by John Pearson
Lennie and Scotch Jack Dickson had been guarding Mitchell for ten days now; both were afraid that he would break out soon. Rather than this they asked Lisa to try persuading him to give himself up. The first time she mentioned it he said that he would do whatever the twins thought best. Next day she spoke about it, but the idea sent Mitchell into a rage, shouting about the eighteen years he had spent inside and how he would kill anyone who tried to get him back. She tried calming him, but he went on shouting, and for a while the others thought he would make a dash for it.
‘Give me your gun,’ he yelled at Exley, who was too frightened to argue. The gun calmed Mitchell.
‘I’ll hang on to it,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to know it’s there in case I need it.’
Next day, 22 December, Mitchell woke late and appeared cheerful, knowing he had a gun. Later his mood began to change. By afternoon he was weeping, shouting and saying he would go out and shoot the first policeman he encountered. When he was quieter he told Dickson he wanted him to take a letter round to Reggie.
It took an hour to write; in it he said that unless the twins got him away at once he would get in touch with his parents. If anybody tried to stop him, he had a gun and would use it. Reggie was visibly annoyed at Mitchell’s letter. ‘Who does he think he is? He’s got everything he wants, even a bloody woman, but he goes telling us what to do.’ Then he asked Dickson more about Exley’s gun and Mitchell’s threats to leave. This clearly worried him.
‘Jack. Go back to Mitchell and tell him he’ll be all right. Tell him not to do anything silly and he’ll be out of the flat in forty-eight hours. I think it’s time I had a word with Ron.’
The twins and several members of the Firm discussed what should be done with Mitchell that night at the flat in Finchley. Although Ronnie was cut off, he had been receiving regular reports on Mitchell. He even knew about the gun, and according to one story he had heard Mitchell was threatening to go round to Vallance Road and use it on the Kray parents.
Certainly the Colonel’s attitude to his old friend had changed dramatically: suddenly he seemed to understand just what could happen if the police caught him. The twins and many of the Firm would be involved. Mitchell could destroy them.
That night as the twins discussed what should be done, Frank Mitchell was no longer a friend but a threat.
Next day a further complication: Frank Mitchell was in love,
‘Wherever they’re taking me to in the country, Lisa must come as well. We’ll never be apart again.’
Later the girl whispered to Dickson, ‘He can think I’m going but I’m not. Just tell the twins I’ll keep my mouth shut and that’s that.’
‘OK, but don’t say anything to Frank. If he thinks you don’t love him, he’d really do his nut.’
When Reggie came, Mitchell asked him about the girl. Of course he could take her. It was a lovely place the twins had ready for them, with animals and servants. Lisa and Frank could both be there together.
Reggie gave Lennie Dunn money to buy Mitchell fresh clothes for the journey; his friends were calling for him the following evening. Mitchell was thrilled; to show how happy he was he put his arms round the piano and lifted it right off the floor. Everybody laughed. Reggie looked relieved, shook hands all round and promised to be down to visit Frank and Lisa for Christmas.
It must have seemed the most exciting Christmas Eve in Mitchell’s life: for the first time in nearly twenty years he would be spending Christmas Day in freedom, and with the girl he loved.
Reggie rang during the morning saying that Donaghue would be calling around 8.30 P.M. and that Frank was to be packed and changed and ready to leave immediately.
Dickson asked what was planned for the girl.
‘Don’t worry about her. Albert will see to her.’
Mitchell and the girl got up around midday. She cooked them all a late Christmas Eve lunch. Afterwards everyone exchanged cards. In his Mitchell wrote, ‘To Lisa, the only one I’ve ever loved’, and she wrote back, ‘Darling Frank, may this Christmas be the best you ever had’. They kissed, drank to the future and went to bed for the last time in the flat.
At 7.30 P.M. the telephone rang twice, then stopped, the sign that Reggie was on the line wanting to talk to Mitchell. Was he packed? The friends would soon be round.
Just before 8.30 Donaghue arrived. A big grey man with thinning hair, he was one of the enigmas of the Firm. He was a drinker and a fighter and an Irishman but he never talked much, never gave himself away. The year before, Reggie had shot him in the foot during an argument in a pub off Vallance Road. Since then they had made it up and ‘Big Albert’ was regarded as Reggie’s man, but he still limped. Mitchell trusted him because he had helped him escape; Donaghue said Reggie’s friends were outside with their van, the Axe Man laughed and asked where they were taking him.
‘Kent, Frank. A farm in Kent.’
‘That means we’re driving through the tunnel under the river,’ said Mitchell to the girl.
‘You know your way round pretty well for a man who’s done the time you have, Frank,’ said Donaghue. ‘Got your things ready?’
Mitchell had nothing much to carry and was anxious to be off. He shook hands with Dickson, then with Lennie Dunn, promising that Ronnie would be sending him £500 after Christmas for all his trouble.
‘Get your coat now,’ he said to the girl. ‘They’re waiting for us.’
‘I’m not coming yet, Frank.’
‘That’s right, Frank. Ronnie’s orders. It’s risky enough getting you there on your own. We don’t want her involved, do we, if there’s any trouble? Cowley will bring her down in his car. She’ll be there as soon as you.’
There was no time to argue; Mitchell nodded and kissed the girl goodbye.
‘See you at Ron’s place, then. Don’t be long.’
At a sign from Donaghue, Lennie turned the lights out. A few moments later Mitchell stepped through the back door. There, in the Barking Road at 8.30 P.M. on Christmas Eve 1966, the story of Frank Mitchell, the Mad Axe Man, officially ends. As far as the police know there was no farm in Kent; if there was they have no evidence to suggest that Mitchell ever turned up there alive.
All that is known is that ten minutes or so after seeing Mitchell off the premises, Donaghue returned and helped Scotch Jack Dickson and Lennie Dunn to clear the flat of all trace of him. The girl hung on to the prison comb and the Christmas card he gave her. Otherwise his few belongings went – the beret and mask he wore during his escape, a pair of shoes and a couple of paperbacks he had been reading. Every surface in the place was cleaned of fingerprints.
Then a car driven by another member of the Firm arrived for Donaghue and the girl, and they ended up together at a Christmas Eve party in Evering Road. Reggie was there and took the girl aside. She was to forget all she had seen and heard during the last five days. She had never heard of a man called Frank Mitchell. If she mentioned him to a living soul the twins would hear of it and in the end they’d deal with her, wherever she was.
‘I’ll forget all right, and the sooner the better.’ She drank a lot, did her best to enjoy the party and spent the night in bed with Donaghue. After Christmas she was back at Winston’s, demure as ever in the black lace dress. For her, as for everyone who came into Frank Mitchell’s sad and violent life, he had ceased to exist. She kept the card that said she was the only woman he had ever loved, but those were the only words he ever wrote to her. None of his few friends nor his family ever heard from him again. Lennie Dunn never received his £500.
The months went by and the police continued their search. The twins had told the Firm to answer any inquiries about Mitchell by saying he had gone abroad. There were reports that he was seen in Melbourne, in Casablanca and the South of France. A postcard supposedly written by him was received from Tangier.
But more persistent were the underworld rumours that Frank Mitchell was dead.
If Frank Mitchell’s grand escape did end in death, his remains were disp
osed of with some thoroughness. For two years later, when the Kray brothers and a South London gang leader called Frederick Foreman were accused at the Old Bailey of murdering him, the prosecution had to admit that they were alleging a murder without the evidence of a body.
The case was long and complicated. The Krays admitted responsibility for helping Mitchell to escape and for harbouring him; that was all. The absence of any trace of a corpse threw doubt on the prosecution, and Frederick Foreman and the Krays were finally acquitted. But it was during the evidence for the prosecution that the girl Lisa, Lennie Dunn and Albert Donaghue gave their own versions on oath of what happened during those ten minutes after Frank Mitchell left the flat and how the story of the Axe Man ended.
Lennie Dunn and the girl both said they remained in the darkened flat, and their evidence was essentially the same. Both claimed to have heard loud bangs from the street outside, two or three minutes after Mitchell left. Lennie Dunn took them for a car backfiring, but the girl was hysterical and screamed that they had shot him. Later when Reggie Kray told her to keep her mouth shut she did so because she ‘knew the Krays and what they could do’.
But it was Donaghue’s evidence that created the greatest stir in court. In the first hearing of Old Street Magistrates’ Court he had been in the dock, along with Foreman and the Krays, accused of murdering Mitchell. But by the time the case reached the Old Bailey he had turned Queen’s evidence. The murder charge against him had been dropped and he went into the witness-box to give his version of what happened between 8.30 and 8.45 P.M. that Christmas Eve.
According to him, the Krays were desperate to get Mitchell away from Barking before he landed them all in trouble, and Reggie Kray and Donaghue had a meeting with Foreman, an old friend of theirs, to arrange the move. Foreman had said he would lay on a van and a driver to take Mitchell down to the country. It would be waiting outside the flat at 8.30, and as Donaghue was one of the few people Mitchell trusted he was told to bring him out.
To start with, said Donaghue, everything went as expected. When he led Mitchell out of the flat a dark-painted Thames van was waiting, double-parked, twenty yards or so down the main road. There were three men inside, including Foreman. One of them opened the back door and Donaghue and Mitchell got in, Mitchell sitting on the wheel casing on the right-hand side of the van and Donaghue going to the front beside the driver.
Continuing his evidence, Donaghue described how the doors slammed to, the van drew away, and Foreman and the man beside him drew their guns, Foreman a silenced automatic and the other man a revolver. Mitchell made a dive towards the driver, but before he could reach him he had been shot several times in the body and collapsed, groaning, with his knees doubled up beneath him. By now the van was travelling down Ladysmith Avenue, a turning off the main Barking Road, and three more shots were fired into Mitchell’s chest in the area of the heart. For a moment, said Donaghue, he lay still. Then he lifted his head. Two final shots, claims Donaghue, were fired into his head and everything was over.
This was Albert Donaghue’s story from the witness-box of the Old Bailey. He said that he telephoned the news to Reggie from the flat, telling him briefly, ‘The geezer’s gone’, and according to another witness who was there, Reggie Kray wept when he heard the news.
As for the disposal of the body, Donaghue alleged that Foreman later told him they had to hold on to it for five days over Christmas, before taking it ‘down to a man in the country’ for disposal. He also described how Foreman told him that they took the body to pieces, that the heart was ripped open and three bullets found in it, and that he had a tiny brain – ‘He cupped his hands to show me just how small it was.’ Donaghue believed the body had been burned.
All this was strenuously denied by Foreman and by the Krays, and the judge ruled that under English law, Donaghue’s evidence required independent corroboration before the jury could accept it, as Donaghue was himself criminally involved in Mitchell’s escape. There was no corroboration. Frederick Foreman and the three Krays were found not guilty of the murder of Frank Mitchell, and to this day the Axe Man is still officially on the run, one of the few men in history to have made a successful getaway from Dartmoor.
FOURTEEN
The Murder Machine
The curtains were kept drawn now in the Finchley flat, the electric light stayed on throughout the day; Mitchell had disappeared but Ronnie remained a prisoner, locking himself away from the police. Like Mitchell he was armed and going mad from solitude; unlike him he had a powerful gang and a twin brother ready for any sacrifice to keep him happy. For Ronnie the war against the Richardsons continued, for he was certain there were men at large seeking revenge for George Cornell. He had to kill them first. They were all on his list and through his spies he still received regular reports upon their whereabouts. As he lay locked in his bedroom he planned exactly how to kill each one of them. This was exciting, his favourite activity, and it would keep him occupied for hours until his thoughts turned from other people’s deaths to his own. Then the depression would begin and he would suddenly be terrified, powerless and trapped and horribly alone.
Life was a waking nightmare for him then. His violent life had turned against him. He was his own corpse. The bullet he had seen enter Cornell’s head was entering his own. He dreamed that he was being disembowelled, slowly castrated, drowned in his own blood. Once he woke and slashed his wrists, but someone in the next room heard his groans and saved his life. During these attacks he generally lay drugged or drunk for days, with Reggie or his favourite boy watching until the terror left him. Members of the Firm calling at the flat would often hear him shrieking in his sleep. Once he woke in the early morning and was found by Reggie’s bed with a gun, saying that he would have to shoot him.
Soon after this Reggie arranged for him to see his regular psychiatrist. So as to avoid involving the psychiatrist with the police, Reggie arranged to meet him in Trafalgar Square. When he showed up, a big car was already waiting by the kerb – the psychiatrist was hustled in. Ronnie was in the back with his collar up and wearing dark glasses. For the next hour as the car cruised through Hyde Park Ronnie described his symptoms and had fresh drugs prescribed. They helped, and at the start of February 1967 Ronnie changed hiding-places. Reggie had found him a room above an antique shop off the King’s Road. There was a new boy, too, a Scandinavian with fair hair. Life became easier.
Throughout this crisis Reggie remained calm; those who knew him found his self-control almost unnatural. Helped by his brother Charlie, he seemed able to keep the routine business of the Firm ticking over – nothing adventurous, but the protection money was still regularly collected from the West End, various frauds continued, clubs continued to make money. Somehow the prestige of the Kray name was preserved.
He had grown thinner and the drink made his eyes bloodshot, his face blotchy in the mornings; these were the only signs of strain. Like Ronnie he possessed great stamina and he knew everything depended now on him alone. It was his love of Ronnie that kept him going; or if not love it was the necessity to protect him, an instinct that went back to childhood and proved stronger now than anything. Even when Frances made a fresh attempt to kill herself towards the end of February he managed to keep calm: Ronnie needed him most. Because he knew this and could understand Ronnie’s sickness he could usually endure his drunken taunts, his sneers, the raucous boasts that he was the only man in the family. He made no reply, just as he made no reply to those who whispered that he was responsible for Frances, that he had got her on to drugs and that she had tried to kill herself from fear of the twins.
It was at night before the drink began to work that he would sometimes wonder how much longer he could go on. So many people knew too much – some would keep quiet from loyalty, others from fear. Others would always hate the twins. Sooner or later somebody would talk and everything would be over.
When spring came life seemed easier. Ronnie appeared to have survived his months in hiding. Nobody had talk
ed; no one had been killed. The case against the police inspector was nearing its time limit; once it expired Ronnie would be free. He was already talking about his holiday and his new plans for the Firm. The police seemed to have forgotten the Cornell case; inquiries about Frank Mitchell had still to reach Lennie Dunn’s flat in Barking and the girl in Winston’s Club. The twins had luck if nothing else.
There even seemed a chance of a fresh start for Reggie with his wife now she was out of hospital. She was no longer with her parents but with her brother and his wife in a big block of flats called Wimbourne Court. Frances was listless, thinner than she used to be. The pert cockney bride had become a waif of nearly twenty-three, too tired to bother with her friends. The annulment proceedings had been held up during her time in hospital, so she was still officially Mrs Kray; when Reggie suggested a day out together she accepted. She found him changed, more like the man he had been when he first knew her. He said he realized his mistakes, still loved her, wanted her back. They could have a new flat, right away from Ronnie, a new life quite apart from the Firm. As a start they could have a holiday abroad, even a second honeymoon – Ibiza – at the end of June. Frances agreed. On 6 June 1967 they went to book their tickets.
Reggie believed in premonitions: that night he woke knowing that something was wrong with Frances. He couldn’t sleep again and just before 6 A.M. drove round to Wimbourne Court to see her. He would have rung the bell but realized that everyone would still be sleeping so went away. An hour later Frankie Shea got up and went to his sister’s room with a cup of tea; she seemed to be still asleep so he left the tea by her bed and went off to work.
