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What Louise Speed saw when she looked into her garage one November morning in 2011 was a horror scene that 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.

'It's something I will find hard to forgive Gary for, forever'

“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, speaking to the Daily Mirror.

“It’s something I will find hard to forgive Gary for, forever. We were the ones who had to pick up the pieces and what he’d done was grotesque. Everyone asks me why he did it, but I have no answers. And that’s why I will 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.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“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 section 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 a completely 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’d 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 she’d 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

“Seeing that was a lightbulb moment for me, in many ways. 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,” says Louise, now 48.

“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.

“Maybe the mental illness or depression was always there from an early age and it’s been ruminating all his life. If so, us having Gary until he was 42, was maybe a bonus,” she says.

Re-visiting the collection of teenage letters reminded Louise that back then she was his world. They met at Hawarden High School and started dating in their early teens.

(Image: Getty Images)

The talented footballer had been taken up to Leeds, where he would eventually win a League title, as a YTS trainee, but he told Louise in his letters that he was only up there to begin building their life.

He wrote about them having a nice home together and how he was working hard and making sacrifices so all their dreams could come true. She now realises though, that all was not ideal in his head.

“The letter has made me realise that dark thoughts were there from a young age. Very dark thoughts which he wasn’t able to talk about. Maybe something had happened early on which he had kept to himself,” she says.

During the trial of paedophile football coach Barry Bennell in February, a victim pointed out that Gary had been one of four boys he’d coached who’d killed themselves.

'I don't want to give Bennell any publicity'

Although Gary’s parents said he’d been interviewed by police about Bennell and made no allegations against him 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.

(Image: Mike Hewitt / Allsport)

“He was low at different times and when I asked what was wrong he’d reply that he was just tired. Looking back I wonder if it was something else. Maybe saying he was tired was masking some things? I’m not sure. Mental illness can remain hidden even from the person.

“Maybe there was something within Gary for most of his life but he was able to mask the reality. I think the adrenaline of football helped in this.”

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 first thing I'd say is 'what do you think you've achieved''

“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 after these horrendous seven years if she could somehow speak to him?

“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?”

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.