Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  Ends: Please don’t hate me for this: it’s because I can’t help it ..Frances xxxxxx

  These notes reveal Frances’s feelings, her guilt towards her family for her actions, the sincerity of her love for them and her concerns for them about money, particularly Reggie’s unpaid debt to Frankie.

  The ring and the necklace mentioned were originally gifts from Reggie to Frances, retrieved by him in the raid on her possessions in the immediate aftermath of her death. Rita Smith told me that Reggie gave away certain items of Frances’s jewellery to members of his family afterwards.

  As for the phrase ‘he can’t get the money because it is in the name of Shea’ this is likely to refer to a savings account passbook which Frances kept in her name. The note makes it clear that she knew her family needed the money: my understanding is that the little passbook was taken away by Reggie when he removed all Frances’s belongings from the Shea home and Wimbourne Court. Here again, Rita Smith told me that Elsie had asked for the passbook and Reggie had responded by saying words to the effect of ‘it can rot’.

  I made contact with ‘Bubbles’, or Lily Shea as she was known at the time, since Frances’s letter makes it clear she had confided in her, but she refused my request for an interview.

  She confirmed that she was Frankie Shea’s girlfriend for ten years (though she was known as Lily Shea, the pair never formally married) and that Frances’s problems had started after the marriage to Reggie. Her recall of those times was obviously far too painful to discuss with me.

  The PS on the back of the first suicide note was also puzzling, given that Clein’s involvement in Frances’s treatment had ended in 1965, eighteen months before her death.

  When I sat in Lewis Clein’s kitchen and asked him what he thought Frances meant by saying, ‘Dr Clein and him killed me’, he reacted quite calmly.

  ‘Maybe it’s because I let her go back home from the clinic,’ he said, referring to her insistence that she leave Greenways, rather than prolong her stay.

  This was a somewhat odd response. But later I understood that in Clein’s profession, suicide notes from patients who die from an overdose go with the territory.

  A professional psychiatrist, as Trevor Turner explained, sees suicide somewhat differently from the rest of us. ‘It’s one of the things a psychiatrist has to deal with,’ he said.

  ‘Some depressive conditions are so intractable that suicide is literally unavoidable. In Frances’s case the combination of her depression, the cruel environment of Reggie and Ronnie, her limited response to treatment and her early history, before Reggie, of some depressive/personality issues as well would have combined to create a very resistant to treatment condition.’

  The consultant psychiatrist who had treated Frances at Hackney Hospital and had been called at her inquest, Dr Julius Silverstone (known now as Dr Trevor Silverstone), is a leading expert on drug treatment in psychiatry. Highly respected in his field, he has now retired to New Zealand. He refused my request to be interviewed about Frances’s story.

  However, these are professionals, with sensitive confidentiality issues around their patients, and while their insights can be helpful perhaps it is the written word, the individual’s ‘voice’ that tells us more after they’ve gone.

  After absorbing the contents of these letters, I could only reach one conclusion: despite all the speculation and rumour around her death, Frances Shea died by her own hand of her own volition.

  The drugs she had been taking over some time may have clouded her vision, blurred her perspective, but it is clear that Frances was determined to deploy them to end her pain for good.

  She knew she was trapped. Her life was no longer her own. Expensive sunshine holidays, diamond rings, promise after promise from Reggie, would make no difference whatsoever. She alone knew, from those nightmare weeks ‘living’ with him, how Reggie operated, the way the Krays ran their lives with whispers and spies relaying snippets of information back to them 24/7.

  Even if Reggie had been locked up for years, she’d have known he’d still make sure she was trapped within his orbit, relentlessly manipulating her to visit him, write to him, keep the ideal of the loving relationship alive.

  It would have been impossible for her to form another relationship with anyone. He’d have continued to have had her watched, made sure that anyone who ventured too close was ‘sorted out’. It would never have stopped.

  As Albert Donoghue commented, all those years later: ‘She had no future. She knew that.’

  Despite all the blame heaped upon Reggie, his lifestyle and his possessiveness, my belief is it would have been the finality of Frances’s death, the end of it all by her own choice, that would have sent Reggie into the emotional spiral that impacted so strongly on his actions afterwards and the murder of McVitie.

  There was always guilt, mostly denied by Reggie at the time, but I’m pretty sure the overwhelming sense that he could no longer have any control over Frances was what pushed him close to madness.

  The Kray twins were all about control; that was their raison d’être. They manipulated everyone around them – and they didn’t stop doing this until the end of their days.

  By removing Reggie’s control of her for good, Frances finally defeated him in one sense. That, I believe, was at the heart of what Reggie couldn’t handle.

  But what about the Shea family? They too had been utterly defeated by the Krays. Their attempts to retrieve some dignity for Frances’s memory were rejected in the face of officialdom.

  Elsie and Frank had to live with the knowledge that not only had they lost a beloved daughter, but everyone around them knew the details of their tragedy, what had happened to their lives.

  They weren’t a sophisticated middle- or upper-class couple who could leave the country, settle in some sunny Mediterranean hideaway, far away from the whispers. They were just working-class Londoners who’d come through a war, raised their kids and hoped for something better. Now they just had to keep living their lives somehow, and come to terms, if that were possible, with their history – and, just like they had in the grimmest depths of wartime, get on with it.

  They tried their best. Elsie eventually got her wish, and by the seventies Frank Senior had finally settled into a ‘proper’ job, as a clerk with the London Electricity Board. At the time, utility companies like the LEB were owned by the public sector, which entitled Frank Senior to a regular salary, paid holidays and, when he retired at sixty-five, a small pension. It wasn’t much but it was a helpful addition to their state pensions when Elsie stopped working at the clothing factory when she too reached retirement age.

  So by the early seventies, like millions of other British pensioners, the couple started to take advantage of the cheap travel now widely available: two-week winter sunshine package holidays in Spain were taken for many years. They tended to stay put during the summers.

  But of course, Elsie could never ever get over her anger at what Reggie had done. The bitterness and the pain were always with her. As is sometimes the case with bereaved people, she would frequently talk about Frances as if she were still alive, still the pretty teenager carefully painting her nails in the upstairs bedroom at Ormsby Street.

  It helped a little bit, having a different flat in Geffrye Street. But the memories would still come flooding back all the time. What made it even worse, of course, were the endless reminders of Kray notoriety, every time the Sheas picked up a tabloid newspaper and saw yet another story or photo about the twins.

  Frank Senior, alas, didn’t live long enough to read about the demise of the Krays. He died in Homerton Hospital following a heart attack in March 1987 at age seventy-five.

  Elsie survived him by fourteen years, dying in 2002 at the age of eighty-five. Her final years, after Frank Senior died, remained uneventful, though she would have known about Ronnie’s very public death and funeral in March 1995, followed by Reggie’s in October 2000. Seeing – or being told about – the newspaper photos of Reggie kissing
Frances’s grave at Ronnie’s funeral would have been yet another reminder too far for a frail seventy-something widow.

  As for Frances’s brother, Frankie, he remained as he always had, living in north London, immaculately dressed, highly personable, running a variety of businesses.

  At age twenty-nine, he had fallen for Barbara Keane, a twenty-four-year-old widow with a two-year-old daughter, Jane. The couple married at St Etheldreda’s Church, off Holborn Circus, in central London in August 1969. Later, Barbara gave birth to a son, also named Frank, and the family moved to a house in Etheldene Avenue, Muswell Hill.

  For many years, through the seventies and eighties, life was good. Frank had secondhand car sites in Camden Town and Islington and at one stage he opened a children’s wear shop. Like his mother, the echoes of the past remained with him. He couldn’t obliterate what had happened to his sister – and his part in it all. But it was easier to pick up a drink and party than it was to sit around going over it all endlessly in his mind.

  He kept up a good front. He tried to be a good dad. No one saw the torment Frankie lived with or heard him talk about the family’s pain. Only when he visited his mother, listened to her talking about his sister, again and again, did he really have to face the worst details of their painful past. And that was only for a few hours.

  In the late eighties, disaster struck. Frankie lost a great deal of money in various financial endeavours. The house in Muswell Hill was sold. With the children gone, he and Barbara moved to a flat in Islington.

  In the summer of 1999, Frankie was approaching sixty. Always a heavy social drinker, he’d started to binge, got stuck into the drinking as never before, and he eventually reached a disastrous breaking point. Frankie Shea crashed and burned. He had a breakdown. In a state of total distress, he wound up in rehab.

  Rehab for drug and alcohol problems is a much-touted solution, yet it doesn’t always work. For some, it is a kind of ‘bandage’: they stop, dry out and then, at some point, the bandage comes off and they start again. But for Frankie, rehab did work. Getting into the daily counselling sessions, talking about his excesses, his mistakes, his life, once he started, he couldn’t stop. He’d carried too much pain around with him for too many years. He’d tried to blot it out with alcohol, but now he was much older. If he was to survive, he realised, to come to terms with who he was, the drinking had to go. For good.

  In August 2000, Barbara died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-five. It was a testing time for Frankie but he stuck fast to his vow to never touch booze again.

  By now, he was starting to be a regular at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He’d get up and ‘share’, talk about how drinking had affected his life, how he’d realised that sobriety had saved him and that the support he was getting from AA helped him cope, to get through the bad days without picking up a drink. The more he stayed sober, the more he could handle the reality of his past. At one point, he went to talk to young offenders in prison. He wanted the message to get through: ‘Don’t do what I did.’

  But he didn’t quite share everything. Because now that Frankie Shea had started facing the world soberly each day, he had no other choice but to look his innermost demon right in the eye.

  And that demon was the secret he’d carried, the real reason behind much of the pain he’d been living with for over half his life. Over the New Year holiday in 2002, he spent a lot of time thinking. The Krays were dead now. His family had suffered enough through the years since Franny went. But he was beginning to wonder, was he right to keep what he knew to himself? And then, out of the blue, the phone rang.

  It was a young reporter from a local paper. There was a new TV documentary coming out about the Krays. Would he answer a few questions about what he knew?

  ‘Yes,’ he said with some hesitation.

  ‘I’ll answer a few questions.’

  CHAPTER 13

  AN ENDING

  Here is the story that appeared in the East London Advertiser on 18 January, 2002.

  ‘I SPURNED GAY REG, SO HE WED MY SISTER IN REVENGE’

  Reggie Kray’s former brother in law has revealed the East End gangster married his sister because he spurned his gay advances. Frankie – who used to work as a driver for Reggie and his twin Ronnie before they were caged for murder said:

  ‘That geezer married my sister because he was in love with me.

  ‘I was one of those baby faced kids I suppose.’

  ‘He did the worst thing any man could ever do to get his revenge at not being able to get hold of me and that’s what it’s all about.’

  Dismissing claims by Reggie’s former gay lover in prison, Bradley Allardyce, that Ronnie had murdered Frances by forcing pills down her throat, Frankie said:

  ‘We know she committed suicide but Reggie was the instigator of it all as far as I’m concerned.’

  He claimed Frances was so desperate to get away from Reggie that she changed her name back to Shea by deed poll, adding: ‘That’s how much she wanted to be away from that a***hole.’

  ‘She married him to keep the peace because he threatened to kill me and my father.’

  Frankie said his 85-year-old mum was still living with the memory of what happened to her daughter.

  Elsie Shea died the same year the story was published. The comment about the threats to kill her family certainly coincides with what Frances wrote in her diary after the honeymoon, though as Frankie told it to the local paper, he believed Reggie made these threats before they wed. After finding this story in the newspaper archive, it was obvious I had to find Frankie Shea, see if he would talk to me, help put the final pieces to the jigsaw puzzle in place.

  But where was he?

  I was frequently told he still lived in north London, still drank in certain pubs, was definitely around. He’d been spotted in various places at different times. Yet ultimately all my enquiries drew a blank. People in the East End who barely knew him were happy to talk about him; he’d become a bit of an enigma, even a ‘celebrity’ in the story of his sister and the Kray twins.

  I discovered I wasn’t the only writer seeking him out. Then, along the showbiz grapevine, I learned that key filmmakers had taken great interest in Frankie’s story, inviting him to meetings and discussing ideas with him.

  Frankie Shea listened to the filmmakers, shook hands and said he’d think about it. And that was it. Whatever his feelings, there wasn’t any further sign of a public declaration of Frankie Shea’s version of what happened to his sister, other than that brief outburst in 2002.

  Perhaps, I mused, after voicing his long held feelings in the local paper story, he had read and heard too much about the Kray twins to ever believe he’d be given a fair hearing. Especially when many of his contemporaries from those days were still around, now mostly retired from the misdeeds of their past, but still out there, gossiping and swapping endless stories about the old days, in the same old haunts.

  But getting sober had changed Frankie’s world for good. That same year he spoke out, he decided it was time to get out of London and find a more tranquil existence in rural Essex.

  Within months he’d met an attractive divorcee, Deborah Hawkins, and the pair soon became an item. Frank loved the quieter pace of the countryside and village life, after all the years in London. This, he decided, was exactly what he needed. Finally, in December 2010, after eight years together, the couple got married.

  Eight months later, Frankie Shea was gone.

  He’d committed suicide.

  With an overdose of drugs.

  From the Herts & Essex Observer, Tuesday 14 May 2013.

  A brother-in-law of infamous London gangster Reggie Kray killed himself by taking a massive overdose of liquid morphine to end the agony of cancer a coroner has ruled.

  Frank Shea, 71, took the lethal measure and an inquest at Chelmsford on May 13 probed the issue of whether his death was the result of an assisted suicide.

  But Essex deputy assistant coroner, Lorna Tagliavini, ruled it was
not and that Mr Shea had needed no help to take the drug and recorded that he took his own life.

  She said: ‘He had sufficient mobility and strength in his limbs to take the bottles from where they were stored in his bedroom, open them and swallow the contents without requiring or being given any assistance by another.’

  She added she was aware of the difficult decisions the paramedics, doctor and family had to make, but said the professionals had sought advice from more senior colleagues. There was no ‘one size fits all’ guidelines for the professionals, but individual decisions had to be made for individual circumstances, she said.

  Frank Shea died on August 5, 2011 from an overdose of morphine.

  He had emptied four or five bottles of prescribed Oramorph and drunk 3,300mg of the liquid. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx in April that year and his wife Deborah, 50, told the inquest: ‘He was just waiting for death. Everyone knew he was just counting down the days.’

  He had refused any surgery and told family members, his GP and palliative care nurses he did not want to be resuscitated.

  Mrs Shea told the hearing: ‘I think suicide was his intention. He refused treatment from the off. He had no quality of life because he would not have an operation.

  ‘It was a case where we were waiting. I think now, looking back, what he did was incredibly brave. He just knew each day he was getting worse and worse and he decided to take matters into his own hands. I think in his mind he thought by the time I found him in the morning it would be over.’

  She found him collapsed in bed about 8.30am on 5 August and the empty medicine bottles were on the floor. Paramedics gave him all the antidote they had available from two ambulances, but then Mrs Shea pleaded with them to stop treatment and let him die at home as he wished. She knew he would not have wanted to be revived.