by Dick Kirby
By December 1966 nobody appeared to be busying themselves about Cornell’s murder and the heat was lifting off Ronnie regarding his non-appearance at the bent cop’s trial. It was therefore time for the twins’ next piece of unparalleled stupidity – engineering Frank Mitchell’s escape from Dartmoor.
*
Frank Samuel Mitchell was born in 1929 with learning difficulties; many regarded him as a gentle soul, and so he could be when he was mending watches or making model cars. But he was also dangerously psychotic and could turn from gentle giant to raving lunatic in a split second. He was first arrested at the age of nine, and a string of offences led him on three occasions into Borstal, where he was the ringleader in a riot. Imprisonments followed: for receiving a stolen revolver, then storebreaking and housebreaking. Given a three-year sentence for burglary in 1954, within two days of entering prison he had attacked a warder, for which he received fifteen strokes of the cat. He was transferred to Rampton Psychiatric Hospital the following year and in 1957 he escaped, broke into a house, threatened to kill the married couple who lived there and attacked the husband with an iron bar. When arrested he was found to be in possession of hatchets as well as the iron bar. Sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for larceny and wounding with intent to murder, he was certified as insane and transferred to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital.
In July 1958 he escaped once more. When sixty-four-year-old Mr Edward Charles Peggs heard someone, attempting to push his car out of the garage of his remote house near Wokingham in the middle of the night, he called out to the intruder. This resulted in Mitchell, armed with an axe, leaping over a hedge and in through the window.
‘Yeah’, Kray supporters and Mitchell apologists sagely remark, ‘but ’e jus’ frettened ’im – ’e didn’t ’urt ’im.’
Didn’t he? This is what Mr Peggs had to tell the court at Mitchell’s committal:
I looked for something and all I could find was my walking stick. I met him half-way up the stairs. He started to aim blows at me with the axe. I warded off as many as I could from my head with my stick but he got several blows about my shoulders and arms. Luckily, before he got to the top of the landing, the axe-head came off the handle. He got me in a sort of commando grip which nearly broke my back and gripped me by the throat until I fell unconscious. When I came to, he had my wife on the floor and he had her by the throat. He then ordered me to get up. I couldn’t.
Mitchell produced a large billhook, threatened the couple, stole clothes and money and tied up fifty-nine-year-old Mrs Eva Ellen Peggs, whom he had dragged out from underneath the bed where she was hiding, before escaping in Mr Peggs’ Ford Prefect. Their whole ordeal had lasted from 3.45 to 5.15 am.
‘Jus’ frettened’? When the couple were examined by Dr John Ambleton, both were in a state of nervous collapse. Mrs Peggs was weeping (she later said, ‘I still shake when I think about that night’) and Mr Peggs had bruising on his arms and shoulders.
Later the same morning, Mitchell was caught on a bus. He smilingly surrendered to the police, but when he appeared in court he was transformed into a raving lunatic. At Berkshire Assizes on 2 October 1958 he pleaded guilty to two charges of robbery, asked the court to take two other charges of larceny into consideration and, after Mr Justice Byrne described him with reasonable accuracy as ‘a danger to the community’, was sentenced to concurrent terms of ten years and life imprisonment.
It appears that the penal authorities took his statement in court (‘I want to prove I am sane and know what I’m doing’) at face value; he was sent to Hull prison, where in April 1962, during an attempted mass break-out, he attacked a prison warder, permanently maiming his right hand. One month later, he slashed another warder in the face with a knife who required seventy-five stitches; for this he received fifteen strokes of the birch. But within four months he was transferred to Dartmoor, where he was given a great deal of freedom. There were two reasons for this: first, the prison had developed a rather more liberal regime, and secondly, the warders were terrified of him. At six feet one, with a fifty-four inch chest and arms like legs, Mitchell was a physical fitness fanatic, spending endless hours in the gym lifting heavier and heavier weights or in his cell performing hundreds of press-ups and sit-ups. When he wasn’t breeding budgerigars and slashing warders, he would demonstrate his enormous physical strength by grabbing two warders by their belts and lifting them, one in each hand, above his head. They probably thought that a little humiliation of this kind was preferable to having their faces slashed open.
So what had this to do with the twins? Simply this: Mitchell wanted a release date and by springing him from prison – not a difficult task, because he was out of doors, practically unsupervised with an ‘Honour Party’ – they could hide him, send letters to the people who mattered and when the Home Secretary kindly provided a release date, Mitchell could peacefully surrender to the authorities, return to prison and mend a few more watches, gleefully awaiting his release. Of course, the twins could not publicly benefit from this act of humanity in the same way that they could be acclaimed for their ‘charitable’ events, but the word of their benevolence would flash through the East End like a bushfire.
This imbecile line of reasoning, plus a complete inability to foresee the disastrous consequences of their own actions, suggests that the twins were even more educationally challenged than Mitchell.
*
On 12 December 1966 Mitchell emerged from the Devon moorland and on to Princetown Road, where a grey Humber hired by Billy Exley was waiting. Two members of the Firm, Albert Donoghue and ‘Mad Teddy’ Smith, provided a change of clothing and persuaded Mitchell to relinquish the knife which accompanied him; and by the time it was realized that he was missing, Mitchell was safely ensconced at 206a Barking Road, East Ham. This was a flat usually inhabited by Lennie ‘Books’ Dunn, so called because he sold magazines and books from a Whitechapel stall. He had previously been a Kray hanger-on; now he really believed that his status had been elevated to full membership of the Firm.
It started off well. Lisa Prescott, an attractive nightclub hostess, was given £100 and provided as company for Mitchell. Next, letters were laboriously written, verified with Mitchell’s thumbprint, to newspapers and the Home Secretary. But although he was occupied and becoming besotted with Miss Prescott, in between obsessively cleaning his teeth and performing press-ups Mitchell was becoming restless. Reg had been to see him just once; Ron, not at all.
And when the Home Secretary declared in Parliament that consideration could only be given to providing him with a date of release once he had returned to prison, this was not something that Mitchell wanted to hear. He grabbed Billy Exley’s gun and started making threats against the twins, who quickly got to hear of it.
What could they do? If they anonymously grassed Mitchell’s whereabouts to the police, there was a very good chance that he would grass them in return. No, on 23 December there was a council of war at which it was decided that Mitchell had to go – and not back to prison either.
Versions differ as to what happened next. Donoghue would later say that Mitchell was taken just around the corner to Ladysmith Avenue, where four men, including Freddie Foreman, were waiting in a Thames van. He had been told that he was going to be taken through the Blackwall Tunnel, that Lisa would be following in another car and that they would be reunited, with Ronnie Kray present as a bonus, at a farm in Kent. Mitchell believed it, probably because he wanted to believe it, but once he got in the back of the van, with Donoghue in the front, the slamming of the back doors was the signal for the shooting to start. Possibly thirteen shots were fired in all; probably the last two killed him.
Foreman would later say he wasn’t even there; the other three men never stood trial; and Mitchell’s body has never been found.
Donoghue made what he said was a prearranged telephone call to Reggie Kray saying, ‘That dog has won.’ This was a coded message, in case Reg’s telephone calls were being intercepted, and since Donoghue
stated that he had no idea that Mitchell was going to be murdered, he claimed it meant that Mitchell was on his way to Kent. Lisa, however, had a different recollection; she would later state that Donoghue had said, ‘The dog is dead’ – which did tend to put a different interpretation on the matter. The flat was cleaned to rid it of fingerprints, and Lisa, who had heard the shots, was told to say she hadn’t; she was threatened by Reggie Kray to make her keep her mouth shut. She did.
*
Christmas came and went and Ronnie’s mind was starting to unravel more and more; he developed a severe identity crisis, never being sure if he was a reincarnation of Al Capone, Lawrence of Arabia or Gordon of Khartoum. He was also convinced that he had lost one of his fingers, although this could be attributed to his lack of numeracy skills rather than his hallucinations. On the plus side, business was still booming, with the sale of stolen bearer bonds from the USA and Canada. Although Reggie was drinking more and more, he tried to revive his unhappy marriage with Frances. Despite her previous suicide attempt they tried a reconciliation; he booked tickets for a holiday in Ibiza, but the following day, 8 June 1967, Frances was found dead following a massive overdose of phenobarbitone.
Reg was beside himself with grief; naturally, he blamed everyone but himself (or Ron) for his unhappy wife’s demise – especially her parents, ‘who turned her against me’. The funeral at Chingford cemetery was predictable in its bad taste even by East End gangster standards: the ten limousines, the hundreds of flowers and, in the midst of genuine sorrow, the seething hatred between Reg and the Shea family.
Belatedly, the twins took over the running of the fruit machines and pornography shops in the West End which had recently been vacated first by Eddie Richardson and Frank Fraser and then by George Cornell. Reg’s drinking was getting worse and so was his violent behaviour – two shootings and a knifing.
Ronnie was becoming more and more suspicious of Leslie Payne, who knew so much about the twins’ illicit dealings; he came to believe that if Payne were ever arrested he would give the police chapter and verse about their activities. Therefore he gave Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie a gun and a deposit of £100 to shoot Payne, with a balance of £400 to be paid when the job was done. McVitie either bungled the job or, more likely, had no intention of doing it. He made excuses to Ronnie, promised he would do it and then staggered into the Regency Club under the influence of an unwise concoction of drink and barbiturates, waving a sawn-off shotgun and threatening, in the twins’ absence, to shoot them. By the following day the Ron and Reg had become aware of this stupid, drunken threat. It would sign McVitie’s death warrant.
Three matters were the catalyst for Jack the Hat’s demise. The first was that Ronnie – referring to Cornell – would incessantly say to Reg, ‘I’ve done mine, now it’s time to do yours.’ Secondly, McVitie had had the impudence to dare to threaten the twins. Lastly, Reg was consumed with mawkish sorrow for his dead wife (who, he believed, had been transformed into a little robin) which was combined with his drinking, his rage and his desire to extract a suitable revenge on somebody – in fact, anybody – for Frances’ death. It could not be anyone from the Shea family; in his disintegrating state of mind he believed that Frances, looking down from heaven, would know, and never forgive him. Therefore Jack the Hat would be a suitable candidate.
*
The preparations were meticulous. The scene was set when Ron and Reg arrived at a basement flat at 71 Evering Road, Stoke Newington on the evening of 28 October. The occupier was Mrs Carol Ann Skinner, known as ‘Blonde Carol’, who lived there with her two young children; she had planned a party there which Ronnie had obviously heard about because he asked her, ‘Weren’t you expecting us?’
She was directed to hold her party elsewhere, which she did; Ronnie Hart – the twins’ second cousin and nine years their junior – was told to go to the Regency Club and tell Tony Barry to come and bring a .32 pistol with him. At the same time, the Lambrianou brothers, Chris and Tony, petty criminals who each had convictions for possessing knives and who were friends of Jack the Hat, were to find him and bring him to ‘a party’ at the address. That was what happened. Barry gave the pistol to Reg and announced the arrival of McVitie and the Lambrianous. A boxing programme was being shown on the television and a record player was ready to be turned on, to drown the noise of the shots.
McVitie, completely unsuspecting, burst into the room, shouting, ‘Where’s the birds? Where’s the booze?’ – but Reg was behind the door and pulled the trigger of the pistol, which failed to fire. Reg then grabbed McVitie but he struggled free and tried to dive head-first through a window, whereupon he was dragged back and pulled to his feet.
‘Be a man, Jack!’ screamed Ronnie and received the reply, ‘I’ll be a man but I don’t want to die like one!’
Ronnie then grabbed McVitie in a bear-hug from behind, trapping his arms, and shouted, ‘Kill him, Reg – do him!’
And Reg, ever the subservient one, did – he stabbed McVitie in the face and, as he sank to his knees, stabbed him again and again, in the stomach, chest and throat.
McVitie murmured, ‘Oh no . . . oh no’, obviously feeling the life draining from his body.
Reg now pulled the knife from McVitie’s throat and thrust it in again, using two hands and twisting it. By the time McVitie was carried up to Blonde Carol’s bedroom and thrown on to her bed, in the room where her children were asleep, he was quite dead.
*
Covered in McVitie’s blood, the twins – Reg with a cut on his hand from the knife he had wielded – were taken by Ronnie Hart to the flat of someone they had known for years, a friend of their parents named Harry Hopwood. Hart took the knife and the gun, which he threw into a canal near Queensbridge Road, and while the twins bathed at Hopwood’s address, Hart fetched fresh clothing for them from Vallance Road He cleaned the twins’ jewellery, their rings and cufflinks, burnt their paper money, then put their bloodstained clothes in a suitcase that was disposed of by Hopwood’s relative, Percy Merricks, who soaked it in paraffin and burnt it. Charlie Kray arrived and was furious when he found out about the murder; later, Ronnie Bender came and told everyone – and this was obviously a reference to McVitie – ‘He’s in the car’. The twins told Bender to dump the body in the East End; they were angry when he telephoned to say he had driven the car across London Bridge and abandoned it, leaving the body in the back covered with an eiderdown. It was left to Charlie to cover up for his siblings and to contact Freddie Foreman to see about disposing of the body.
Now came the gruesome business of clearing up the scene of the murder; not the twins’ job, of course. When Carol Skinner returned to her flat at 4.00 am she was denied access to the basement by Ronnie Bender who, she noticed, had a pair of her little boy’s socks on his hands. Understandably annoyed at being told what to do in her own home, she asked why she couldn’t come in, to be told that there had been some trouble and ‘We’re just clearing up’. That was an understatement; Bender was carrying her washing up bowl containing a mixture of blood and water, which he emptied down the lavatory, there was smashed glass everywhere, the floor was wet where it had obviously been washed and the carpet, folded in a heap, was bloodstained.
Later that evening, Albert Donoghue arrived to help clean up. The walls were scrubbed down and re-plastered where necessary, wallpaper was removed and replaced with tar paper stuck down as an aid against damp – unfortunately, when the tar paper was later stripped off by the police, blood-spots matching McVitie’s group were found underneath it. Blood had got under the lino, which had to be taken up; felt was put down and a new carpet laid. In the space of twelve hours the basement was completely redecorated, all the old furniture was removed and new furniture was put in place.
Apart from the smell of fresh paint, it was as though nothing had happened at 71 Evering Road. McVitie’s common-law wife, Mrs Sylvia Barnard, reported him missing, but the police did not launch a nationwide search; Jack the Hat had wandered off before and
he would probably re-appear. And the twins? After leaving Hopwood’s address they had gone to Tommy ‘The Bear’ Brown’s flat in Tottenham – it was Brown’s brother who supplied the new furniture – before moving on to stay with their friend Geoff Allen, who at that time was living in Lavenham, Suffolk.
After a couple of weeks, they returned to London. The police weren’t looking for them because nobody was talking. Once again, they’d got away with murder. They were apparently invincible. George Cornell’s widow Olive was making a nuisance of herself – she had smashed every window at Fort Vallance and a sympathetic magistrate had fined her a pound – and it was thought that Carol Skinner and Ronnie Hart’s common-law wife Vicky (who had also been at Evering Road) might be a problem. But Ronnie Kray wasn’t too concerned. He mentioned that if necessary, he had a woman lined up to poison the three of them.
CHAPTER 21
Re-enter Nipper Read
Following his success with the Richardson enquiry, Gerald McArthur planned to take on the Krays; in fact, he had already started to collate information, but when this was discovered, the top brass at the Yard were furious and demanded that he hand over every bit of evidence to them. This was because the Assistant Commissioner (Crime), Peter Brodie, had had his nose put firmly out of joint when the complainants in the Richardson case had gone to McArthur in Hertfordshire because they felt the Met could not be trusted. True, McArthur had done a fine job with his mixture of Met, Hertfordshire and No. 5 RCS officers, plus he had been rewarded with an MBE. However, the Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson KBE, had died suddenly in office; his deputy, Sir John Waldron KCVO, had stepped into a caretaker role, but Brodie could foresee that he himself stood a very good chance of becoming Commissioner. And this was not vanity on his part; like Simpson, Brodie had been a product of what had been known as Lord Trenchard’s (the pre-war Commissioner) ‘officer class’. What he needed was the ability to show the powers that be that not all of the Met detectives were bent and that ‘his chaps’, as he referred to his CID officers, could produce a resounding success. What he needed, in fact, were the Krays, arrested, convicted and in prison.