Armed robber-turned novelist Linda Calvey: ‘I slapped Myra Hindley in jail'

Telegraph

a day ago

Linda Calvey has led a succession of extraordinary lives. There was the 19-year-old Linda Welford, so naive she was reluctant to attend a party for the release of armed robber Mickey Calvey – who would eventually become her husband – because she thought every criminal was ugly, like in 'all the films'. Then came the freshly bereaved widow – Mickey shot dead by police mid-raid – who set out to avenge him by becoming a sawn-off-toting gangster herself. When she was finally caught, there was then the Calvey who suddenly acquired a conscience, realising the terror of her victims only while staring down the barrel of a gun.
Now 77, she is a novelist and great-grandmother of eight in Chigwell, Essex, looking back on it all with as much amazement as the rest of us. 'I can't believe this woman that I was, that I did the things I did,' she tells me on a video call from a friend's sofa. It is all so astonishing that even a six-part podcast – the BBC's new series of Gangster – struggles to squeeze it in.
The tale starts with 'love at first sight' in a bar in 1968, when Mickey was on day release. They married with an armed guard – while he was doing another stretch – and had two children, Neil and Melanie. Then, in 1978, he was part of a gang attempting to rob a security van collecting the takings from a supermarket in south London. He was the only one who failed to make it into the getaway car and was shot dead by the Flying Squad.
To this day, Calvey is convinced he was killed unlawfully and is still working on getting hold of papers to prove it. But she was soon seduced by another member of the group, Ronnie Cook, a close friend of the Kray twins, who 'treated me like I was a princess'. He bought her a 'wardrobe of fur coats' and whisked her off to Vegas. He also presented her with a diamond and ordered that she place on her ring finger, despite the fact he would remain married to another woman.
Calvey tells Livvy Haydock, presenter of the podcast – for which Calvey says she was open to any questions and was paid nothing – that he declared: 'That's the 'you belong to me' ring. You belong to me now.'
Calvey was under no illusions. She recalls an associate telling her of finding a dead body in Cook's boot. He also went on to boast of killing more than a dozen people and said to Calvey he claimed responsibility for making her a widow – deliberately locking Mickey out of the getaway car. 'You killed your husband,' he stated. 'I fell in love with you when I saw you on the doorstep, and you sealed his fate.'
Cook ended up with a 16-year sentence for attempted armed robbery. But while at Her Majesty's pleasure, he appointed another bandit to watch over Calvey. It did not go to plan. Instead, Calvey had an affair with her minder … and became an armed robber herself.
This she attributes to going 'mad' in the wake of her husband's death. 'Prior to that, even though I was married to a robber, I wouldn't have walked in a shop and picked a sweet up. And that applies to me now. It's just totally alien. The day Mickey died, my brain clicked.'
She became a woman on a mission. 'I just felt, 'I've got to take over from him'. He died trying to give my kids the best and give us a good life.'
Calvey claims to have no idea how many hold-ups she took part in in the 1980s, or how much cash she made off with. 'Not really, no. It was sort of easy come, easy go.' When I press her, she estimates a dozen, potentially totalling £1m in today's money.
She revelled in the gang's madcap gambits. If there was nowhere to loiter to case the joint, they erected a temporary bus stop. 'Sometimes we'd turn up and people would be queuing, going, 'Well, where's the bloody bus then?' It was a bit like Keystone Cops, but it worked.'
The scales fell from her eyes as she lay on the pavement with a policeman's gun aimed at her. 'The day I was arrested, I thought, 'Oh my God, how horrific is this?' And I totally clicked back. I just can't explain what happened to my brain.'
There is no real explanation, either, for why Calvey chose the life she did. Both her parents were straightforward grafters – father Charlie a blacksmith and mother Eileen selling wigs on a market stall (donning wild hairpieces during jobs became one of Calvey's trademarks). Of her eight siblings, only brother Anthony got caught in a life of crime, coincidentally convicted at the same time as her for conspiring to rob post offices.
But Calvey says she took her seven-year sentence on the chin and was determined to return to the straight and narrow. Upon release in 1989, she started working on a legal business with her sister, making bespoke curtains with the skills she had learnt on a course at HMP Cookham Wood in Kent.
Only 18 months later, her old life came back with a vengeance. Cook was on day release and standing in Calvey's kitchen when he was shot in the head. It was not for nothing that she earned the nickname the Black Widow, after the male-eating female spider. As one CID officer put it: 'Every bloke she's ever had dealings with is either dead or in prison.'
A neighbour heard her shout, 'Kneel!' before Cook was found dead on his knees. Calvey insists she was yelling the name of her son, Neil. The prosecution argued she had recruited rapist Daniel Reece to enact the execution, but after he lost his nerve, she fired the fatal shot herself. Reece said the same. She was convicted alongside him.
It is the one crime she still denies, claiming Reece did it alone. She admits she was only with Cook out of terror of leaving. 'I sort of just thought, 'Well, this is my lot, I suppose'.' And after his death: 'I was relieved, even though I had no part of it.'
A court reporter tells the podcast that Calvey and Reece were in a relationship and were canoodling in the dock. She is unaware of this and refutes it entirely. 'It's ludicrous. That never happened,' she tells me.
More ludicrous than marrying the man who murdered your lover and tried to pin it on you, I ask. Yes, Calvey and Reece went on to wed while both were in prison – with two other murderers as bridesmaids. Ex-detective Colin Sutton says: 'It's Stockholm syndrome on acid really, isn't it?'
'Anybody sitting out here would say so,' she concedes today, insisting it was initially only as a means to continue getting legal visits from Reece. Although she quickly had second thoughts, other inmates had become so excited at the prospect of a wedding, she decided to go ahead with it. The couple saw each other once afterwards, before getting divorced.
Calvey was locked up for 18-and-a-half years, during which she rebuffed proposals of marriage from Charles Bronson and Reggie Kray and rubbed shoulders with Myra Hindley ('Really, really intelligent,' she tells the podcast) and Rose West ('Quite thick').
When she came across Hindley in the laundry at Cookham Wood, she tells me, she was disgusted that a child killer could be standing there singing along to the radio. 'And without realising it, I just walked up to her and went, slap! She said, 'I could get you shipped back to Holloway for that.' And I went, 'Holloway holds no fears for me.' But she never said anything.' Calvey was later ordered by the governor to dye Hindley's hair after the Moors Murderer selected her from a list, knowing she had done a hairdressing course.
'I feel very, very bitter,' she says of her long sentence, adding that she hopes an ageing detective might decide to finally 'tell the truth' about how evidence in her case was tampered with.
She is now a widow for the second time (George Ceasar, whom she married in 2009 and who passed away in 2015, was her first non-criminal partner), and a 'bona fide author'. She is working on her seventh book, following the release of her autobiography, The Black Widow, in 2019, and subsequent crime novels including The Locksmith (2021), The Game (2022) and Faith (2024). She hopes her work will inspire readers to keep their noses clean.
'There is no glamour in crime. That is why I drummed into my children, 'Don't follow me and your father.' And both of them didn't. My son goes, 'Well, I'm a dustman. That's nothing special.' I said, 'But it's an honest job.''
As for herself, Calvey imagines a parallel life, if crime had not taken hold. 'This sounds crazy,' she says, 'but I think I would have liked to have gone into law. And I think I would have been quite good.'
Gangster: The Story of the Black Widow is on BBC Sounds