 On 13 April 1962, Kirchherr met the group at Hamburg Airport, telling them that Sutcliffe had died a few days before. Sutcliffe's mother flew to Hamburg with the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, and returned to Liverpool with her son's body. Sutcliffe's father did not hear of his son's death for three weeks, as he was sailing to South America, although the family arranged for a padre to tell him when he docked in Buenos Aires. After Sutcliffe's death, Kirchherr wrote a letter to his mother, apologising for being too ill to attend his funeral in Liverpool and saying how much she and Lennon missed him: "Oh, Mum, he (Lennon) is in a terrible mood now, he just can 't believe that darling Stuart never comes back. [He's] just crying his eyes out ... John is marvellous to me, he says that he knows Stuart so much and he loves him so much that he can understand me."
