TRAGEDY OF THE BEAUTIFUL BRIDE

Frances Shea was one of the brightest and prettiest girls in the East End. Intelligent and gay she went to a grammar school and later learnt shorthand and typing. Reggie Kray had watched the smartly-dressed red-head grow up.

Early in 1965 he asked Frances to marry him—but then he and his twin brother Ronnie were arrested on a charge of demanding money with menaces. Frances stood by him, and when the twins were acquitted plans were made for the wedding.

A friend of Frances’s family said: “She looked forward to a happy marriage, hoping to become a typical, loving housewife.” Celebrities from the West End filed into the church, St. James the Great, alongside cauliflower-eared boxers and East End thugs.

ROWS

Champagne flowed and telegrams from celebrities, including Lord Boothby, Judy Garland, Billy Daniels and many others were read out. When they flew to Athens for their honeymoon Reggie said: “We are going to settle down as a happily-married couple.”

But Reggie never settled down. By now he was a powerful gang boss. Reggie was seldom home and the rows began. A man who knew the Krays well said: “Finally, Frankie, as we called her, told Reggie she wanted the marriage annulled. She said the marriage had not been consummated. But the Krays would not hear of it.”

This was the day that the ‘devil’ walked in"

Four years of fear for an East End family ended today with the sentencing of Reginald Kray.

But it came too late for their 21-year-old daughter. For she lies in an unmarked grave at Chingford, Essex, after taking her life with a massive drugs overdose.

Reginald Kray was the husband who was "seldom loved," and dark-haired Frances ("Frankie") Shea was the girl who married him to keep her parents alive. She killed herself for the same reason—they say.

Reginald Kray first met the Shea family in 1962 when their son Frank brought him home to the little terraced house in Ormsby Street, Bethnal Green. That was the day the "devil" walked in.

Frankie’s mother, middle-aged Mrs. Elsie Shea, said: "I wish to God my girl had never seen or heard of him. She might have been alive today."

"He was well-spoken and quite nice," she said. Two months later Frankie announced they were getting engaged. "We tried to persuade her against it," she continued. "We said she was too young, but he had swept her off her feet."

The five-year long engagement was a glittering affair—sometimes. Sparkling evening dress affairs at film premieres and first nights, plus plush restaurants and expensive clubs. All were on the list.

Mrs. Shea, fighting back tears, explained: "Twice she tried to break it off, but each time Reginald would persuade her to go back with him. He would sit for hours in his big American car, with his mates, at the end of our street waiting for Frankie to go out."

‘His girl’

"Really, she never wanted to marry him. She kept putting off the date as long as she could. But in the end she agreed. She was afraid he would kill us. He had made threats, she said, that he would harm us. She told us he had also threatened no one else would have her. She was his girl."

Frankie married Kray on April 20, 1965 at her local church in Bethnal Green. But the eve of wedding day was not a happy one. "She cried all night," said Mrs. Shea.

"Even from the word go you couldn’t call it a marriage. Soon after the wedding he sent her abroad with a girl friend to Ibiza. When she came home she was sent away again. And in November she was back home with us—she had left him."

Her father interrupted: "Soon after this we discovered she’d been on drugs, including heroin. By then she was not the same girl. Twice she tried to kill herself before taking the fatal dose. Once she was taken unconscious to hospital but when she woke up she didn’t even thank me. She just looked and said ‘I don’t thank you, Dad. Why didn’t you let me go to sleep?’"

Three months before she died Frankie, who had dyed her hair blonde, left Kray for the last time.

"He was about to sue her for divorce on the ground of non-consummation of marriage," she her mother. "But she wanted to divorce him long before. Reginald always got his way, and insisted things be done like this."

She moved into her brother’s home in Wimbourne Street, Hoxton. On June 7, 1967, she was found dead there.

Reg Kray’s wife said it herself: ‘I’m like a bird in a big cage.’ Death was the only way out . . . and she took it in the end

by RICHARD HERD

REG KRAY needed a beautiful woman to grace his table on image-building sorties to the West End.

He chose Frances Shea, 17-year-old daughter of an East End neighbour.

She was a gay, ex-grammar school girl—bright, intelligent and an easy and natural conversationalist. She was everything Reg Kray needed to impress the big names he craved to meet.

He picked her as any other man might select a new car. As a status symbol. An asset. An ornament.

After four years he married her. He was 32. She was 21.

But Kray failed to turn the chestnut-haired typist into a night-club sophisticate.

Her life with him was a nightmare from the first night of their honeymoon when he got drunk and locked her alone inside the bridal suite.

Despair drove Frances Shea to drugs. After 25 months of marriage, she committed suicide after telling her friends that the marriage was never consummated.

Three women risked their lives to break the Krays.

The full story of their bizarre relationship is told here by Frances Shea’s parents—Frank Shea, 57-year-old London Electricity Board collector and his wife, Elsie, 52.

“She was our only daughter. Her marriage turned out to be a cruel sham. He mentally murdered her. Twice before she tried to take her life with drugs. Both times we brought her round. The second time she said: ‘Oh, why didn’t you let me sleep, Dad.’

“Her dying wish was to be buried in the name of Shea, not Kray. She wrote it down in a note to us a few hours before she took the tablets.

“But the Krays took the funeral out of our hands. They knew the had changed her name by deed poll—back from Kray to Shea. But they still got Kray on to the death certificate.

“At least twice she feared he had a gun on her. Once was when they were sitting in the Palladium watching Judy Garland. Our Frances wanted to go home instead of going drinking again in the dressing room. He threatened her and kept poking something in her back all through the show.

“Frances told us: ‘I’m like a bird in a big cage. I’m trapped . . . I can’t get out of it . . . If I could get a gun I’d shoot him . . . no one will ever want me now. I’m defiled.’

From the day Kray began the strange, four-year-long ‘courtship’ he never allowed Frances to go out to work. It would have been wrong for the image to have a Kray girl earn her living at a typewriter. He took her to clubs, introduced her to stars, and used her to do his bidding. For a time Frances was impressed.

“But she began to get tired of it all. She told us how she envied our being able to sit round the fire watching TV in peace and quiet and she used to say: ‘While I’m single I can manage him, but if he ever makes me marry him . . .’

“It was Primrose Day they married, 1965. But we were the odd two out. They humiliated us. They did it all. It was OUR only girl getting married. But they wouldn’t let us have anything to do with it.

“Nobody was invited from our side. The other side was packed with the Krays; all their relations and friends. We felt like jumping up and telling Frances not to say ‘I will.’

“They went to Athens for their honeymoon. She said he once locked her in the hotel bedroom and went out and got drunk. She complained that he got drunk several times on their honeymoon.

“Then he sent her to Spain, Majorca and Ibiza. But he never went with her. Each time she came back he packed her off again.

“In the end he got a flat in Marble Arch. He cooped her up there. We sensed she was on the drugs by then. Once she told us he’d left her without food or tablets and that she was crawling across the floor in agony.

“In June 1967 she killed herself with phenobarbitone. She was driven to it. A couple of days after Frances was buried he ransacked her old room at our house. He took everything, even her underwear and £600 worth of jewellery he had bought for her.

“The Krays took over the funeral. They ran everything. He insisted that Frances was to be buried in her wedding dress. They were paying. We had to allow it. But we made certain that no part of that wedding dress touched her flesh. She was fully clothed underneath.

“And it was the little ring we bought her as a girl that was buried with her—not his wedding ring. We made certain of that. We were the last to see her. We were choked to see how peaceful and lovely she looked for the first time for years.”

All these words came tumbling out unchecked as Frances’s parents talked in the kitchen of their home in Ormsby Street, Haggerston, London, E.

Her father finished off the story, always referring to Kray as him or he, never by name.

“He made a great show of buying Frances a brand new red Ford for her 21st. All the neighbours saw it. A few weeks later the HP man was knocking at the door. He said the payments were behind.

“He took our girl as a teenager full of life and tried to change her. Frances once sent us a note saying: ‘He has a gun, a sword-knife, a chopper and a flick-knife. He used to slap me with the flick-knife. He used to stand there frightening me with his hands.’

A collection of thirty-five wedding telegrams and cards including a card signed 'To Reg, Frances from Mum, Dad' (Violet and Charlie Kray) , two telegrams from 'Mum and Dad', a telegram ' Best of Luck and Every Possible Good Wish from Boothby' (Lord Boothby), a telegram form Gordon Goodfellow (Lord Boothby's butler), one form Charles Clark (Friend of Reggie Kray who reputedly was responsible for disposing of the gun that Ronnie Kray used to kill George Cornell), one form Tom Mangold (Journalist), one form Lita Roza ( English Singer most famous for ( How Much Is) That Doggy In The Window) and others, also a black and white photograph of Frances Shea in her wedding dress and a Birthday card to Frances Shea