Frances: The Tragic Bride (22 page)

This desire to help was demonstrated to me by Dr Lewis Clein’s recollection, during our interview, of a phone call from Reggie, which came out of the blue many months after Clein had last seen Frances.

‘He wanted me to arrange for her to go back to Greenways,’ he recalled. ‘They had split up, he said. She was with her parents. But he was prepared to pay the bill for her to go to Greenways again.’

Clein says he duly rang the Sheas on the number Reggie had given him. ‘They flatly refused to allow me to see her because of the link with the Krays. They didn’t want anything to do with him.’

The doctor’s memory of the precise timing of this call is not clear, though he says it was not long before Frances died. According to what Frances had told Michael Taylor during her time at Hackney Hospital, the decision to abandon further private treatment with Clein at Greenways could have been hers alone – because, as she made it clear to Michael, she didn’t like the effect of the drugs the private psychiatrist had prescribed. The Sheas could have known this. But of course, by then, they wouldn’t have tolerated Reg’s intervention in any way.

Yet Reggie, who was happy to swap one private doctor for another in his quest to help his twin, may well have convinced himself that private medicine might just make the difference to Frances’s treatment. In everything, he was supremely determined to have ‘the best’ available: cars, holidays, clothes, lawyers, furniture, country houses… you name it, he had it. Private medicine and Harley Street specialists, he’d have reasoned, were far superior to anything available for free on the NHS. Everything could be bought – especially when the currency was fear.

But the one thing that couldn’t be bought was a return to happiness or peace of mind for Frances. Reg must have funded Frances’s trip to the Canaries; the Sheas would have been unable to stop this. Yet in the last few weeks of her life it certainly seemed, to Reg at least, that they’d retrieved some of their old intimacy, what they’d once shared as a younger courting couple. For, incredibly, in those last weeks they had started seeing quite a bit of each other again.

Ron continued to remain in hiding. He’d endlessly goad Reg about seeing his ex-wife – the twins always had an uncanny, quite psychic ability to know what the other one was getting up to, even when apart. However the physical distance from the East End to Chelsea, plus the fact that Ron couldn’t go out and about at all, meant that Ron’s constant taunts about Frances had less effect.

The atmosphere at Wimbourne Court when Reggie visited was slightly less oppressive than that of Ormsby Street, though the issue over the loan from Frankie Junior had driven a distinct wedge between the two men.

But while Frances seemed outwardly to accept having Reggie back in her life, one might pause to question her motivation.

Did she just go along with it to keep the peace? Had she learned, by bitter experience, to dissemble, pretend to Reggie that all was well while hiding her real feelings?

Reggie’s motivation was surely partly driven by what was now happening to him and Ronnie as the net of the law started to close in on them.

He knew all too well that getting back together with Frances, finding that normal, happy married life they’d often talked of, far away from the East End and Ronnie, was surely his last chance of freedom from the bonds of twinship.

He knew that after Cornell’s murder, and the crazy ordered killing of Frank Mitchell, the time would come when they’d be behind bars. He also knew that his twin’s illness was getting worse. He believed he still had it in him to be a legitimate businessman. He could, he convinced himself, make amends with Frances, prove to her that he wasn’t Evil Reg at all – but the same caring guy who still loved her as much as ever. They’d find another place together, he’d make everything up to her, he promised.

A cynic might also say that a reunion with his pretty wife would also prove highly positive for the twins’ public relations machine, especially if they did go down for some time.

Whether Frances was convinced by all Reggie’s promises remains doubtful. She was weak, thin, quite passive. But she was as intelligent as she’d always been. She’d heard it all before many times. And she’d noticed that the promises to change always seemed to intensify when he was away from Ron’s influence, as he had been at the beginning of their relationship. Yet he did seem to be genuine, she told a friend. He was certainly different. He reminded her of the younger Reg who’d been so pleasant and attentive to her. Was she merely playing lip service to his renewed pleas for one more chance? And was Reg merely acting the part of the husband hoping for reconciliation because he knew the net was closing in on him?

I don’t believe Frances now shared Reg’s dream of a future together. It was surely comforting, in her unhappy existence, to see him as keen as ever and to do some of the things they’d enjoyed in the past, the drives to the country, the two of them far away from the East End – and Ronnie.

In all probability, Frances was too diminished by everything she’d experienced to push him away or make big demands. She was exhausted. It was easier to just pretend.

Frances Shea, by this time, had chosen her path. The knowledge that there was only one way to banish her torment and fear for ever was now stuck fast in her mind. It just wouldn’t go away.

The calendar said it was almost summer, but the English weather, as usual, had proved unreliable. The days were getting longer, yet May that year was a disappointingly cool, dull month in London. Apart from one brief spell of sunshine, it remained chilly and rainy.

Reg, ever aware of how the Mediterranean sunshine lifted his Frankie’s spirits, suggested a second honeymoon at the end of June. Just them, away from it all in Ibiza. Frances loved the sleepy, pine-scented Spanish island with its near deserted beaches and laid-back old town. Yes, she said, they could do that.

On 5 June Frances went for an appointment at the Hackney Hospital with the psychiatric consultant, Dr Julius Silverstone. He thought she seemed a bit brighter. She told him she was going on holiday with her ex-husband and asked him for some tablets for the flight, which he duly prescribed. The following day, she saw Reg and they booked the tickets for Ibiza at a local travel agent. Later, they farewelled each other at her brother’s flat and Reg went home.

It was her brother Frankie who found her. That morning of 7 June, he took his sister a cup of tea, as he usually did, carefully placing it on the bedside table.

She seemed to be still sleeping peacefully, so he went out to work. Yet something, he couldn’t quite explain what, sent him back to check on his sister around lunchtime. She was just as he’d left her earlier. The tea was stone cold.

‘Oh no, she’s gone and done it again,’ he whispered to himself as he stood over the bed, fervently hoping for evidence of some sign of life. But as he touched her hand, now cold, he realised the truth. There was a strange little half-smile on his sister’s face, a smile, almost of triumph, that was to haunt him down the years. To Frankie, it was as if she was saying, ‘I’m happy now’. His beautiful sister Franny was dead. She’d found her way out.

Frankie called the doctor, who came and confirmed what he already knew and contacted the police. He then called his dad who drove round straight away. At first glance, Frank Senior thought his daughter was just sleeping. But by now she was stone cold. Rigor mortis was already setting in. Franny was gone. She’d taken a huge number of sleeping pills. ‘Those bastards the Krays have finished her off,’ said Frank Senior to his son.

After his dad had driven off to break the terrible news to his wife, Frankie asked a friend to go round to Vallance Road, to summon Reg.

According to Rita Smith, Reg had already experienced a premonition of something terrible happening to Frances the night before and had even driven round to Wimbourne Court in a panic around dawn. He didn’t ring the bell, however, realising that everyone might still be asleep.

‘He had that feeling that something was wrong,’ recalled Rita. ‘The day before he’d said she was really down. She’d coloured her hair, put some stuff on it and she couldn’t get it off. Reggie even went to the chemist to get something to brush it out.’

Yet despite Reg’s efforts to cheer Frances up that night, when he left her he later told Rita she seemed distant, not very communicative. At the time, immediately after she died, some people wanted to believe it was this small thing, a bad hair day, that had tipped Frances over the edge: she was a very appearance-conscious girl, almost to the point of neurosis. Maybe it was an accident, and she just took one pill too many? She couldn’t have planned it, many argued. They were looking forward to going away, weren’t they?

These were false hopes. Frances had been merely biding her time, pretending to Reg about the holiday, knowing full well she’d never be going anywhere with him again.

How did she get the drugs that killed her? The doctors had insisted that though Frances could be prescribed certain drugs, she should not be permitted to keep any drugs in her possession.

‘She had sleeping pills but they were kept away from her, just to be given to her when needed. But she found them. The whole lot,’ recalled Rita Smith.

As Trevor Turner pointed out, all the instructions and efforts of the doctors treating a suicidal person outside a hospital setting have their limitations: a truly determined person will find a way to get their hands on the drugs that can kill them, if they wish to.

Yet now, faced with the shock of their loss, the two opposing factions in her life, rather than becoming united in their grief, linked by their loss, were driven even further along the path of hatred and vengeance.

Reggie, upon seeing Frances lying there, lifeless, lost to him for good, was overwhelmed with grief. He drank himself into oblivion that afternoon and spent that same night on the floor beside her body, weeping bitter tears – and wallowing in his undying hatred for the Sheas. They had done this terrible thing. He wanted to kill them.

Back at Ormsby Street, the family’s pain must have been unfathomable. Even with the knowledge of the previous suicide attempts, they’d never quite managed to truly believe it could come to this: as far as they were concerned, Reggie Kray was the monstrous killer of their daughter, a man beyond evil.

What happened next in June 1967 is a measure of Reg’s dogged determination to possess Frances Shea to the grave and beyond. It also shows contempt for Frances’s loved ones at what was surely the worst time of their lives.

After Frances’s body had been moved to the mortuary where, as her husband and next of kin, he was required to identify it, Reggie didn’t waste a minute.

There were plenty of histrionics, with Reggie weeping and pleading with his darling Frankie to come back to him over and over again, an incredibly theatrical display of grief he would repeat, day after day, even after her body was moved to a silk-lined coffin in the funeral parlour at Hayes & English in Hoxton Street, N1. Despite all this, the practical, devious Reg went into action.

He drove round to Ormsby Street and Wimbourne House and demanded every single item belonging to Frances. Her engagement ring. All her jewellery. All the letters between them. Photos. Her bank book. Her collection of little dolls from their trips abroad. A silver dressing table set he’d bought her. Her clothes, underwear. Even her make-up. Everything.

Here we see the same Reg the organiser, the businesslike twin who always did a first-class mopping up job after one of the Kray’s calamitous crimes, the same Reg who’d successfully engineered the silence of the entire East End after the disastrous Cornell slaying. Cunning Reg, the planner who thought ahead, knew the law, understood perfectly he was entitled to everything as Frances’s legal next of kin. The same Reg who’d strung Frances along on the annulment of their marriage – until it was too late.

There was no pity or concern for the family of the girl he claimed to love, at a time when they desperately needed the smallest crumb of comfort they could salvage from their wrecked lives. His savage ransacking of Elsie and Frank Shea’s daughter’s life, right down to the last hair grip, was yet another example of Kray terrorism, rule by fear.

But it was also an act of sheer calculation, lest anything in her belongings might betray his image and incriminate Reggie as the monster controller he surely was at that moment. The Sheas needed something to hang on to, no matter how small, in the early days of their grief, something to briefly assuage the sorrow that would never really leave them for the rest of their lives.

What Reggie Kray gave them as a grieving son-in-law was as violent and crushing as if he’d taken a brick and smashed it right in their faces. Though as we will see, despite his raid on her possessions, he didn’t quite manage to get his hands on everything.

Until Frances died, it was relatively simple to understand, even to find a modicum of sympathy, for the conflict in Reggie Kray’s emotions: his desire for Frances and a different, normal life versus the overwhelming need to remain with his crazy twin brother – who hated Frances’s very existence and scared her witless.

Yet at this juncture, when all Reggie’s fantasies for their future were finally destroyed, you have to question the motivation of a man who, in the midst of such tragedy, so chillingly sets out to put his own interests before anything else.

This also strips bare the Kray myth, persistent to this very day, that the twins were ultimately a force for good.

The ransacking of Frances’s bedroom, the plundering of the remnants of her short life, were never the actions of a caring, generous or thoughtful man. Respect is a word that crops up again and again in the Kray lexicon. It’s almost a mantra within the world they inhabited – even today the word has profound connotations in the criminal world. Where was the respect for Frances and her family in this?

Six days after Frances’s death, an inquest was held at St Pancras Coroner’s Court on 13 June. Here is the report of the inquest from the local paper, the
Hackney Gazette
, dated Friday 16 June 1967: