Remains may be man missing since 1970
Man may never have left hospital he vanished from.
Russell Brunner disappeared from Massillon State Hospital 50 years ago, never to be seen again.
Officials told Brunner’s family he had walked away from the mental hospital, a place that had been home for most of his lifetime.
Located beyond the southern limits of the city during its heyday, the institution was its own community. More than 3,000 patients lived there at any given time, growing vegetables and raising livestock on a thousand acres of farmland.
Truth is, Brunner may have never left at all.
He may have hanged himself in a pig barn on the hospital grounds. A body was found there in 1972, a yearand-a-half after Brunner vanished.
Then-Stark County Coroner Gus Shaheen apparently suspected the skeletal remains were Brunner’s, but never put a name to the body. The bones, identified as “unknown male” on a state death certificate, were buried across the street from the hospital in an unmarked grave at Massillon City Cemetery.
Plot 488, section C, at the base of a hillside. Today, it’s overgrown with saplings.
In 1972, Shaheen noted the man who hanged himself was most likely a state hospital patient, but he stopped short of identifying the remains as Brunner, despite several similarities:
■ The skeleton was that of a white male in his 30s; Brunner was a white male who was 31 when he disappeared.
■ State hospital-issued items were found on the body; Brunner had been a patient at Massillon State since the late 1950s.
■ The remains were found in a pig barn; Brunner had worked in the pig barn.
■ The skeleton was 70 inches long, and had probably stretched while hanging; Brunner stood about 5-foot-8.
■ The skeletal remains and Brunner both had light brown hair.
“When Gus Shaheen called me ... I kept asking him repeatedly, ‘Is this my brother?’” one of Brunner’s sisters, Rena Kindler, recalled last week during an interview for this story. “And he kept saying, ‘We can’t prove that.’”
Russell Brunner was the seventh of Karl and Loucretia Brunner’s 14 children. He was born in 1938 and grew up in the Maximo area of Washington Twp., where the family had a house on a couple of acres.
His parents committed Brunner to the state hospital for the first time when he was about 13 years old. His oldest sister, Rita Todd, recalled he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She said he was hallucinating and that her parents feared for the safety of their other children.
Except for holiday visits home, Brunner lived at Massillon State his entire adult life. His mother and sisters visited regularly, even weekly, and made sure he had a supply of new shirts and jeans.
Rena Kindler, eight years younger than Brunner, said she and her siblings visited their brother at the hospital for summer picnics. It wasn’t until she was older that she realized he was a patient in an insane asylum.
A family tree created in 1983 notes Brunner “disappeared from Massillon State Hospital” on Aug. 16, 1970.
When hospital officials told Brunner’s family he had disappeared, his sisters weren’t too worried. After all, he’d wandered away before — usually to a store in Massillon in search of a bottle of pop.
“He’d say, ‘I’m from Massillon State Hospital, I’d like a pop,’” Kindler said.
Typically, the store owner would contact the hospital and the staff would retrieve him.
But this time, there was no call and Brunner didn’t come back. Kindler even recalled their mother getting a letter from the hospital a day after he vanished, indicating Brunner had been discharged.
Todd doesn’t remember the letter, but said she talked to law enforcement investigators several times about her brother’s disappearance. She never got a definite answer.
No one in the family saw Brunner after 1970. He didn’t surface when their mother, Loucretia, died in 1976. Same thing when their father, Karl, died in 1984. In their father’s obituary, the family listed Brunner among deceased relatives.
“I know one thing, he’s never been around,” Todd said.
In December, The Canton Repository published an investigation of former Coroner Gus Shaheen’s 18 years in office. One story briefly mentioned a case that grabbed Kindler’s attention — the unknown male found hanging in the Massillon State Hospital pig barn in 1972.
Kindler contacted the Repository, wondering if there was any way to prove the body was her brother.
The newspaper obtained the coroner’s report and death certificate for the unknown male, tracked his body to Massillon Cemetery, spoke to the funeral director who handled the burial, reviewed portions of the coroner’s file that are, by law, open to journalists, and dug up old newspaper clippings.
Some details about Brunner’s life don’t mesh perfectly with facts about the body found in the pig barn:
■ Kindler said her brother had a complete smile. The skeleton was missing many teeth, including the front teeth. However, the dental examination in the coroner’s file noted some teeth could have fallen out while the body decomposed.
■ Brunner’s sisters didn’t know him to smoke. A tobacco pouch and rolling papers were found on the body.
■ Kindler said Brunner was apprehensive about plans to close the hospital’s pig farm. But at the same time he’d never talked about suicide, and was excited to meet the baby she and her husband planned to adopt. The man who died in the pig barn hanged himself in the loft with a wire coat hanger.
Current Stark County Coroner Anthony Bertin informally reviewed the file and the facts gathered by the Repository, and came to one conclusion about the identity of the unknown male.
“I think from the circumstantial evidence surrounding this case that it is most likely Russell Brunner,” Bertin said.
To know for sure, the family would have to exhume the body, but the bones probably have deteriorated too much to obtain DNA needed to compare to Brunner’s living relatives. Facial reconstruction would be another option, if the skull is in good condition, Bertin said.
Since Shaheen ruled the death a suicide, and there are no indications of foul play, the family would need a court order and have to pay to exhume and test the remains, Bertin said.
But there’s one piece of evidence that, if true, would seem to clinch the case.
A Highway Patrol report kept in the coroner’s file noted a brown T-shirt, blue jeans and black tennis shoes were found with the bones. But Rita Todd vividly recalls investigators telling her about another clothing item not mentioned in the 1972 report.
“There was a belt at his feet with ‘Russell Brunner’ stamped on it,” she said. “That’s why they called mom.”
Todd said authorities offered to give Brunner’s family the remains, but their mother refused. She didn’t want the body if they wouldn’t guarantee it was her son.