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Cover of Frances Kray - The Tragic Bride: The True Story of Reggie Kray's First Wife

Frances Kray - The Tragic Bride: The True Story of Reggie Kray's First Wife

Written by Jacky Hyams

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247 pages, about 5 hours of reading

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About this book

The first full account of the beautiful, innocent young woman who married Reggie Kray - and became trapped in the violent and terrifying world of the Kray Twins.She was young, very beautiful and had everything to live for - but the life of Frances Shea, wife of Reggie Kray, remains one of the most tragic stories of the Sixties.Courted by Reggie as a schoolgirl, Frances was lured into an outwardly glamorous world of nightclubs, expensive clothes and showbiz parties. Yet she very soon discovered the real world of the Kray Twins, the hidden, twisted world where violence, drink, drugs and terror dominated everything.Frances broke away and briefly enjoyed other relationships, struggling to maintain her freedom. Yet Reggie would never let her go. Paranoid and obsessive, he monitored her every move, stalking her night and day.By the time she married Reggie in their ‘Wedding of the Year’ in 1965, Frances and her family had become inextricably linked with the Twins’ downward spiral from gangland extortion and brutality into senseless murder and mayhem.Trapped, desperate and unable to cope, just two years later Frances died from a drug overdose.Only now, 50 years later, in a revealing and shocking examination of the facts, the truth about the life of Frances Shea and her short marriage to Reggie Kray is finally revealed in this new, revised edition. With hitherto unseen photographs, documents and revelations, the book explodes the many myths surrounding the marriage. In doing so, it uncovers the sordid reality of the Kray world - and shows how the effect of this tragic, doomed relationship haunted the lives of Frances’s loved ones right to the end.

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