by Hyams, Jacky
Tormented, drunk nearly all the time, and more under the influence of his twin than at any time before, Reggie now started to take out his rage, his anger, on virtually any random target.
Ronnie, who came out of hiding that July, merely added fuel to the fire. He didn’t stop reminding Reggie that he hadn’t yet done what he’d done that night in the Blind Beggar pub.
Reggie had to kill, he told him over and over again. Did he call himself a man? Or was he just soft? Did he want to be a cissy for the rest of his life? Only murder by Reggie’s hand, he insisted, would seal their bond, reinforce their legend as killer twins.
By now, Reggie was teetering on the edge of breakdown. Ron, helpful as ever, told him a man called Frederick, a small-time criminal, had been rude about Frances. That was it. Reggie went round to the man’s house and shot him in the leg. He knifed another man for some half-imagined slight. Both men survived their attacks. Neither took their grievances to the law, of course.
Business was ticking over but it wasn’t that good. The twins changed tack: they got involved in peddling purple hearts, took over fruit machines in the West End, even briefly took a cut from others involved in the pornography business. Word got back to them that a Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad was in the East End, talking to people about George Cornell.
For the Kray twins this was to be their final summer of discontent, their last as free men. Given Ron’s illness and Reggie’s own mental instability, the summer gave way to a terrible autumn of blood, gore and the crazily botched murder of ‘one of their own’: Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie (the nickname was used because McVitie always wore a hat to conceal his baldness).
There are many accounts of how small-time crook Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie met a violent end at the hands of the twins in a basement flat at 65, Evering Road, Stoke Newington on 29 October 1967. Few tally precisely, though like the Cornell killing, there were many witnesses to the slaying.
Jack ‘The Hat’ was well known around the East End, a fighter and a bit of a ladies’ man. He’d recently got involved with the Krays in the purple hearts business, yet there was bad blood between McVitie and Ronnie in the weeks before the murder. Ron had given McVitie £100, as a down payment for the killing of businessman Leslie Payne, a key Kray associate Ronnie was convinced had now shopped them to the law (this information turned out to be pretty accurate).
McVitie, who was far from a professional hood, bungled the killing of Payne. The man’s wife had come to the front door of their home and told him that Payne wasn’t there – so McVitie just drove off. This was not exactly the handiwork of a dedicated hitman.
Yet with his mission unfulfilled, he had not troubled himself to repay the £100 ‘deposit’ Ron had handed him to do the killing. With Ron on the warpath for the slight, Reggie had stepped in, even smoothed things over in the wake of Ronnie’s wrath. Even more bizarrely, he reputedly lent McVitie some money when he’d pleaded poverty. Somewhat stupidly, however, McVitie, a habitual drunk and pill popper, didn’t repay the kindness: he was later overheard in the Regency Club, in his cups, threatening to shoot the twins.
This, of course, was not to be tolerated, and set in motion a chain of events which culminated with McVitie being lured, at midnight, to the Evering Road flat on the promise of a party where the twins were both drunk, Reggie high as a kite on booze and pills, and awaiting his arrival. The ‘party’ ended with McVitie’s mutilated corpse, wrapped in a bedspread, being dumped in a parked car, an old Ford Zephyr belonging to McVitie, in south London. Police never found the corpse.
Freddie Foreman, writing in his autobiography, Freddie Foreman: The Godfather of British Crime, served ten years for his role in the murder of McVitie, though he had taken no part in the killing itself.
‘The Lambrianou brothers and Ronnie Bender dumped the body on my doorstep in Bermondsey,’ he wrote. Later Foreman transferred McVitie’s corpse to a van and disposed of the Ford Zephyr in a wrecker’s yard.
He then wrote: ‘I drove his body down to the coast with a back-up motor minding me off. We had a friend who wrapped him up in chicken wire attached to weights… our contacts were now called in to help out again.’ According to Foreman, just like the body of Frank Mitchell, McVitie’s body was duly buried ‘far out at sea’.
Ronnie Hart’s description of how the twins murdered McVitie was to save him from at least twenty years behind bars, a huge betrayal, which shocked all those who were involved with the Krays at the time. (Hart, now deceased, is reported to have attempted suicide after the Kray trial and then emigrated to Australia with his wife, Vicky.)
Many others in the Firm were to ultimately betray the twins and break the wall of silence around them at their Old Bailey trial. Yet Hart’s initial court account of the murder, first given to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1968, told the public, in no uncertain terms, what the Kray twins were really capable of. Repeated even more sensationally when the twins’ case was finally sent for trial at the Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in January 1969, it was a chilling eye-witness account of the depths to which the twins had sunk in those last months of their freedom. Here is that first ever account. It shocked everyone: it was the first time the public was able to learn, in detail, the blood-drenched truth about the twins. The following account is from The Times newspaper, 16 October 1968:
Nearly a year after the murder, on October 16, 1968, Ronnie Hart told Bow Street Magistrates’ Court that he saw Reggie stab Jack the Hat to death while his twin held him from behind saying ‘do him, Reg’.
Hart told the court that he was present at the Evering Road flat that October night when a drunken McVitie arrived at the flat with four other men.
‘Soon after arrival there was a scuffle between Mr McVitie and the Kray twins.
‘I saw Reggie’s hand trapped under McVitie’s arm – he had a gun in his hand. McVitie was holding Reggie Kray’s hand over his arm – Reggie was trying to get his hand from under his arm.
‘At one stage McVitie attempted to run from the room but Reggie Kray grabbed him, made him sit down.’
During the scuffle, Ron Hart said Reggie Kray had attempted to shoot McVitie with a black gun. But each time he pulled the trigger it failed to fire. McVitie was sitting facing a window as Reggie Kray stood in front of him.
‘Reggie then held the gun against McVitie and tried to shoot him again. He was holding the gun a foot or two from McVitie’s face. The gun didn’t work.
‘Then McVitie tried to jump through the window. He broke the window and we pulled him back. Then we started to hit him and he kept saying, “stop it”.
‘Ronnie Kray got him in a lock from behind. Reggie got a knife from a shelf and stuck it into McVitie’s face. McVitie was still saying, “stop it”.
‘Reggie stuck the knife into his stomach and side. He stabbed him more than once.
‘Ronnie Kray was telling him to kill him. I don’t know how many times he said it. “Kill him Reg”.’
When Hart was asked of any reason why Reggie Kray would want to kill McVitie, he told the court: ‘Ronnie was taunting him all the time. He said it was time Reggie done his. I heard him say this on more than one occasion. Every time they had a row, Ron would say, ‘I’ve done one, it’s about time you did yours.’
This account, of course, and the phrase itself ‘I’ve done mine, you do yours’, linked the twins to both the McVitie and Cornell murders and meant the two cases could eventually be heard together. (There was a separate trial for the murder of Frank Mitchell, where Freddie Foreman and the twins were acquitted of his murder.)
The court statement by Hart demonstrated all too clearly Ronnie’s power over the weaker Reggie, his goading, his jeering, his determination to make his twin his partner in the ultimate of crimes. This evil power, unleashed on his ‘other half’ would go on to form an important part of the legend of the Krays over the years.
Reggie initially denied his part in the murder. He insisted it was Hart who stabbed McViti
e to death, though he confessed to the murder much later in a book. Yet even two years before he died, when he was seeking parole, Reggie Kray still insisted he didn’t feel guilt for this murder.
At that time in 1998, Reggie had put in a formal application for parole. Consultant psychiatrist Trevor Turner was then asked by Reggie’s solicitors to meet with Reggie and prepare a psychiatric report on his mental state. Turner talked to Reggie at length. His report concluded that Reggie’s mental state was stable and he was not, in any way, a risk to the community should he be released.
‘He was perfectly coherent, no sign of being depressed, paranoid or demented,’ recalled Turner.
When it came to the question of the McVitie murder, Reggie’s response to Trevor Turner was along the lines of ‘if I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me,’ added Turner.
‘He put it in a perfectly coherent way: “I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not”.’
A few days before he died in 2000, as his life ebbed away with cancer, in his last few days of freedom, Reggie Kray conducted a deathbed interview broadcast on the BBC.
In the interview he again showed no remorse for McVitie’s death, saying he was ‘a vexation to the spirit’ and on that night of the murder he had a lot of frustration in him ‘and anger, probably more than any other night of my life’.
There was only one thing fuelling that anger and frustration: his tortured grief and anger at the loss of Frances, a factor which could have been taken into account by Reggie’s defence team and which could possibly have earned him a lesser prison sentence in 1969.
There was, of course, no way that Reggie Kray would have given his brief the go-ahead to use this grief as part of his defence at the time. It would have destroyed his hard-man image, and set him apart from his twin. Yet even when you consider Ronnie’s role in McVitie’s death as a significant contributory factor, you still have to ask yourself: Would Jack McVitie have met such a nasty end had it not been for the combination of Reggie’s grief and Ronnie’s taunts?
Dick Hobbs certainly believes the McVitie killing was a consequence of Frances’s death: ‘That particular episode seems to have been largely driven by Reggie Kray’s grief and the increased amounts of drink and drugs he was taking as a result of that grief. His behaviour became more violent and unpredictable after her suicide. Had she not done so, it might have delayed the twins’ demise.’
Chris Lambrianou (Tony’s brother), who served fifteen years in prison for his role in the disposal of McVitie’s body, also believed it was this unpredictability that drove the events leading up to the murder. He described the crime as ‘a tragedy of errors’, going on to say:
‘Reggie had no intention of killing anyone that night. I honestly don’t think it was meant to happen. They’d fallen out with him and Ronnie was making all sorts of threats but just a week before, they’d been sitting talking to Jack in the Regency like good mates. There was no suspicion that this was going to happen.’
Yet the ‘now it’s your turn Reg’ killing of Jack McVitie was, in essence, the beginning of the end of the Kray madness. The moment encapsulated an era when, as Ronnie Kray, described it, they were ‘the bosses of London’, and it was reaching its endgame. Because the on-off police investigation into their activities was now ready to swing back into action with a vengeance. The Krays had to be stopped.
After the McVitie murder, as Ronnie Bender and Tony and Chris Lambrianou were left to mop up the blood, and to clear the flat of all evidence and dump the body, the twins had left London.
Ronnie Hart drove them first to Cambridge, then to the Suffolk village of Lavenham, where they visited an old friend and enjoyed the peace and quiet of their favourite place, the English countryside.
At the same time there were already big developments underway at Scotland Yard: Nipper Read’s superiors had given him permission to launch a high-priority investigation into the twins.
It was to be a totally secret operation, run undercover with a fourteen-strong team of men working outside Scotland Yard from a police building, Tintagel House, on the River Thames’s Albert Embankment.
Around Christmas 1967 Read told his superiors he believed he could catch the Krays. Yet he understood all too well that the men who would bring them down and give evidence against them were criminals.
The price of these men’s evidence, for the police, would be high. It could mean the police having to look away from these men’s other crimes, a bitter pill to swallow for the police hierarchy.
Yet with some reluctance, the police bosses agreed. The hunt to trap the Krays was on. And as the investigation grew and witnesses gradually started to talk, they were given a guarantee: their evidence would not be used until the Krays were finally locked up. From the police perspective, the trade-off, a first in the Met’s long history, made the entire exercise far more risky. But the risk was worth taking. As ‘Nipper’ Read admitted later: ‘It was the only way.’
By the New Year, Fort Vallance had been abandoned, one of the last houses in the street to be demolished in the slum-clearance programme. Charlie and Violet were allocated a new local-authority flat in a high-rise building, Braithwaite House in Clerkenwell, about a mile away. But the twins decided it was a good idea to move their parents to the country. In February 1968, they bought a country house (in Violet’s name, with a huge mortgage) in the Suffolk village of Bildeston, near Sudbury.
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 wi
th 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
That 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.