Out of Play
Gary Speed’s widow speaks of his suicide for first time and reveals his torment from age 17
What Louise Speed saw when she looked into her garage one November morning in 2011 would haunt her for the rest of her days.
Gary, her childhood sweetheart, beloved husband, father of her two sons and a footballing icon, had hanged himself with a cable, and on the instructions of the emergency services she walked in and cut him down.
When paramedics arrived at their Cheshire home Louise was shaking, staring at her husband’s body, screaming at them “in hope and desperation” to resuscitate him, even though she knew that the love of her life was gone.
She hadn’t seen it coming. Nobody had. And almost seven years on she still can’t comprehend the act that devastated her family and shook the football world to its core.
“There’s never a day goes by that the memory of it doesn’t take my breath away. That scene was like a horror film. I wish there was an operation which could take your memory out and obliterate it from my mind,” says Louise.
“It’s something I will find hard to forgive Gary for. We were the ones who had to pick up the pieces and what he’d done was grotesque.
“Everyone asks why he did it but I have no answers. That’s why I’ll never have any closure.”
The day before he died had been a normal Saturday. The boys, 14-year-old Ed and 13-year-old Tom had been playing football and Gary, then the 42-year-old manager of Wales, had gone to record BBC’s Football Focus.
He was in high spirits, looking forward to the party that night at their nearby friends’ home, at which he had a great time.
“If someone had told me during that day what was going to happen that night I’d have been so shocked I’d have said Gary needed to be in some secure unit.
“But he was his normal self. There was no hint of what would happen,” says Louise sitting in the lounge of her large modern detached home, struggling with her emotions as she recalls the horrific night that tore her life apart.
A hint at the deeper turmoil Gary was enduring emerged recently though from an unexpected source.
While she was helping Gary’s journalist friend John Richardson write new book Gary Speed Unspoken: The Family’s Untold Story – serialised exclusively in the Mirror this week – she stumbled on a letter he sent to her mother’s home when he was a 17-year-old at Leeds United.
It confirmed her deepest suspicions. Gary had been ill for a very long time.
She couldn’t remember seeing the letter and had never talked to Gary about it. But the weight of those words written by his teenage hand, and what they portended, were a revelation. As she now says, it spoke for itself in black and white…
Dear Louise,
I don’t really know what to say. I have been thinking about finishing at Leeds, I’ve also been thinking of other things which I won’t say. I’m so depressed. I’m just going to go to sleep now and hope I never wake up. I love you so much, I will always love you. I don’t know what else to say except you might see me sooner than you think, or otherwise. You never leave my mind, nothing else seems to matter anymore, I love you more than you can imagine.
Gary xxx
Louise, now 48, says: “Seeing that was a lightbulb moment for me. It answers an awful lot about why he did what he did. It’s not something a normal 17-year-old would write, is it? Or not a well one. It seems to say it all really, when you consider how he ended his life.
“If he had a mental illness then he probably had it from an early age.
“Maybe Gary’s problems were a time-bomb waiting to explode.”
Re-visiting the letters reminded Louise that she was his world back then.
They met at Hawarden High School and started dating in their early teens.
The talented footballer had been taken up to Leeds United as a YTS trainee but he told Louise in his letters that he was only there to begin building their life. He wrote of them having a nice home and how he was working hard and making sacrifices so all their dreams could come true. Louise now realises all was not ideal in his head.
“The letter has made me realise dark thoughts were there from a young age,” she says.
“Very dark thoughts which he wasn’t able to talk about. Maybe something had happened early on which he had kept to himself.”
During the trial of paedophile football coach Barry Bennell in February, a victim pointed out Gary had been one of four boys he had coached who had killed themselves.
Although Gary’s parents said he had been interviewed by police and made no allegations, I ask Louise if this could have had anything to do with the secret he was keeping to himself?
“I don’t want to give Bennell any publicity. All I’ll say is that Gary was obviously struggling with something at the age of 17,” she says. “He was low at different times and when I asked what was wrong he’d reply he was just tired. Maybe saying he was tired was masking some things?”
When news came through of Gary’s death the shock and sadness were shared to an unusual degree by the wider world. Because here was a genuine, modest man who seemed to have it all.
And who was so loved and respected.
“Yes, there was so much love out there for him and that’s why the impact it has left is almost indescribable. It rips apart a large part of you which you can never replace because what happened was unnatural,” says Louise.
“Sometimes when I see homeless guys on the street I think, ‘What is it that keeps them going?’ They have nothing. Gary had everything.
“That’s when I realise he must have been ill because human nature is all about survival. The irony is that Gary didn’t have a lot of time for people who got depressed when they had so much going for them.”
I ask what she would say to Gary if she could somehow speak to him? She replies: “The first thing I’d say is, ‘What do you think you’ve achieved, and can you explain it to me, the boys and your parents?’ And I’m sure he wouldn’t know. I’m sure he’d say, ‘I must have been ill’.
“But maybe he didn’t realise. And if he didn’t realise he was ill then how could any of us around him have known?”
- If you are having problems, you can call the Samaritans, 24/7, on 116 123.
Gary Speed: Unspoken – The Family’s Untold Story, by John Richardson and published by Sport Media, is on sale from Thursday, September 20 priced £18.99. Louise Speed is not receiving any proceeds from the book. At her request, we are making a donation to the Heads Together campaign.
TOMORROW: THAT TERRIBLE DAY, TURNING TO THE BOTTLE AND HOW MY BOYS GOT ME THROUGH
Glittering career of football hero
Gary Speed was born in Mancot, North Wales, and supported Everton as a boy.
The midfielder signed as a trainee at Leeds on leaving school in 1988 and made his first team debut at the age of 19. He was a key member of the title-winning side in 1992.
He married childhood sweetheart Louise in 1996, and they had two children, Thomas and Edward.
That year the midfielder made his dream move to Everton.
He signed for Newcastle United for £5.5m in 1998, where he stayed for four years before moving to Bolton.
He ended his playing career at Sheffield United, and started his managerial career there in 2010.
That same year he was awarded an MBE. He became Wales manager in December 2010 and was in the role until his tragic death.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine on Thursday with explosions heard soon after across the country and its foreign minister warning a “full-scale invasion” was underway.
Weeks of intense diplomacy and the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia failed to deter Putin, who had massed between 150,000 and 200,000 troops along the borders of Ukraine.
“I have made the decision of a military operation,” Putin said in a surprise television announcement that triggered immediate condemnation from US President Joe Biden and sent global financial markets into turmoil.
Shortly after the announcement, explosions were heard in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and several other cities, according to AFP correspondents.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his address to the nation at the Kremlin in Moscow on February 21, 2022. Alexey NIKOLSKY / Sputnik / AFP
Putin called on Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms and justified the operation by claiming the government was overseeing a “genocide” in the east of the country.
The Kremlin had earlier said rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine had asked Moscow for military help against Kyiv.
The extent of Thursday’s attacks was not immediately clear, but Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the worst-case scenario was playing out.
“Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes,” Kuleba tweeted.
“This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win. The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.”
Biden immediately warned of “consequences” for Russia and that there would be a “catastrophic loss of life and human suffering”.
NATO’s chief condemned Russia’s “reckless and unprovoked attack” on Ukraine.
Putin’s move came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made an emotional appeal late on Wednesday night to Russians not to support a “major war in Europe”.
Speaking Russian, Zelensky said that the people of Russia were being lied to about Ukraine.
Zelensky said he had tried to call Putin but there was “no answer, only silence”, adding that Moscow now had around 200,000 soldiers near Ukraine’s borders.
Earlier on Wednesday the separatist leaders of Donetsk and Lugansk sent separate letters to Putin, asking him to “help them repel Ukraine’s aggression”, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The two letters were published by Russian state media and were both dated February 22.
Their appeals came after Putin recognised their independence and signed friendship treaties with them that include defence deals.
– ‘Moment of peril’ –
Putin had for weeks defied a barrage of international criticism over the crisis, with some Western leaders saying he was no longer rational.
His announcement of the military operation came ahead of a last-ditch summit involving European Union leaders in Brussels planned for Thursday.
The 27-nation bloc had also imposed sanctions on Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu and high-ranking figures including the commanders of Russia’s army, navy and air force, another part of the wave of Western punishment after Putin sought to rewrite Ukraine’s borders.
The United Nations Security Council met late Wednesday for its second emergency session in three days over the crisis, with a personal plea there by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to Putin going unheeded.
“President Putin, stop your troops from attacking Ukraine, give peace a chance, too many people have already died,” Guterres said.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned that an all-out Russian invasion could displace five million people, triggering a new European refugee crisis.
Before Putin’s announcement, Ukraine had urged its approximately three million citizens living in Russia to leave.
“We are united in believing that the future of European security is being decided right now, here in our home, in Ukraine,” President Zelensky said during a joint media appearance with the visiting leaders of Poland and Lithuania.
Western capitals said Russia had amassed 150,000 troops in combat formations on Ukraine’s borders with Russia, Belarus and Russian-occupied Crimea and on warships in the Black Sea.
Ukraine has around 200,000 military personnel, and could call up to 250,000 reservists.
Moscow’s total forces are much larger — around a million active-duty personnel — and have been modernised and re-armed in recent years.
– High cost of war –
But Ukraine has received advanced anti-tank weapons and some drones from NATO members. More have been promised as the allies try to deter a Russian attack or at least make it costly.
Shelling had intensified in recent days between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists — a Ukrainian soldier was killed on Wednesday, the sixth in four days — and civilians living near the front were fearful.
Dmitry Maksimenko, a 27-year-old coal miner from government-held Krasnogorivka, told AFP that he was shocked when his wife came to tell him that Putin had recognised the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves.
“She said: ‘Have you heard the news?’. How could I have known? There’s no electricity, never mind internet. I don’t know what is going to happen next, but to be honest, I’m afraid,” he said.
In a Russian village around 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the border, AFP reporters saw military equipment including rocket launchers, howitzers and fuel tanks mounted on trains stretching for hundreds of metres.
Russia has long demanded that Ukraine be forbidden from ever joining the NATO alliance and that US troops pull out from Eastern Europe.
Speaking to journalists, Putin on Tuesday set out a number of stringent conditions if the West wanted to de-escalate the crisis, saying Ukraine should drop its NATO ambition and become neutral.
Washington Wednesday announced sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Germany had earlier effectively suspended by halting certification.
Australia, Britain, Japan and the European Union have all also announced sanctions.
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