I Met The Man With My Dead Husband's Face!

When lilly’s husband tragically took his own life, he ended up saving someone else from beyond the grave.

- Sharon Keeble

Lilly Ross had never been as nervous as she was the day she met Andy Sandness. As she clutched her son Leonard’s hand, she was afraid about how she would feel to see her husband’s face again – except this wasn’t a reunion between two past loves.

Lilly’s beloved husband Rudy was dead, and Andy was the man who had battled back from the brink of death to be given an incredible gift – Rudy’s transplanted face.

‘I felt incredibly proud,’ an emotional Lilly, 21, tells New Idea of the moment she and Andy met in October 2017.

‘I’d been so nervous waiting for that day, because I felt it would be so hard to see Rudy’s face on someone else.

‘But it didn’t look completely like my Rudy because the eyes and cheekbones were different.

‘I immediately felt a deep sense of closure that I had been missing in my life.

‘I was happy that Rudy had helped Andy in such a positive way – it’s a legacy for our son Leonard.’

This incredible story began two days before Christmas in 2006.

Andy, then 21, had reached a breaking point in his life and had been feeling ‘super depressed’ for days.

He grabbed a rifle from his closet and shot himself under the chin.

Immediately, he knew he had made a terrible mistake and he pleaded with a police friend who had come to help, saying: ‘I don’t want to die.’

The attempted suicide left Andy with just two teeth, no lips, a shattered face and little vision in his left eye.

He spent years hidden from the world, ashamed of his appearance.