By CAROLINE GRAHAM, The Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 22:00 09 September 2006

Rock legend Eric Clapton received a heartbreaking love letter from his dead son just hours after the child's funeral, it was revealed last night.

Four-year-old Conor, who died in 1990 when he fell from the 53rd floor of a New York skyscraper, wrote his first letter to his father days before the accident.

The boy and his mother, Clapton's former girlfriend Lory Del Santo, posted the letter to Clapton in London - but before it was delivered, Conor was dead, killed after a cleaner left a window open in the Manhattan flat Del Santo was renting.

Details of the secret letter, and previously unseen video of Clapton with Conor, were shown when Del Santo appeared on an American television show.

The Italian model said: "The baby had learned to write a few words and he said to me, "Oh mummy, I want to write a letter to daddy, what shall I write?" I told him, "Well, write, I love you". He wrote that and we posted it like a regular letter.

"After Conor died, Eric and I arrived in London for the funeral. I was there when Eric received his mail just after the funeral and he opened it up and it was Conor's letter. That is a moment I cannot forget."

Clapton, 61, who has since remarried, now has three young children. He wrote the award-winning song Tears in Heaven in tribute to Conor.

The film that Del Santo, 45, unveiled on ABC's Primetime news programme has been locked away for 15 years.

The tapes show Conor playing with a miniature guitar and dancing to the Bob Dylan song Knocking On Heaven's Door.

She said: "I am the only one with tapes of Conor as he was. For years I could not bring myself to look at them. It was too painful. I kept them locked away. Now I want to remember how he lived, not how he died."

Conor is buried in Clapton's home town of Ripley in Surrey.