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21/07/03 - The madness of
Ronnie Kray
Western Daily Press
During their violent reign of terror in London's East
End, the Kray brothers were welcomed into society's most
glittering circles. Few doors were closed to the infamous
twins, Reggie and Ronnie, as their glamorised gangster
lifestyles allowed them to hobnob with the stars.
They partied with Diana Dors and Judy Garland and shared
drinks with the West End elite. But the lustre of their
legend was yesterday stripped bare as a series of letters
written by Ronnie Kray came up for auction.
The 23 letters, written between September and December
1993, illustrate the killer's decline into madness and
his crippling paranoia. He was a prolific letter writer,
and would sometimes scrawl as many as 14 a day as he sank
into the lonely grasp of schizophrenia.
A spokesman for auctioneers Mullock Madeley said: "There
can be few series of letters which provide such a valuable
insight into the thoughts of such a high profile criminal.
"They show an increasing paranoia and you can see
his mind disintegrating.
From a criminologist's point of view they are fascinating."
Along withthr older brother, Charlie, the twins formed
the notorious gang The Firm and ascended to power in the
1950s leaving a bloody trail behind them. But their 10-year
stranglehold over London's criminal underworld was shattered
by a feud with a rival gang.
Ronnie, a homosexual who was married, was certified insane
in 1958 and had long been acknowledged as the psychopathic
brawn behind the gang. ONE night he shot George Cornell
dead in the saloon bar of the Blind Beggar pub in the
Mile End Road, east London.
Reggie then stabbed to death gangster Jack "The Hat"
McVitie in North London. Scotland Yard had been on their
trail for years, and in 1969 the twins were sent down
for 30 years. By the time Ronnie wrote this series of
letters he had served more than two decades of his life
sentence for murder at Broadmoor secure hospital.
The letters, all written to a journalist, Robin McGibbon,
a friend of the family and Charlie's biographer, are now
expected to fetch thousands when they go under the hammer.
In the 40 pages of almost illegible handwriting, Ronnie
loses his mind in fury over a book written by his wife
Kate.
His paranoia over the revealing book on her life, My Story,
eventually caused him to have a nervous breakdown.The
first letter, written on September 11, said: "Can
you put in the papers that the book, My Story, that has
just come out is a lot of lies that Reg never said, nor
did I."
As he descends deeper into madness the letters become
less coherent and more frantic. On September 15 he wrote:
"I'm divorcing Kate as soon as I can. What she said
about me, I never told her to put in what she did about
me in her book."
For him, she had broken the rules of being a Kray and
committed the ultimate sin of bringing shame on the family.
The sale is on July 31 at Mullock Madeley's in Shropshire.
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