by Hyams, Jacky
A note of that phone call was the first entry I discovered in the Home Office file for 1968 that covers Elsie’s formal application to move Frances’s body from Chingford Mount, a file first released in 2004.
The file contains a detailed history of Elsie’s attempts to remove Frances’s remains from ‘Kray corner’.
Its contents are set out below. They are important because they include Elsie’s version of the trajectory of Frances’s relationship with Reggie, though some of the smaller details written in the file are incorrect and it seems Elsie herself was unable to clarify certain aspects of the story.
Yet what I also discovered amidst the papers in the Home Office file were some other documents, letters I never expected to find. This unexpected discovery revealed a great deal about Frances and her state of mind around the time of her death.
A week or so after her initial call to the superintendent at the cemetery, Elsie received a form to fill in. She duly sent the form off on 14 May 1968. But it was not until 31 March 1969 that Elsie was able to phone the Home Office officials to discuss her application.
This gap of several months was, of course, because she was waiting for the outcome of the Krays’ arrest and the final, much-publicised hearing of their case at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey.
The Krays’ trial at the Old Bailey had started on 7 January 1969. It lasted for thirty-nine days, a ‘show trial for the sixties’, the longest and most expensive criminal trial to be held in London at the time.
It ended on 8 March 1969. The twins each received sentences of life imprisonment, recommended by Mr Justice Melford Stevenson to be not less than thirty years without parole, for the murders of Jack McVitie and George Cornell.
Elsie’s phone call to the Home Office was generated by this news. Now, she reasoned, the authorities would be more sympathetic to her request. Reggie Kray was a convicted murderer, locked up, probably for good. He’d been given the longest prison sentence legally permitted.
The Home Office file on Elsie’s application, written by Home Office official, R. Varney, reads as follows:
‘She was concerned that the mere filling in of a form would not sufficiently convey what she felt to be the strength of her case.
‘Mrs Kray explained that her daughter’s marriage to Reggie Kray was “in the process of being annulled at the time she took her own life and that a memorial stone was now being erected over the grave showing her daughter’s married name and not the maiden name in which she had expressed her wish to be buried.”
‘She indicated there was no prospect of her feeling herself able to approach Reggie Kray and I was left with the impression there was no chance of him giving consent to the removal.’
R. Varney did not encourage Mrs Shea in the belief an interview at the Home Office would serve any useful purpose. Yet an interview was arranged at the Home Office, Romney House, Westminster, for 9 April 1969.
A note taken from this meeting at Romney House explains that Elsie brought her partially completed application forms and a number of other papers with her. It further states:
Mrs Shea seemed to be a sensible sort of person, no more emotional than the circumstances warranted and to be genuinely motivated by concern for the good name of her family and desire to execute the wishes of her daughter.
At the same time she seemed not to be very clear about some of the details of the events she described and said much of what she said about her daughter’s married life was reconstructed after the event.
‘Married in May 1965 at age twenty-one having been friendly with him since sixteen.’ [The marriage took place in April 1965 but this error may have been Elsie’s incorrect recall of events, as was the statement that Frances was sixteen when first going out with Reggie.]
The marriage was never really much of a reality. After a week’s honeymoon in Athens, Reggie Kray sent her to live with his mother. For the rest of her married life she stayed variously with her own family, alone in hotels and in flats provided by Kray, in hospitals and occasionally with women friends of the Krays, on trips abroad but never, apparently, together with Kray.
Her history through this time seems to have been one of growing addiction to drugs.
In March 1966 she changed her surname by deed poll to Shea. It was apparently around this time she formed the intention of pressing for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds of non-consummation.
According to Mrs Shea, Reggie Kray persuaded Frances to allow him to make the petition instead which, in her anxiety for the success of the annulment, she was willing to do. Kray then used every means to delay the process, which only arrived at the stage where it was ready to go to courts just before she died. And was therefore never completed.
Frances killed herself 7th June 1967 at her brother’s home. It was her third attempt.
The death was reported to the coroner and the inquest was held, Mrs Shea thought, at Hackney [it was Clerkenwell]. Death certificate issued in the name of Frances Elsie Shea, otherwise Kray.
Frank’s initial negotiation with undertakers Hayes and English of 148 Hoxton Street N1 was interrupted according to Mrs Shea by the arrival of Reggie Kray with a priest whom Mrs Shea described as ‘crooked’ who later gave evidence at his trial.
Kray then made all the arrangements for the funeral including distribution of the booklets to accompany the service – in the name of Frances Elsie Kray.
Mrs Kray was not sure what denomination of religious rite the ceremony was accompanied – or whether her daughter was buried in consecrated ground.
She said the Krays ignored her at the funeral and evidently felt it to be a source of grievance that a friend of the Krays came after the ceremony to remove the names of donors from the funeral wreaths.
Elsie told the Home Office that the flowers her family placed on the grave had regularly been removed. She had seen the headstone Kray intended to erect over the grave costing £500 which was felt to be offensive and hypocritical, i.e. ‘in loving memory of my darling wife Frances Elsie Kray’ with verse. Mrs Shea seemed to be under the impression that the words on the headstone were conceived out of spite for her family and that she and her husband were upset to be seen visiting the grave linking them with a murderer.
Asked about her husband, Elsie said he shared her concern that his daughter’s grave should not bear the Kray name but was not entirely happy with the idea of removing her body. She said he was very upset by the whole business and was not well enough to come to the Home Office with her.
It was not clear that Elsie’s overriding concern was the headstone, i.e. that it should bear the name by which she (Frances) was now legally known and which she believed at the time she wrote her last letter would be the name which would go on her grave.
If the headstone could be changed, Elsie told the Home Office, she would no longer wish to remove the body. She had not written to Kray to ask for his consent: she said it was inconceivable he would agree.
Kray was both legally the next of kin and he owned the freehold rights to the plot. It was explained that the scope of the Home Office was limited in view of Reggie Kray’s objections and the objection of the burial authority for Chingford Mount. Elsie did not own the grave, therefore her rights were limited.
However, she told the Home Office, ‘It was our daughter’s dying wish that she should be buried in our name. She wrote a note to this effect shortly before taking phenobarbitone tablets. My husband and I are desperately anxious that this should be so.’
The file also revealed Home Office correspondence with the Registrar of the Abney Park Cemetery, the burial authority for Chingford Mount Cemetery. They, in turn, confirmed on 31 July 1969 that Reggie Kray was the owner of the grave: he was said to have purchased the freehold rights. The grave contained only the remains of Frances Shea – but there was room for three more burials. The ground was not consecrated. Abney Park Registrar Martin Clark reaffirmed that the burial authority would not allow the grave to be opened witho
ut Reggie Kray’s consent: it was written into the cemetery regulations that the grave could not be opened without the owner’s permission.
On 30 July 1969 the file noted that the public relations branch of the Home Office had suggested that Mrs Shea be invited to visit again and suggest that she defer her application for a year or more ‘in the hope that RK’s views may have mellowed by this time’.
They went on to say: ‘The case for deferring the decision is surely that one would not wish to see a strong story in the newspapers about this at a time when sympathy for Mrs Shea is likely to be at a maximum.’
(The public relations people also suggested closing the file IF the Home Office could say in a letter and/or in an interview that under the law the Home Secretary had no power to act.)
The file also contains a Home Office letter sent to Elsie on 14 August 1969 saying that the Secretary of State could not help in this matter.
Another letter, dated 11 August 1969 from Reggie Kray’s solicitors at the time, Sampson & Co at 11–13 St Bride Street, Ludgate Circus, London, EC4, confirmed that:
• Reggie Kray had full rights over the grave.
• The burial authority would not allow the grave to be opened without his consent.
• The only person with any authority to alter the headstone wording was the owner, Reggie Kray.
Furthermore, Sampson & Co wrote that Kray ‘takes the very strongest possible objection that the remains of his late wife be removed from her grave or that any alteration be made to her memorial’.
‘He is aware that during a period of separation resulting from a matrimonial dispute his wife purported to change her name, but they were afterwards reconciled.’
The Home Office file also contains correspondence they had received from the Prison Department of the Home Office.
On 29 May 1969 the Prison Department wrote that beside being responsible for his security (in Brixton prison at the time), ‘Kray poses a considerable control problem to prison staff and if we can help it we should avoid anything likely to make the control problem worse and it would appear that the matter of the grave and the removal of his wife’s remains is a very delicate subject.’
So there it was. The authorities had played ‘pass the parcel’ and Elsie’s request to them was rejected.
Reggie, always the organiser, had been very canny in his purchase of the freehold to the burial plot.
Perhaps he had done so on the advice of his solicitors; maybe he already understood it would give him absolute control over Frances’s remains and that of his family. The authorities in the Prison Department were far too scared of Reggie’s temper to do anything about it and, in the end, the Home Office concluded that even Frances’s suicide ‘was not enough to justify departure from the accepted principle that he had to give his consent’.
‘It is a great pity but I cannot see any other decision is possible. The fact that a person has been sentenced for so serious an offence as murder, does not make him an outlaw, deprived of all other rights,’ wrote the senior Home Office official overseeing the case.
Reading the file, I reflected that after this rejection, it would be very difficult for anyone in Elsie’s situation not to feel profoundly bitter about the hand she had been dealt by authority.
Certainly, the Sheas came from a place where authority itself was paid scant respect. Yet this blow would have defeated anyone’s belief in justice, the fair play the British are so renowned for.
But the yellowing file, its paper worn thin by time, also contained a few single sheets of photocopied paper, carefully folded up in the centre of the file, yet with no accompanying note or description at all.
These, I realised, after I had examined the contents, had been the papers Elsie had taken with her to the Home Office, to prove to the officials that it had been Frances’s last wish to be buried in her own name. Frances’s mother had clung to these tragic little documents, all photocopies, in the vain hope they would convince officialdom to help her.
These documents consist of four photocopied sheets of paper, all undated, seemingly written at different times, though the handwriting on two of them is much more legible than the remaining two.
One of the two legible notes is obviously a suicide note, addressed to Frances’s family. From its contents it looks like it was written just before she died. The other, shorter, legible note is clearly directed at Reggie and takes the form of a goodbye, ‘get out of my life’ note.
The handwriting is stronger, clearer in this note and the tone is angry, rather than passive or defeatist. It doesn’t read as anything like a suicide note.
The remaining two notes are difficult to decipher. But what can be deciphered is indeed proof that Frances did believe that by changing her name legally, she could be buried as Frances Shea.
It was an enormous shock to find these poignant notes, ignored for so long, an eerie moment in what had already been a long quest for insights into Frances’s story.
Here was Frances’s voice, her last attempt at self-expression. And proof, if you like, of her determination to end the horror of the last two years for good. Showing these tragic letters to the Home Office officials had made no impact whatsoever on the outcome of Elsie’s application. But it seems these were notes that the Sheas, in the confusion and grief of the days after Frances died, had somehow managed to conceal from Reggie’s grasp.
Reggie Kray made it widely known that he was troubled by the fact that he never saw any suicide note after Frances died. In 1990 he wrote a book called Born Fighter. In his account of Frances’s death at Wimbourne Court he wrote of arriving at the flat and being told that she had committed suicide.
Then he wrote: ‘There was no last note anywhere in sight, which I found hard to believe because on the last two attempts, she had left notes. I was suspicious of my father-in-law… I thought he might have picked up a letter or a note.’
The originals of the notes could have been handed to police by her family after Frances died – but they were not mentioned in any reports of her inquest. It’s possible that the less legible photocopied notes in the file could have been the notes Reggie mentioned about her previous attempts. Reggie, of course, desperately wanted them all – because he wouldn’t want anyone else to read their contents. But in keeping these copies, at least, it seems the Sheas had achieved one small sad victory over their foe.
Here is the first legible letter. On the back of it, Frances had written:
‘To my family.
‘P.S. Dr Clein and him killed me’
At the top of the letter she had written:
‘I love you forever until the end of time. All my things – to Frances [her niece] and my necklace to Frances.’
Dear Mum and Dad and Frankie
I’m sorry I’ve had to do it so this way but do me one favour don’t grief [sic] too much over me after all, it’s useless now and you have the baby to compensate for me.
I was dying in any case [underlined] you know when it comes there’s nothing any doctor can do for you then.
I wish it wasn’t me that had to bring disaster on the family – if I’d have had the guts I would have drowned myself – it all happened since I had that relapse xxxxx xxxxx [not legible] and I’ve had to keep on as long as possible for your sake. I’m sorry. I’ve told Bubbles some of the xxxxxx [not legible] things that have happened to me. Please don’t grief [sic] for me – it’s been a hard enough job for me to keep alive these last 7 weeks that’s why I’ve always been so fidgety. Please forgive me as my last wish. I couldn’t go on any longer and you know I’m not the person to give in if there’s any chance of survival which there wasn’t. Please love me always think there’s always Frances to [this word difficult to read but looks like compensate].
Please forgive me
Love and xxx
Frances.
This looks like it was the final suicide letter; Frances mentions ‘these last 7 weeks’ which would have roughly been the period since her return fr
om the last holiday in April.
Below is the most legible letter. It is written on a separate sheet of paper, possibly torn from a notebook, most likely written at another time because the writing itself is clearer, less shaky and well punctuated.
However, it is the last phrase that is so chillingly prophetic.
This letter reads:
Your low breed, sickly mouth ugly face sicken me. If I remember words of this effect from your mouth “F----- OLD BATTLEAXE” which are only suitable for your type of creatures. CRAWL BACK TO THE GUTTER. Get some … ‘F------ OLD B/AXE’ to be a scrubber for you. Find a dumb blond, old, slave for yourself.
Get a ROBOT – a stupid woman void of humanity. I’m finished with you forever and don’t come crawling back gutter snipe. [These last six words are underlined] Have the decency to let me live my type of life and you can stink in yours unless you want a ghost to haunt you.
Of the remaining two pieces of photocopied paper, the writing is difficult to read and the photocopying much fainter. But here is what can be transcribed from the notes which run into two separate pages.
… ..suffering [underlined] any more and its best for you all to get over me. I wish Fate had been a bit kinder to me and that I could have regained my peace of mind [underlined] and my strength [underlined] and my spirit [underlined] so that I would have proved to you all my love for you.
This is followed by several illegible lines and then it reads:
I can’t [underlined] take anything any more. Please use all my money to help you for a holiday or fresh life somewhere else and tell Frankie to sell the ring and necklace to pay his debt. I would just like to have red roses on my grave to express my love because I’m incapable of showing it. It’s better for me to take my own life than make you all ill [these last three words underlined] having a burden like me on you. I just haven’t any strength or peace or anything to fight the impossible. At least I know I can have the name Shea on my grave because it’s been changed by deed poll … he can’t get the money because it is in the name of Shea.