Obituary: Face transplant recipient Connie Culp

Connie Culp was the longest-surviving recipient of a face transplant and became an advocate for those with disfiguring facial injuries

On December 10, 2008, eight surgeons replaced 80 per cent of Connie Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had recently died. The 22-hour operation was the first near-total face transplant in the US and only the fourth in the world. Culp had already undergone more than 30 reconstructive operations, including surgery that fashioned cheekbones from her ribs and a new upper jaw using one of her leg bones. She had also endured countless skin grafts from her thighs. Until the transplant surgery she was unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own or smell, and “it felt like my face was sliding off”, she said.

Culp’s ordeal began in 2004 when she was shot by her husband, Thomas Culp, with a 12-bore shotgun at the bar they owned in Hopedale, Ohio. Thinking he had killed her, he then turned the gun on himself. Astonishingly both survived, but while Thomas lost only a few teeth and some vision in his left eye, most of Connie’s face was destroyed.

The shot shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye; hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face and she needed a tube into her windpipe to breathe. She recalled that two months later Risal Djohan, a plastic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, made no promises but said he would do his best to “fix me”.

Connie Culp before and after her transplant surgery. Picture: AP

After the surgery, for the first time in four years she could drink from a cup, talk, smile and smell. Although she remained almost blind — her right eye was prosthetic and the vision in her left eye was severely limited — she learnt braille and slowly began letting friends visit her, having led a reclusive existence since the shooting.

She missed the simple pleasure of mowing the lawn but also spoke of her joy at being able to smell soap. She needed to take drugs every day to prevent her immune system from rejecting the transplant (these, however, made her more susceptible to infections). A talking pill box would dispense her medicine; she also had a talking alarm clock and a clothes scanner that told her the colour of her outfits. “Otherwise I’d be going out with odd socks on,” she said.

She insisted: “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I want to be treated the same as I was my whole life, before the shooting. After all, if I dwell on the past I’ll have no life to live.”

She could recall every detail of the night she was shot. “He was jealous, and money was tight with the bar. Sometimes he would break things in the house when he’d get mad. And then that night something just snapped … I remember him lifting the gun and what he says to me and then firing. It’s an image that will never leave me.”

Connie Culp before her husband shot her. Picture: AP

She publicly forgave her husband, declaring her love for him at his trial for attempted murder and telling the judge after he was jailed for seven years that she would wait for him. However, in 2009 on an episode of Oprah, she said she no longer planned to after her daughter asked her, “Mum, what kind of example would you be setting for me if you went back to the man who shot your face off?” Before his release in 2011 she finalised their divorce.

She was born Connie Wagoner in 1963 and grew up in eastern Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. She and her husband ran a painting and wallpapering business in the small town of Unionport. The couple bought the restaurant and bar in 2004. One 2010 profile of Culp in The Plain Dealer described her as having been “a hard-working, fun-loving, Harley-riding, thumb-wrestling, small-town Ohio woman”. Her children, Steven and Alicia, who frequently acted as her guides after the shooting, survive her.

Culp was the longest-living recipient of a facial transplant to date; since her operation about 40 such surgeries have been performed. For two years she knew little about her donor, but the family revealed her name in 2010: Anna Kasper, from Lakewood, Ohio, had died aged 44 of a heart attack.

Culp sought to foster acceptance of those with disfiguring injuries, often giving interviews about her experience. Once, after hearing a child call her a monster, she pulled out her driver’s licence. The child was baffled by the photograph of a pretty brunette with hazel eyes and a wide smile.

One of her greatest joys was playing with her grandson, Maddox. After one operation Culp pulled down her face mask and showed him the changes. “He said, ‘OK Grandma’,” and happily climbed on to the bed next to her, she remembered. “Don’t you wish all people was like kids?”

Connie Culp, transplant recipient and campaigner, was born on March 26, 1963. She died of an infection on July 29, 2020, aged 57

The Times