Intimate letters and paintings sent between gangland boss Reggie Kray and the wife of a fellow Parkhurst prisoner could fetch over �2000 at auction.

Born-again Christian Carol Kelly, met Reggie, who notoriously ran organised crime in the East End with his twin brother Ronnie in the 1950s and 1960s, when visiting her husband at the prison in 1983.

A series of letters between the two, detailing the thoughts and events that led to the gangster eventually becoming a born-again Christian, will go under the hammer at East Sussex auctioneers Gorringes on February 9.

Reggie and Ms Kelly, who lives in north-west London, became friends after he told her she reminded him of his former wife Frances and they wrote regularly to each other until Carol contracted cancer.

In a subsequent letter to Carol, he said that on hearing this news, he ‘fell to his knees in his cell and prayed for her salvation’.

She said: “He looked like a broken man when I first saw him.

“He told me he made a deal with God that if he saved me, he would dedicate his life to following him.”

The collection includes half a dozen letters including a secret note in which Reggie asked Ms Kelly to contact his brother Charlie.

Two of Reggie’s artworks will also go under the hammer; a signed oil painting of a boxer created for Carol’s son David in 1985 which is expected to fetch up to �1200 and a coloured pencil sketch of himself as a cowboy given to Carol, expected to go for up to �600.

The East End gangster was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969, with a non-parole period of 30 years, after being found guilty of the murder of Jack McVitie.

He died of bladder cancer in 2000, two months after being released from prison on compassionate grounds.

For further information on the auction, visit gorringes.co.uk.