EXCLUSIVE
BRIAN READE
Football star Gary Speed’s suicide left millions devastated, but no one was more broken than the woman who cut down his body and had to carry on without him.
His wife kept hearing how the football world was struggling to come to terms with the shocking loss of an apparently happy-go-lucky, 42-year-old icon who was not long into his dream job of managing his country, Wales.
Louise Speed lost the soulmate she had been with since she was 13 and the father to their two teenage boys.
At 41, she had to pick up the pieces of a world torn apart by, in her words, “sadness, heartache, a sense of abandonment and an anger”.
Mystified about why he had taken his own life, unsurprisingly Louise became extremely depressed in the aftermath of Gary’s suicide in 2011, to the point where she could not get out of bed.
In new book Gary Speed: Unspoken – The Family’s Untold Story, serialised exclusively in the Mirror this week, she reveals she turned to the bottle.
She says: “I did start to drink an awful lot. I didn’t need a drink as soon as I woke up, but I did drink virtually every evening for the first two years.
“It was always wine and I felt it helped numb the pain I was suffering. For a few hours it helped make me forget the terrible event. I was at the lowest point I could possibly reach. I couldn’t function. But I could never have done what Gary did. I could never have given up on my two sons. Which makes me think Gary must have been so ill to do what he did.”
Gary died in the November and Louise, now 48, did not go out properly until the following March, to a friend’s house party.
“I really didn’t feel right putting on a dress and going out. I was the wife of Gary Speed who had hung himself. How could you act normally? People though, generally, were very good. “I just wanted to talk about anything but Gary. But poignantly, when we arrived at the party the first song we heard was Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds. That was mine and Gary’s song. It Gary in 1981 obviously hadn’t been arranged, it just came on. Was it a sign? To be honest it really spooked me out.”
At first she kept expecting Gary to walk in and make everything normal again. If the phone went or she received a text message, she thought it was him.
It was the second year after his death, when everyone who had helped her pull through got their lives back to normal, that she found the toughest.
What kept her going was focusing on her boys – Ed, now 21, and Tommy, 20.
She says: “Hearing them laugh again, having their friends around, helped so much. I’m very proud of them and how they have coped with everything. Their