Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  He had shockingly vivid nightmares about Cornell’s last seconds of life. But in the dreams it was Ron’s head that took the bullet and caused the subsequent explosion of blood and brain.

  Drunk and barely coherent, in his semi-literate scrawl he compiled lists of all his ‘enemies’ who deserved to die, who needed to be taken out. Raving and delirious, at one stage he attempted suicide, slashing his wrists, only to be saved by Reg, who contacted Dr Blasker. His twin, warned Blasker, was a very sick man. He should be in a secure hospital.

  Reg couldn’t even contemplate that. By February 1967, the initial press outcry over the disappearance of Frank Mitchell seemed to have calmed down. Even the search for his body seemed to have abated. It was a terrible struggle, but Reggie finally convinced Ronnie to see a new psychiatrist, smuggled him into a car and managed to get him to meet the man in London. It worked. A change of drugs and a move to a different hideaway, this time in Chelsea, seemed to do the trick: the nightmares stopped. Crisis over. For now.

  Yet at Ormsby Street, calamity had struck for a second time that winter. On 30 January 1967, Frances had barricaded herself in the front room, turned on the gas fire and taken substantial quantities of barbiturate pills. Again, Frank Senior found her in the nick of time and managed to quickly get her into casualty at St Leonard’s Hospital.

  This time she remained there for eight days. The diagnosis of her illness was barbiturate poisoning. Consultant Dr Jones discharged her from the hospital’s Tanner Ward on 7 February 1967. There had been two suicide attempts in four months – the Sheas were virtually at their wits’ end with concern. They felt utterly helpless.

  When Frances came home from St Leonard’s she was mostly quiet and fairly unresponsive. No, she was okay, she assured them – when just looking at her, so thin and pale, it was obvious she was anything but okay. What would happen now?

  At that point, Frankie Junior stepped in: he was now living close by with Bubbles and their daughter in a brand new flat in a multistorey tower block, Wimbourne Court, on Wimbourne Street on the Wenlock Estate, just a mile away. He could see how bad things were for everyone. Why didn’t Frances come to live in his flat? he suggested. She adored his daughter; surely the move would be good for her?

  The young couple would keep a watchful eye on his sister, he promised his parents. At the very least, it would take some of the day-to-day worry off their shoulders. And Elsie wouldn’t have to keep dealing with the neighbours’ whispers and nudges every time Reggie Kray walked down the street or his car appeared near their house.

  By this time, Frank Shea was twenty-seven. He’d grown up since those far-off days at the billiard hall when ‘d been so chuffed to be seen driving Reg around in the big flash cars. He was a dad now. He’d had his problems with the law but he was still managing to establish himself as a haulage contractor. His friendship with Reggie had turned very sour over the £1,000 loan that Reggie had never repaid. He knew, because Frances had told him, that the loan had caused fights and rows between Reg and Frances.

  Nonetheless, his sister’s welfare was a priority and like their mum and dad he was desperate for her to pick up somehow, to get better. How vividly he remembered the bright, sparky, inquisitive teenager she’d been; he couldn’t stand to think of the way she’d changed in a few years into a passive, near lifeless shadow of herself.

  He kind of understood the lows, the depressions. He too got down sometimes; it was a bit of a family trait, though their dad didn’t seem to suffer from it. Yet it was time Mum and Dad had some sort of break from all the worry. They were in their fifties now, getting on. The house at Ormsby Street was down for demolition in a redevelopment programme. They’d be rehoused soon, to a new home built by the council. If only they could all help Franny get better, try to make her see that she still had some sort of future, life could be better for everyone.

  If Frances didn’t believe that for one minute, she still went through the motions of living as winter gave way to spring. Her old passport had expired, so she got a new temporary twelve-month one, issued on 20 March 1967. She hadn’t been abroad since those trips immediately after the honeymoon as she’d been too ill. A winter sunshine trip now would give her a lovely boost; it was just what she needed.

  On 27 March, Frances’s passport shows she took £50 – ‘foreign exchange for travel expenses’ – abroad with her. (In the sixties, strict currency controls in Britain meant that anyone travelling abroad had to formally declare any cash they were taking with them, up to a limit of £50.)

  The holiday with friends, from 27 March to 8 April, a ten-day cruise around the sunny Canary Islands starting at Las Palmas, was her last trip to Spain. Tickets would soon be purchased for another trip, to the island of Ibiza. But there would be two empty seats on the plane.

  What went through Frances’s mind in those weeks after that last trip?

  She might have been a bit happier away from Ormsby Street with all its associations with the past. But any uplift she felt from the change in environment would have been brief: given what was now a fixation in her mind, that drugs would help her escape for good, she would have already been quietly determined to do what she believed she had to do, once the opportunity arose.

  Over the years many people have claimed that it was Reg who fed her drugs, Reg who supplied them; that Reg was the culprit in getting her addicted to pills that could calm her down – or kill her. That theory has some truth in it, but there is more to take into account.

  The pills, by then, were not restricted in their availability via the criminal world. Reg may have initially given Frances tranquillisers or barbiturates, yet by the mid-sixties they were fast becoming quite commonly used.

  A GP would legally prescribe them for ‘bad nerves’, in modest doses. And the illegal street trade in any drug of choice was positively thriving for those seeking recreational highs induced by medication. Drugs such as purple hearts, black bombers, speed (amphetamine), Mandies (Mandrax, a barbiturate drug with several formulations) or Quaaludes, known as ‘ludes’ (another form of barbiturate, a sedative hypnotic drug), were not difficult to obtain on the streets of London. It was where the mid-sixties cultural explosion of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll had already burst forth.

  Certainly, if Frances was regularly using both prescribed and illegal street drugs, dependence would have formed. But as Trevor Turner pointed out, it is impossible to be sure: ‘Some drugs, like Mandrax, had a considerable tendency to produce dependence because of the extra ‘buzz’ they gave; people became addicted to it very quickly,’ he said. ‘But by and large, addiction to any drug is dominated by the individual’s metabolism.’

  Without any specific knowledge of the drugs Frances took or exactly when she took them, it’s far too simplistic to say, ‘Reggie got her addicted’.

  On the topic of addiction, it was no secret that both twins were totally addicted to alcohol. Pills too were used all the time, though Ron had little choice: without drugs he was a crazed lunatic, a danger to himself and everyone around him.

  Reg would openly take handfuls of tranquillisers such as Librium and wash them down with gin or beer. But deliberate intent on his part to ‘get Frances hooked’ as part of any conscious desire to possess cannot be easily directed at Reggie: his crimes were many, but his desire to help her, pull her away from the abyss, seemed outwardly genuine. He was possessive beyond reason. But losing her for good, which now seemed to be a possibility, was still unthinkable as far as he was concerned.

  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 p
ill 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.