The Two Burials of Celestine Schneider

My maternal grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Celestine Schneider, died of tuberculosis at the age of 18 in 1922. That’s her picture above. I think she looks something like my grandmother. Sadly, her story did not end there. I’d heard elements of this tale from my mom but I didn’t know the whole story until one of my siblings uncovered it.

About a month after she died and was buried grave robbers dug a neat hole and removed her body from its coffin. The story that I had been told was that her body had been stolen by a necrophile. I had wondered about medical research. The truth was apparently far stranger and it involves a man named Harry Brenn.

Harry Brenn, a veteran of World War I, had married a German “war bride” and had an infant son. He owned a garage. On the same night as Celestine’s body disappeared, Mr. Brenn had told police a bizarre story of being kidnapped at gunpoint by six men, carried off in a car, and later escaping. Around midnight that night his garage burned to the ground. In the cinders of the garage the charred remnants of a body were found.

Initially, it was assumed that Brenn had died in the fire. Closer examination of the charred remains determined they weren’t Brenn’s at all but belonged to Celestine. Brenn’s wife, Gertrude Brenn, was arrested on a charge of grave robbing but later released. The police finally concluded that Brenn had stolen Celestine’s body and burned it and the garage in some sort of insurance fraud scheme. There had been several similar and widely reported insurance fraud cases in Missouri at the time.

Apparently, Celestine’s story made national news. I’ve seen repetitions of it from upstate New York to Florida, from the East Coast to the Rockies. You can read one of them here. The second facing page is here. Don’t miss the lurid illustration on the facing page. They just don’t make newspapers like that any more.

After the medical examination the charred remains of Celestine’s body were cremated and I have found no record of what became of them. She is not listed as having been buried in Hope Cemetery, her original resting place, so I wonder if her poor ashes were just dumped in some nameless pit.

From time to time in life I’ve wondered if my family were really just like everyone else’s and our predisposition to look at everything as a story just made our history look different. Then I come across something like the story of poor Celestine Schneider’s two burials and wonder if my family isn’t pretty different after all.