Gary Speed's wife has revealed details of a love letter the former Wales manager wrote when he was 17 and spoke of wanting to 'just go to sleep and hope I never wake up.'

The contents of the previously unknown letter are detailed in a new book 'Gary Speed Unspoken' which contains four chapters by Louise.

The book, which WalesOnline is serialising over the next three days, also has tributes from a number of Speed's former team-mates, including leading Wales stars, who express shock at the tragedy which happened seven years ago.

Displaying incredible courage, Louise has addressed a number of matters in the book.

She explains how two years after that terrible day which shocked the football world she started looking through some of the letters Speed used to write to her as a teenager.

Because of what happened, she explains how one suddenly stood out for her as 'a lightbulb moment.'

At the time of the letter, Speed was making the grade with Leeds United, but spoke about missing Louise and home in Wales.

Show Player

"To try to help we would write letters to one another. I know he really looked forward to seeing what I had written to him," says Louise.

"There were no mobile phones then so you couldn’t text one another, so the best way of keeping in touch was by sending letters.

"I looked through some of his letters he had written to me in his early days at Leeds.

"There was another letter I discovered which read as follows:

Gary's letter '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'."

Show more

The letter clearly demonstrates the special love Gary and Louise had for one another from a young age.

She writes: "Considering what eventually happened to him, this letter really stood out – as anyone reading it now can see.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

"When I found it, this letter didn’t have a stamp on the envelope so I don’t know if Gary actually posted it. Or it could have been with another one in which he told me not to take any notice of this letter. But you can tell that he was very dependent on my letters.

"Maybe something had happened early on which he had kept to himself? I can’t remember reading this particular letter at the time at all. Or maybe I knew I was seeing him very soon after it arrived, so I could have been thinking ‘how ridiculous’ or whatever.

"I honestly don’t know. Maybe as a 17-year-old I hadn’t really taken on board any deeper meaning in the letter.

"But re-reading it, the letter seems to say it all really when you consider how he ended things. Maybe Gary was a timebomb waiting to explode at some point.

"Looking at his letter now is like a lightbulb moment in many ways. It answers an awful lot about why he did what he did.

"Maybe the mental illness or depression, however you want to describe it, was always there from an early age and returned at times. It seems that no-one knew what was going on in his head at times.

"The letter when you go over it again is very succinct – it says a lot in not so many words. 'I’m just going to go to sleep now and I hope I never wake up' is not something a normal 16-year-old or 17-year-old would write, is it? Or not a well one.

"These letters showed that at the time I was his world."

The new book is being serialised over the next three days by Wales Online.

Gary Speed: Unspoken - The Family's Untold Story, by John Richardson and published by Sport Media, is priced £18.99 and on sale Thursday September 20. Louise Speed is not receiving any proceeds from the book. At her request, we are making a donation to the Heads Together campaign.