Rest of The World - It was the softer weaker boys he targeted...

May 13, 2012

No wonder his death came as such a shock. Gary Speed did not seem like a man who was fixing to die. Married for 15 years to Louise with two sporty sons he loved; on a roll with Wales after winning four out of his last five games as manager of the national team Speed was 42 and still had big ambitions.

Next year I’ll be in the Premiership, he told one of the Welsh back-room staff, and you’re coming with me. He was thinking of the future. Christmas with the family in Dubai; the next weekend, a Ronan Keating charity dinner in London with Louise and a table full of old friends. They would all be on table 11, his old shirt number.

The goalkeeper Steve Harper, a team-mate from their playing days at Newcastle, was expecting to see Speedo that evening. He was going to be at the charity event, too, along with their friend Alan Shearer. With the dinner still a week away, it was Shearer who called Harper that Sunday morning, November 27.

Harper was sitting with a couple of mums watching his son play rugby when his phone rang. It must have been about 10am. You’re not going to believe this... It was a short call as Shearer, one of Speed’s closest friends, had several other calls to make. Harper walked away and burst into tears. He waited until he had got himself together before he went back.

One of the mums said, Are you okay?

Yeah, yeah, he said, I just had some bad news about a friend. It was like being hit by a sledgehammer, Harper told me.

At the inquest in January, Louise Speed described what happened on the night of her husband’s death. She explained how they had exchanged words as they returned home from a night out about something or nothing. I can’t even remember what it was. She’d tried to go out for a drive but Gary had blocked her exit, saying she wasn’t going anywhere. She had gone upstairs and lain on the bed for a few minutes, and then decided to go out anyway to clear my mind [and for] space to think. This time, apparently, he had either not attempted or had not been able to stop her.

She’d got to the top of the road they lived at the end of a long driveway off a country lane and thought, This is silly, so she had driven back, but for one reason or another could not get into the house. The back door was locked and another door was self-locking, so she went back to the car at about 1am.

My children were asleep in the house and I did not want to disturb them. I decided to keep the car running and stay there until I could get hold of someone. I fell asleep and was on and off all night, and it was about 6am.

She’d needed the loo but could not get into the house, so she went to the outside bathroom, and noticed some shed keys were missing. At that point I did wonder if he’d gone to sleep in the shed.

She went to look in the shed, and then the garage. Louise tried and failed several times to get into the garage through the automated door, so she went to the back of the garage. That was when she saw him through the window. He appeared to have hanged himself.

The news of Speed’s death was received with utter disbelief. Steve Harper thought people would be lying if they said they had not, at times, felt anger towards Gary for leaving his family behind, as well as grief. Others, such as Andy Hinchcliffe, who had played with Speed at Everton in the mid-to-late 1990s, speculated that you could convince yourself, in desperate, dark moments, that your family and friends the world, in fact would be better off without you. More than anything, though, everyone who knew him was asking, Why?

There have been many rumours about Speed’s private life since then. Even if any of them were true, they still might not explain Speed’s death. As Harper said, everyone struggled with their marriages at times and never thought of taking their own lives. Dean Saunders, who had roomed with Speed for years when they played for Wales, dismisses the suggestion that he might have been secretly gay. He was not burdened with gambling debts. Had another player fathered one of his children? Well, actually, no; that was just a particularly unpleasant rumour started by an ignorant social networker.

Saunders had spoken to Louise shortly after it happened and felt that she was as baffled as everyone else. I thought I knew him, he said, but I obviously didn’t. Saunders wished he’d had a moment to tell his friend to give his head a shake and think about what he might be doing. He imagined Speed looking at him, going, Yeah, what am I doing?

I sensed something approaching a feeling of betrayal among some of Speed’s friends that he had not felt able to talk to them about whatever might have tormented him. Steve Harper had suffered a bout of depression himself some years ago and had taken anti-depressants for a short while. He felt that Speed would have known he could have confided in him if he needed to. But Harper had never seen even the slightest hint of depression in his friend. If Gary had ever suffered, he was a hell of a good actor.

On the other hand, Carol Speed, Gary’s mother, told the inquest that he was always a glass-half-empty person; certainly no optimist. What had his mother seen that others had missed?

Not many seemed aware that Speed had been a junior in feeder teams for Manchester City. One man, who did not know Speed but had heard his name long before the footballer became famous, immediately believed he knew the answer.

Speed’s death brought unpleasant memories flooding back for the man, who had once been a promising junior with teams affiliated to Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra. He is now a police officer, an experienced detective whose work sometimes brings him into contact with the perpetrators of sex crimes and their victims.

He talked to me at length about his time as a youth footballer.

A court order dating back to a trial 14 years ago prevents the detective from being identified, but his ordeal began after he was spotted around the age of 10 by Barry Bennell, a local football coach and scout for Manchester City and Crewe.

The boy’s parents had been told by Bennell that their son had promise, and could be helped if he stayed at Bennell’s home on the edge of the Peak District some weekends.

Everyone liked Bennell. He was popular, enthusiastic and just a little bit quirky, his home full of things that appealed to children. He kept a monkey in a cage, a pool table, jukeboxes, fruit machines. It was all very seductive. People said he was like the Pied Piper, the way he drew children to him. As the boy now the detective soon discovered, Bennell was a sexual predator who cruelly exploited the children in his charge over more than a decade before he was caught. He would pick on particular boys to abuse and used threats to keep them quiet they would be off the team if anyone knew, and so on. He had sexual relationships with underage girls at the same time, when he was in his thirties.

I heard from one longtime Manchester City associate, whose own son had played in Bennell’s team, that City broke off relations with Bennell after a boy complained that he had been sexually assaulted. Nobody told the police and Bennell had simply moved on and set up shop with Crewe instead, while continuing to abuse. He did not, of course, abuse all the boys in his charge, but the detective I spoke to said he had been told by police at the time that there might have been hundreds. Many were too shy or afraid to speak out. The detective could not bring himself to tell me what Bennell had done to him, but said it was everything you could think of. How often had it happened? More or less every weekend for three or four years.

Bennell had finally been stopped when another boy spoke out after one of Bennell’s regular football trips to Florida. He was initially convicted and imprisoned in Florida, then re-arrested and charged on his return to Britain. In June 1998 he was sentenced to nine years in prison at Chester Crown Court after pleading guilty to 23 offences of indecent assault, attempted buggery and buggery.

The detective had been forced to give up competitive soccer after being plagued by panic attacks and depression. He’d stared into the abyss himself more than once but, through therapy and other help, had turned his life around.

Then came Speed’s death. The detective remembered how Bennell used to refer to Speed quite often as one of his protÃƒÂ©gÃƒÂ©s. The detective was younger than Speed, so their paths had never crossed. Bennell had told him how Speed had also stayed at his home and how much the detective reminded Bennell of Speed. God, you’re just like him, he would say.

Was there something in the past that Speed could not shake off? We approached his family and received a reply from Louise Speed’s lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis, who stated: Whilst Gary Speed knew Mr Bennell through football connections, he was not a Ëœvictim’ and thus played no part in the investigation. The Speed family have been assured that the police investigation at the time was exceptionally thorough and there is no legitimate reason to link Mr Bennell to Mr Speed.

I came across the detective almost by chance, during my research into the connections and associations Speed had made during his early playing days. The detective readily agreed to be interviewed. It must have been of great importance to him to talk, as he told me he had disclosed his own experiences to his supervising officer for the first time as a result of my inquiries. The supervising officer accompanied the detective to our interview.

The detective told me he wanted to talk to me so that people could know the truth about Bennell’s crimes, and the lasting impact of such offences on the lives of the victims. Times have changed, of course, and nowadays anyone working with children is subjected to Criminal Records Bureau checks. But the detective hoped parents would still be alert to the dangers, especially when the grooming behaviour can be so subtle.

He recalled how Bennell had suggested that he and Speed were both his favourites. Bennell had also mentioned Alan Davies, another favourite whom he had coached. Shockingly, Davies committed suicide in 1992. The footballer had signed for Manchester United and set up two goals that won them the 1983 FA Cup final, but his career soon deteriorated and he had ended his days at Swansea (not then in the top division), where he had lived with his wife and daughter.

Davies’ wife had been pregnant with their second child when he went to a remote rural place in 1992, aged 30, and killed himself. The inquest suggested he was depressed by the downward spiral of his career, and there was never any suggestion of childhood abuse. There is no evidence that Gary Speed was a victim of Bennell either. But, at the very least, the fact that Davies, Speed and the badly abused detective had all been coached by Bennell albeit at different times was quite a coincidence. It was certainly enough to make the detective feel compelled to speak out, so that parents may be made aware of the risk to boys in junior teams.

I went to see Ian Brightwell, another former professional footballer who had known both Barry Bennell and Gary Speed. He recalled Bennell as being like an overgrown kid. Brightwell played alongside Speed a few times as a junior and later played against him, early in their professional careers in the 1980s and ‘90s, when Brightwell was at Manchester City and Speed had made his debut at Leeds. I always remember how high he could jump for a header. He came across as modest, with no ego. He just got on with what he needed to do.

Brightwell is still involved with Manchester City now, in corporate hospitality. He had never stayed at Bennell’s house, but remembered all the speculation later, after Bennell’s crimes had been uncovered, about those who had stayed and whether they might have been victims. Speed’s name did not come up.

I was able to track down and talk to Bennell himself. He readily admitted harming the detective, but then, of course, he had been one of the victims Bennell had admitted abusing, at Chester Crown Court in 1998. Bennell said that in common with the detective Speed had stayed overnight at his home.

Cheshire police told me they had interviewed a large number of people during the lengthy and complicated inquiry into Bennell’s abuse. They declined to say whether Speed had been interviewed. Certainly, Speed was not one of the victims on Bennell’s charge sheet.

Bennell categorically denied harming Davies or Speed. I’ll take a lie test, he said. He told me Speed had played for his team only a few times. He claimed, though, that Speed had stayed at his home several times, and told me: If I had abused him, I probably wouldn’t tell you. He said, too, that Speed had been special, meaning, I think, special as a player. After insisting he had only ever abused six boys, and implying that some of them had given exaggerated evidence against him to claim compo (compensation as victims of crime), Bennell did acknowledge that, having completed sex-offender treatment programmes, he understood the lasting impact of what he had done on the lives of his victims and their families.

At the end of our conversation I told Bennell I was going to leave him in peace. There’s no peace now, he said. How can you have peace when you’ve killed somebody? That was an odd thing to say, I thought, after his insistence that he had not abused Alan Davies or Gary Speed. He then seemed to retract or try to change the meaning of that bald statement, as he went on to say: To me, killing someone is what you’ve done to them, because their life’s never the same againÂ¦

In those days, Speed played mostly for Blue Star, a youth feeder team for Manchester City. Pictures of him show a dark-haired lad, with the good looks that would one day be likened to those of a Hollywood star. Most people knew him as Speedo, but he was Gus Gorgeous Gus to his team-mates in the Wales squad.

Ray Hinett, the Blue Star coach at that time, remembered Speed as a hell of a nice lad who kept himself dead right. Hinett’s own son had played for Bennell and he told me how amazed and disappointed he had been when Bennell turned out to be a paedophile he was a great coach, he had so much to offer.

A Manchester City spokeswoman said: Barry Bennell was not an employee of Manchester City although the club was connected to him in his capacity as a Ëœscout’ in youth football at the time in question. The club ceased to deal with Mr Bennell as soon as complaints regarding his alleged inappropriate behaviour emerged.

Crewe Alexandra acknowledged that Bennell had been a part-time scout, but said they knew nothing about his paedophile activities until he was arrested.

Hinett recalled how City’s chief scout just hadn’t rated Speed as a player. Next thing, a chap had come along and said, Do you mind if I take him to Leeds, and that was how Speed’s professional career began. (Bennell claims he was responsible for recommending Speed to a mate at Leeds.) Speed made his league debut aged 19 and was eventually established as part of a formidable midfield, alongside Gordon Strachan, Gary McAllister and David Batty.

As Strachan tells it, Speed got more fan-mail from women than anybody else in the squad. Strachan got the grannies and the under-8s, he said, and Speedo got everyone else. The girls threw themselves at him, but he was not a ducker and diver and he always used to say he would never get married until he was ready to be fully committed.

Strachan believed Speed had worried about whether he would make it as a player in the early days. You either make your mark by 20 or you don’t. Not many players break in at 21.

Was Speed insecure? Time and again in the course of my research, I would hear what an insecure game football was. Players would be fearful of not making it, or in despair if they were not selected. You were not supposed to show weakness, either as a player or a manager. But Leeds hit a winning streak, culminating in the 1992 First Division title and Speed was part of that.

In 1996, the year he married Louise, he moved to Everton. He had supported Everton since childhood and Louise had been his childhood sweetheart. She told the inquest she had known him almost all her life. He had a difficult relationship with the Everton manager Howard Kendall, however, and went on to join Newcastle in 1998 on a Ã‚Â£5.5m transfer. Speed was not the first or last player to face abuse on returning to play a former club, but Everton fans certainly believed he had betrayed them, as their terrace chant suggested: Gary, Gary sh*thouse Speed. This seems to have been the most unpleasant moment in an otherwise uncontroversial career.

Once, he had been involved in an incident on a night out with fellow Wales players during Terry Yorath’s spell as manager in the early 1990s. According to Yorath, the team was holed up at a hotel near Stansted airport, ready to fly overseas the following day. The players went out to a local nightclub, where a young woman kept asking Speed for autographs and finally offered him her breast to sign. The woman’s boyfriend got upset and there was a scuffle involving the boyfriend and three Wales players, which resulted in two of them, including Speed, being held at a police station.

Yorath told me that Speed never looked rough, not even after that night. He was conscious of his appearance and liked to dress well, in expensive designer clothes. In Yorath’s view, it didn’t matter what he wore. I always said you could put him in a five-quid pair of jeans and a T-shirt and he’d look immaculate. That’s the way he was. Speed’s home was fastidious too, apparently; everything was in its place. I wondered if he was something of a perfectionist, perhaps a little rigid with it. Certainly, he had high expectations of himself.

The sports writer John Richardson, who was chosen by Speed to ghostwrite his (unfinished) autobiography, remembered the easy camaraderie between the Welsh team players.

There were antics on the road, of course, but what happened on tour stayed on tour.

Richardson had sometimes ghosted columns for Paul Gascoigne, so he knew about footballers suffering from depression, and that certainly wasn’t how he saw Gary Speed.

Professional football is a sociable world and Speed made many friends.

He played golf regularly with Alan Shearer and Steve Harper.

They would often go on holiday, their last excursion being a boat trip in the south of France last summer, where Speedo was, as usual, in charge of the music. He was always the man to top up your iPod. Perhaps it was on this trip that Speed had disclosed some marital difficulties to Shearer, as Shearer later reported to the inquest.

But Harper saw no tensions between Gary and Louise, and might not have thought too much of it anyway, as all couples have their struggles at times. Harper said: Everybody who didn’t know him would look at him and think what a great professional he was, and he seemed like a really good bloke as well... so that’s why, whether you knew him or not, people can’t comprehend what happened.

Some footballers find it hard when their playing days come to an end, but nobody detected that problem in Speed.

John Richardson had been meeting Speed quite regularly at a pub near his home to tape interviews for his autobiography. They had worked through about three chapters when Speed suddenly announced he was shelving the project, because he didn’t feel he’d achieved enough yet to justify a book. They stayed in touch, however, and Richardson took a call from Speed one afternoon when Speed complained of a problem in the Wales job he was feeling the burden of financial cutbacks and said he was thinking of resigning. I think I’ve had enough of this lot, he said.

Richardson asked where he was and he said he was out shopping in the Trafford Centre with Louise. You do realise, don’t you, said Richardson, that if you resign you’ll be shopping every day with Louise. Speed laughed. You’re right, you’ve made my mind up for me. I’m not resigning.

Speed’s old Wales team-mate Kevin Ratcliffe told me he was sure that the answer to Speed’s death lay in football rather than his private life. He compared Speed’s time as manager with his own experiences as a coach. By the end of the week I’d have headaches, I’d be absolutely shattered. You’re a marriage-guidance counsellor, a financial adviser, this player’s upset, another player’s in trouble with the policeÂ¦ I was just getting a bellyful.

At the inquest, Gary Speed’s mother, Carol, said in a statement that he was a man of few words. She didn’t know why he hadn’t talked, if something was making him unhappy. He had humility; he had been uneasy with the celebrity aspect of his world, being unsure whether to accept an MBE in 2010 because he was worried he hadn’t achieved enough. Was that humility or insecurity? He did not seem to think he justified an autobiography, either.

Carol said the phone call from Louise that Sunday morning had been the worst moment of her life. The night before, Gary and Louise had gone out to a surprise dinner given by their friend Keith Dearling, a financial consultant, for his wife’s birthday. After the meal there had been games of pool and table tennis, which Gary had been determined to win at all costs, according to Dearling’s testimony.

Gary had seemed his normal self. The guests had been merry, though not drunk, and the men had started playing around the swimming pool, trying to throw each other in. Gary went in first, in his jeans and T-shirt, then he tried to throw the others in, and finally the men had all ended up in the water, playing polo. They were still in the pool when the first taxi arrived. The Speeds left at about 12.30am. My wife had Gary’s trousers in the tumble dryer for about 15 minutes, but they were still wet when he got changed and said goodbye.

The Speeds knew the cabbie who drove them home and he told the inquest there was nothing out of the ordinary on the journey. No argument. Gary had asked Louise if she knew who threw him in the pool, but she didn’t. He had not seemed upset.

Louise agreed with the coroner that Speed’s job managing Wales had put a degree of stress on their marriage, as he was spending time away from home, either travelling abroad or staying at a flat in Cardiff. We were going through ups and downs like all couples do and we were working through it, she said. She described her husband as not someone to open up. He was a very private person in a very public role.

The one clue to his intentions was a text he had sent to Louise four days earlier, in which he had referred to suicide. The exact wording was not given to the inquest. The message or messages were paraphrased by Louise. He talked in terms of taking his life and then he moved on about moving forward excited about our journey together and how important the boys and I were to him. It was purely in the context of the ups and downs of our marriage.

The coroner gave a narrative verdict, meaning he could only say what had happened, not why. Speed had died of hanging, but had he really intended to kill himself or was he just making a dramatic gesture? Not many of Speed’s friends believe he died by accident. They believe he meant to do it. They just don’t know why.