FOUR WEEKS WAS ALL I HAD TO BE HIS WIFE...
ANDREW Harper’s grieving young widow Lissie told of her utter devastation and how she is now a “mere shadow of the person I once was” in a heartbreaking impact statement.
Twice breaking down in tears, the 29-year-old told the Old Bailey: “That night as I opened the door to the stranger in uniform, everything I had known in my life to be true was robbed away. Every ounce of beautiful peace, gone.”
The childhood sweethearts were married just four weeks before he was brutally snatched away from her.
She said his appalling death had robbed them of their future together, shared dreams of starting a family shattered.
“Need I repeat the devastating details and the cruelty in which this occurred?” she said. “Of the plans that were stolen from us? Should I describe my torment over the children that will never come to be?”
Lissie, her voice choking with emotion, went on: “Four weeks was all I had to call him my husband, four weeks to be called his wife. My life often feels bleak, hopeless, irreparable. My desolate nights bring no rest, no time for reprieve from this utter turmoil.
“Every aspect of my life since Andrew was taken is bitterly different. Every moment of my life before Andrew was taken was imprinted with his love and his presence. A fact in which I alone can only truly understand.
“So not only did these men take my true, beautiful love away from me; not only did they rob a brother, son, uncle and friend from all who love him, but they took our future.
“They took more than one life away that day, they stole the person that I used to be, the happiness that we shared and plans we had made.”
As the court listened in hushed silence, she continued: “Unless you have stood in my shoes, unless you have had the immense misfortune of losing a husband or a wife, a soul mate, true love or beloved partner whom you intended to be with until your dying day, then how is this loss even possible to describe?
“I have used every word in my vocabulary to describe the pain. I have screamed, cried and broken down in fractured defeat.
“I will spend every day of the rest of my life with a hollowness that will never ever be filled. An indescribable reality that no amount of words will ever fully reveal. Yet again I search around for the words to express my heartbreak, yet each description of grief appears inadequate and incomplete.”
She pleaded with Mr Justice Edis: “Please do not let the sacrifice that he was forced and unknowingly made to give stand for nothing. He gave everything. A bitter reality that I must face and endure for the rest of my life.”