Krays- the Final Word

by James Morton

  Kray is also said to have listened to a plea in 1992 by Ann West, Anne Downey’s mother, to have Myra Hindley harmed if not killed. Very much in the tradition of Vito Corleone, he refused, saying he could not have a woman, however evil, hurt.

  Kray was apparently extremely polite with women. A man might, and Johnny Cardew did, get a slashing for saying he had put on weight, but when a woman told him, ‘If you put on any more weight the next time we go out I’m not going to introduce you to any of these good-looking young boys’ and patted his stomach, he merely simpered ‘Bobby [McKew – the fraudster], tell her to leave me alone.’72

  In 1985 Ronnie decided he should get married. Marriages or relationships with Broadmoor patients are fraught with difficulties on their release. A good example came in 1969 when Paul Beecham shot his father four times, his mother nine times and for good measure his grandparents, and ended up in Broadmoor, certified insane. There Rita Fry, a married member of Broadmoor’s League of Friends, became attracted to him and on his release in 1979, her marriage now over, the cured Beecham moved in with her. It went well until 1997, when one of Rita’s children called round and found Paul dead. Rita was nowhere to be seen. A month later an excavation of the patio unearthed her body. Beecham had killed her with a hammer before shooting himself.

  There would be no question of Ronnie ever being released and now he settled on Elaine Mildener, often described as a rather homely divorced mother of two, to be his lucky bride. She began her relationship, as did many others, by being Reggie’s pen friend before being moved on to his twin. The courtship was not without its problems and on Boxing Day 1984 Ronnie cut his wrists, something attributed to problems in his relationship with his fiancée.

  Nevertheless, they married on 12 February 1985, the first wedding allowed in Broadmoor, and sold the story to The Sun for a reputed £20,000, for which the paper had its knuckles rapped by the Press Council. She was said to have put the money towards a house for her and Ronnie to live together when he was released. Kray spent the next year cultivating press interest in his new situation, even petitioning the Home Office to allow him to consummate the union. He wanted twins, he said. He believed that when, rather than if, he got out of Broadmoor, he would not live with his bride. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with Reg and to travel but, he added generously, she and her children could come and stay whenever they liked.73 The attendant publicity was probably not what the new Mrs Kray wanted, and five months after the marriage she had ceased to visit him. Three years later, after he had instructed his then solicitor Stephen Gold to file a petition for divorce on the grounds of her desertion, Ronnie was able to sell that story to a tabloid. A decree was granted in May 1988.

  On 6 November 1989 Ronnie married again. This time it was to 32-year-old divorcee Kathleen Anne Howard, who ran a kissogram girl agency. She was another who had first written a fan letter to Reggie after buying The Profession of Violence at a railway station.

  Once more Reggie had passed her on to his brother. When David Bailey declined to be the wedding photographer, Lord Litchfield was paid £2,000 to take a picture of the happy bride. A white Rolls Royce provided transport to the hospital. Harrods provided the food for the subsequent wedding breakfast at the Hilton, Bracknell (Ron and Reggie in absentia) as well as the shellfish for Reggie’s monthly visit to his brother in Broadmoor.

  On 1 January 1990 The Sun reported Ron had bought Kate a £25,000 house near Broadmoor. He was said to be sick with worry that if her car broke down on the motorway she would be attacked. In turn Ron worried about catching Mad Cow Disease and Kate cheered him up by saying it would not matter, since he was mad already.

  Not to be outdone, at the end of the month, Reggie was said to have bought a luxury six-bedroom house in Suffolk, complete with nine acres and a moat, from his old friend Geoff Allen, who had let him have it for £350,000, around £150,000 less than the going rate.

  Less favourably, in the middle of the month there were suggestions in the press that Ronnie was under investigation for hiring rent boys in Broadmoor after two nurses claimed he had bribed a warder. Jimmy Savile, then heading a Broadmoor task force, was reported to have been informed.

  Kate Kray was questioned over allegations of bribery. She explained that she employed two of the warders as chauffeurs. They had helped her and Ronnie and she was helping them. Four nurses were arrested and two were sacked. In her book The Krays Free at Last, she accepted she did in fact pay officers £500 to £1,000 or, if they preferred, gave them portable TVs or microwaves.

  Kate then claimed that the next year, tired of Broadmoor, Ron put together a plot to be rescued as he travelled to Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot for a hernia operation. Two American mafia hitmen were to be recruited, one to be dressed as a doctor and one as a porter, to kill his guards. He would then be put on a coach packed with old-age pensioners going to Kent for the day. From there he would be put on a cross-channel ferry and eventually be flown to Venezuela. She maintained the plot was aborted because Kray committed a cardinal gangland sin and lost his nerve.74

  On 5 September 1992 Kate Kray was held on credit card offences in Debenhams. She had been using a stolen Diners Club card. Fined £240, she claimed she was now skint and living on £40 unemployment benefit. Ron was reportedly not pleased.75 Nevertheless, he wrote as a preface to his 1993 book, ‘Kate is my wife and we will never be parted. I have trusted her to help me tell the real story of the Krays today and she has.’

  But the marriage did not last, and they were divorced in May 1994. Ronnie’s petition claimed that Kate had committed adultery, breached matrimonial confidences, demeaned him and caused him distress by selling her story with photographs to The Sun. She had written a chapter entitled ‘Sex and All That’ in her book Murder, Madness and Marriage in which she detailed an affair she had.

  Generally speaking his behaviour was good, at least until the summer of 1993 when he tried to strangle another patient, Lee Kiernender, who was annoying him. Kray, who had apparently been on reduced drug treatment, suddenly snapped and was pulled off by nurses before the unfortunate man went blue. It resulted in a loss of privileges and he seems to have been remorseful. ‘I want to go on record as saying that this is the last act of violence Ron Kray will ever commit.’ Note the third person speech.76

  This was a bad time for him. He was unhappy with Fred Dinenage’s book Our Story, claiming he had been misrepresented. Not all his troubles were of his own making, however. In 1994, 26-year-old Stephen Laudat stabbed 56-year-old Bryan Bennett to death at a Stratford day centre, believing he was killing Kray, something he described as ‘a public service’. Laudat denied murder, but admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sent to Rampton rather than to Broadmoor.77

  On 15 March 1995 Kray complained of feeling unwell after breakfast. Despite writing to his friend Bert Rossi advising him on his diet – ‘at one time he wanted me to take up a diet of garlic pills. Another time he said he was living off raw eggs and honey’ – he was still chain-smoking.78 A nurse thought he was having a heart attack – he had had a minor one in 1994 – and he was sent to Heatherwood Hospital, where he was treated for exhaustion and anaemia before being sent back to Broadmoor. That evening he complained of feeling weak and faint and was taken back to Heatherwood for tests. But the next day his condition deteriorated and he was sent to a specialist at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, where he died at 9.07 the following morning. That morning, a gangland pal had told the Daily Mirror he did not think Ron Kray would last until Christmas. Reggie had phoned the hospital at 10 a.m. only to be told he had died an hour earlier. He had applied for leave to go and see him and had been refused.

  Shortly before his death Ron had written Kate a nice little poem:

  ‘No man knows me, only God can my mind see

  And with a Big Sleep set me free.’

  After the news of Ron’s death his twin was placed in a cell with his
friends Freddie Foreman and Joey Martin, receiving condolences from other inmates and drinking prison hooch. Foreman was given parole in time to be a pall bearer. Reggie had wanted Joey Martin to be one as well, but there was no release for him.79

  As might be expected, tributes were mixed. The Sun was happy to record his dying words – echoing Edward G. Robinson’s, ‘Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?’ – as ‘Oh God, mother help me.’ Criminal turned criminologist John McVicar wrote in The Times, ‘He sliced up more people than most normal people slice up Sunday joints.’ Barbara Windsor took the opportunity to say she thought Reggie should be released. Charlie Kray said, ‘He had principles all his life. All he ever tried to do was to keep boys out of trouble.’

  Colin Fry, a Kray biographer, thought he had given away a million pounds to good causes, but he had kept £20,000 in the delusion he would one day be able to go on a world cruise.80

  Nor was the inquest trouble-free. At the time, a coroner had powers to hold one when and where he liked, and the coroner for East Hampshire, Robert Wilson, decided to hold it alone in his own home in Waltham St Lawrence. In under five minutes he ruled that Ronnie had died from natural causes. Some thought it was not a valid inquest. Wilson was unrepentant, saying he should be congratulated because he had held it so speedily.81

  Now was the time for the Twins to return once more to the East End in triumph. On 28 March – the same day as the less well-attended funeral of the serial killer Fred West – Ronnie’s High Anglican funeral with a glass-sided hearse drawn by six black horses, followed by 25 black limos, saw a massive turnout.

  Bouncers at the funeral home were organised by celebrity criminal Dave Courtney, and Ronnie’s latest solicitor Mark Bloomfield was also on the door. Courtney told the press, ‘I see it as an honour. Losing someone like Ronnie is like losing the monarch. To me Ronnie is now lying in state.’82 But, despite all Courtney’s best efforts, it appears that lines of cocaine had been smoked off the coffin as it lay at the undertakers and someone had tried to set up a Ouija board to see if it was possible to contact Ronnie. There were also suggestions that when he was lying in his open coffin, a pair of earphones had been put on his body. Later someone stole Ronnie’s photograph from the centerpiece of flowers in the cemetery. It was never recovered.

  The funeral procession stretched from St Matthew’s Church, Bethnal Green to the Carpenters Arms, and the crowds that followed the subsequent procession to Chingford cemetery was said to be over a mile long, more than many a political demonstration.

  Reggie’s tribute, in red roses on white chrysanthemums, was lettered ‘To My Other Half’. Kate Kray’s wreath was a heart pulled in two composed of white and red carnations, with a note, ‘Tears in my eyes I can wipe away, but the pain in my heart will always stay’. Other floral tributes included one from John Gotti of the Gambino New York Family, and another from Danny Pagano of the Genoveses. ‘Black Widow’ Linda Calvey, serving life in Holloway for killing her lover Ron Cook, sent a floral boxing glove from her and the girls in H wing.

  Inside the Order of Service was a message:

  ‘We wish for only good to come from Ron’s passing away and what is about to follow is our tribute to Ron. It is a symbol of peace that the four pallbearers will be Charlie, Freddie Foreman, Johnny Nash and Teddy Dennis; each one represents an area of London, north, south, east and west.’

  Frankie Fraser had been invited to be a pallbearer but had declined, saying that as such a small man it would have appeared lopsided if he had been carrying the coffin with three six-footers. Instead he rode in a limo with Alex Steene, the boxing promoter. Reggie was brought separately by prison officers.

  Hymns included ‘Morning has broken’ and ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and there was a recording of Whitney Houston singing Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ from the soundtrack of The Bodyguard. Publisher Robin McGibbon’s wife Sue read ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’, written by the American poet and florist Mary Elizabeth Frye. The service ended with a tape of Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’, itself well on its way to becoming the worldwide hymn of choice at any gangster funeral. A collection realised £850.

  As the coffin was lowered, a World War Two Spitfire flew over the Chingford Mount cemetery, dipping its wings in tribute to a man his brother believed was the equal of Winston Churchill or the Duke of Wellington, if not both. Under Ronnie’s name on his tombstone would appear the word ‘Legend’.

  At the wake the music was provided by ‘Gary’, who sang a selection of Sinatra favourites accompanied by backing tapes. When Tony Lambrianou approached him and asked him to sing ‘New York, New York’, Gary told him he had sung it three numbers ago and he thought he should wait a little while before he sang it again. Lambrianou merely said, ‘Are you going to fucking sing it or not?’ And so, sensibly, he did.83

  It was a time for the renewal of calls for Reggie to be released. However, not everyone agreed. One man wrote:

  ‘You as Home Secretary should have insisted this disgusting creature was interred in an unmarked grave within the precincts of the institution he finished his days.

  How on earth can the young and impressionable be convinced that crime does not pay when people of your standing in Government allow this circus to take place. The glorification of crime is not what I voted for.’

  Unfortunately an incision at the hairline had been discovered: Ronnie’s brain was missing. The 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed that criminals’ brains differed from those of ‘normal’ people such as barristers and judges. Over the years many of Lombroso’s theories, including a belief that women with excessive pubic hair became prostitutes, have been discredited. Nevertheless when the autopsy was performed, his brain was removed in an attempt to establish whether any physical abnormalities had caused Ronnie’s violent criminal behaviour. Or indeed if there was a tumour. Ron’s brain weighed just over two pounds and showed signs of wastage. When he was buried it was still in a laboratory in Oxford.84

  Now papers had a field day, with the News of the World displaying the tasteful banner headline ‘The Great Brain Robbery’ and going on to say, ‘Docs have pickled Ronnie Kray’s brain in a bottle – now his wife has half a mind to sue’. A campaign backed by another Sunday newspaper was sufficient to ensure that the brain was sent to Charlie Kray to be buried with its owner.85

  Reggie never accepted the circumstances of Ronnie’s death and shortly before he died it seemed he was considering calling for an inquiry. In a tape from prison he said:

  ‘I wish to express doubt that my brother Ron Kray did not die from natural causes… There is a sequence of events which is unexplained – events which happened the day before he died and on the day of his death.’86

  Nothing came of it.

  Ronnie left an estate of approximately £10,000. He gave all his jewellery and personal belongings to his twin and the remainder was to be divided between Kate Kray, a family friend Anne Glew and his best man Charlie Smith, a double murderer who was eventually transferred to Maidstone psychiatric hospital, from where he escaped.

  On 17 March 1997 a ceremony was held ‘to try to help reconcile Ron with God and help him find peace’, said the Reverend Ken Rimini, vicar of St Matthews, Bethnal Green. The 40 or so celebrants included Dave Courtney. Another Spitfire flew past followed by a small plane bearing a banner with the words ‘Ronnie Kray – Legend’. Frankie Fraser sent a telegram: ‘Some they say are damned but Ronnie walks the streets of paradise now, his head held high and unashamed.’ Reg Kray sent a tape: ‘I asked Jesus how much do you love me? “This much,” he answered and stretched out his arms and died. God bless, Reg Kray.’

  On Ronnie’s grave in Chingford Mount cemetery appears another short poem:

  ‘The kiss of the sun for pardon

  The song of a bird for mirth

  One is nearer to God in a garden

  Than anywhere else on
earth.’

  Patrick McGrath, ‘I grew up in Broadmoor’, Daily Mail, 7 September 2012.

  Daily Star, 29 March 1995.

  The People, 19 March 1995.

  Douglas Thompson, Hustlers.

  Reg and Ron Kray, Our Story, p. 138.

  Taylor, P., and S., White, S., ‘Raving Ron’s Deadly Escape Plot’, News of the World, 3 September 1995.

  Daily Mirror, 9 October 1992.

  East London Advertiser, 10 June 1993.

  The Independent, 17 December 1994.

  James Morton, Bert Battles Rossi, Ch. 9.

  Laurie O’Leary, Reg Kray, A Man Apart, p. 269.

  The Times, Daily Express, The Sun, Daily Mirror, 18-21 March 1995.

  Daily Mirror, 21 March 1995.

  Daily Star, 29 March 1995.

  Conversation with JM, 19 March 2015.

  The Independent, 5 June 1997.

  For an account of solicitor Stephen Gold’s efforts to find out why the brain had been removed and his other dealing with the brothers, see Stephen Gold, Breaking Law.

  Mail on Sunday, 20 February 2000.

  Chapter 19

  Surviving Ronnie Kray

  In January 1981, nearly 15 years before his twin’s death, Reg Kray was transferred without notice – a process prisoners call ‘ghosting’ – to Long Lartin in Gloucestershire. The move was not a success. As the year went on he found it harder and harder to cope with life there, and just before Christmas he cut both wrists with a safety razor in the Segregation Unit of the prison. He had been sent there the day before after quarrelling with his former friend, the Birmingham hardman Patsy Manning, then serving a sentence for a hammer attack on a nightclub bouncer. Kray had become convinced Manning was going to poison him. The wrist cutting was not considered a serious suicide attempt, but on 16 January 1982 he attacked Manning a second time and the next day he again cut his wrists with a safety razor. Once more the Governor thought that this was attention seeking.