Frances: The Tragic Bride (26 page)

• 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 from 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.

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.