reg’ he said in my very hearing. But Reg wouldn’t listen. I’ve always admired Reg for that, but he paid a very heavy price.

  He paused. ‘More than thirty years in prison, and he’s still there today with little hope of freedom. It’s a dreadful story.’

  So there it was, and Platts-Mills was right: in its way it was a dreadful story. But at least it partially explained why the twins decided they would rather spend the rest of their lives in prison as criminal celebrities than have Ron consigned to Broadmoor.

  On the day the Twins were sentenced Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Conservative Prime Minister at the time of the Boothby scandal, was in court to hear the words of Melford Stevenson.

  ‘Ronald Kray, I am not wasting any words on you. The sentence upon you is life imprisonment. In my view society has earned a rest from your activities, and I recommend that you be detained for no less than thirty years. Put him down.’

  The same sentence was pronounced on Reg. Ian Barrie received twenty years, the Lambrianou Brothers both received fifteen, Charles Kray and Frederick Foreman were awarded ten, and Cornelius Whitehead seven. Anthony Barry, owner of the Regency Club, was acquitted.

  A few days later, a second trial would begin before Judge Lawton in which the Twins and Foreman were accused of murdering Frank Mitchell. The principal evidence against them came from Big Albert Donoghue, and the trial concluded when Judge Lawton ruled that since he was a ‘tainted witness’ his entire testimony was inadmissable. Whether Sir Melford Stevenson would have concurred is debatable. Probably not. The decision made no difference to the Twins, who were already sentenced to thirty years in prison, but it must have brought immense relief to Foreman and Charlie Kray, who would otherwise have faced a similar sentence.

  But in one respect the Mitchell trial had done the Twins a favour – by adding the truth about that whole strange story to the other tales of villainy and murder which had formed around them.

  On that April day in 1969 when the Mitchell trial ended, as I watched them being led off to the cells, I realised that in a weird way they had got what they had always wanted. When Ron succeeded in persuading Reg to murder Jack McVitie the Twins finally became what they’d never been before – identical twin murderers. Since then, those two murders, senseless and sadistic though they seemed, had been elevated out of all proportion by this interminable trial which had also established the legend that would bring the Twins their immortality. Thus the greatest murder trial of the Sixties had reinforced that fatal bond between the Twins and made them more notorious than ever.

  It had also given them what they’d always longed for and were willing to sacrifice their freedom to attain – enduring fame and the certainty that they were special. Provided they had this, and were respected by their fe
llow criminals for what they were, they were perfectly prepared to face the future.

  24

  End Game

  WHEN THE TWINS were sentenced in 1969 they were thirty-four years old and their days of violence and murder lay behind them. Ron would serve twenty-six more years of his thirty-year sentence before he died of a heart attack in March 1995; Reg served thirty-one, and was released thirty-five days before he died of cancer on 1 October 2000. As I have described this period in depth in my book The Cult of Violence I won’t go over it here again.

  But during these years one thing still obsessed the Twins – preserving the precious image of themselves as twin criminal celebrities which they had so cruelly established on the day they murdered Jack McVitie.

  As we have seen, they had already made their preparations for a film about themselves to be coupled with my biography before they were arrested, and during their early days in prison their plans showed every sign of working.

  The prison authorities had decided that after they’d been sentenced the Twins would not only be separated but also sent as far away from each other as possible – Reg to the maximum-security unit at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight and Ron to the even more forbidding maximum-security unit in Durham Jail. This unit was actually a reinforced small prison within a prison which somebody described as like ‘living in a submarine’. According to the sociologists Cohen and Taylor, who wrote about the Durham unit at around the time that Ron arrived, its effect on long-term prisoners was usually ‘withdrawal and complete capitulation to the system’, which was presumably what Melford Stevenson had in mind when he’d sentenced the Twins to thirty years in top security.

  But Ron and Reg had no intention of surrendering to anyone if they could help it, least of all to Melford Stevenson. They thought they already knew everything there was to know about life in prison; and they also thought that they could use their fame as criminal celebrities to beat the system. Amazingly, both of these assumptions would ultimately prove to be correct, but only after they had spent more than a dozen years in close confinement.