Secret jail documents have revealed the Kray twins’ ‘love-hate’ relationship and their ‘almost telepathic bond’.
Notorious East End gangsters Ron and Reggie were initially sent to separate prisons to carry out their life sentences, but their mother Violet’s campaign for them to be reunited saw them transferred to the same one.
Confidential prison records claim the twins were dubbed ‘The Godfathers’ during their time at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where they were both worshipped and feared by other inmates.
When Ron was declared insane in 1979 he was shipped off to Broadmoor Hospital, where Reggie was allowed to visit him regularly until he died in 1995.
But despite all they had been through together, long-lost prison records have revealed many of their meetings were not joyful reunions and instead passed in eerie silence.
Long-lost prison records have revealed Ron (pictured right) and Reggie (left) Kray’s ‘love-hate relationship)
A prison officer ordered to observe Reggie during the trips to Broadmoor wrote in his report: ‘His relationship with his brother was of a curious love-hate nature.
‘Sometimes on his regular visits to see his brother in Broadmoor they exchanged hardly a word.’
A few years later in 1981 Reggie was transferred to lower security Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire, but continued to visit his brother.
Medical notes state that when Reggie returned to Parkhurst in 1982, staff were shocked by the change in appearance from the man they remembered as ‘a lively humorous East Ender’.
He was said in reports to be ‘sallow, drawn, looking very worried and concerned, had lost his confidence and was clearly upset.’
Reggie only revealed the devastating impact of the separation years after his twin’s death.
Reggie was allowed to visit Ron after he was sent to Broadmoor Hospital in 1979, but the documents have revealed their time together often passed in complete silence
The records have uncovered that Reggie’s (right) health deteriorated heavily after he was separated from Ron (left)
He was aged 64, when he finally opened up to an unnamed prison probation officer from the Krays’ old haunt of Bethnal Green.
The officer won Reggie’s trust in the two years before his death and wrote a report for the Parole Board concluding he had been as bad as his twin but was no longer a threat to the public and should be given a release date.
He wrote: ‘I know much of the escalating violence by the Kray twins has been laid at the feet of Ronald Kray.
‘Reginald Kray has always refuted this and I have no evidence to dispute the fact that each was as culpable as the other.’
The probation officer concluded following his brother’s transfer to Broadmoor, Reggie’s mental health ‘suffered severely’.
His report concluded: ‘Until his separation from his brother, Mr Kray’s identity had been inextricably linked to his twin.
One prison officer who Reggie (right) opened up to after Ron’s (left) death said the pair had an ‘almost telepathic bond’
‘Mr Kray does not go so far himself but certainly gives account of a very intense and close relationship with his brother.
‘I have not time to consider the voluminous research of the phenomenon of twins but believe there would be an expectation that an enforced separation would be traumatic.
‘The fact that Reg Kray was one of two Kray twins, both very violent young men, meant that both became together, greater than the sum of each individually.
‘Changes to Mr Kray’s attitude and reappraisal of his values have been the result of a long process.
‘If nothing else, Mr Kray has had plenty of time to think over the past 30 years.’
Reggie Kray was finally freed from prison in August 2000 by Home Secretary Jack Straw because of his failing health and died in his sleep aged 66 two months later after a battle against bladder cancer.
The secret report written when Kray was held in HMP Wayland in January 1998 was discovered among files released into the National Archives after his death.