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
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.’
“I felt like shooting him. But what chance would I have had? I’d have had to shoot three Krays, not one.”
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