Tom Schweich

Schweich was re-elected last November to a second term as auditor. Schweich announced last month that he would seek the Republican nomination for governor in 2016 — a race that had already fostered unusually bitter in-party conflict despite the primary being more than a year away. Schweich graduated from Clayton High School, Yale University and the Harvard University School of Law. He served as an intern for then-U.S. Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., and later joined Danforth at the Bryan Cave law firm downtown, where Schweich became a partner. Schweich long had been close politically to Danforth. When Danforth led the federal investigation in 1999 into the mass deaths at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, he chose Schweich for chief of staff. He also worked with Danforth during the former senator’s service in 2004-05 as American ambassador to the United Nations, then with the U.S. State Department as a top official with the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. Schweich returned to Clayton and to Bryan Cave in 2008, and was a visiting professor and “ambassador in residence” at Washington University. In 2010, in his first bid for public office, Schweich unseated incumbent state auditor Susan Montee, a Democrat. He breezed to re-election last November, receiving 73 percent of the vote against two minor-party challengers. The Democrats did not run a candidate against him. He died Thursday February 26 after apparently shooting himself in his Clayton home. Schweich and his wife, Kathleen, were married shortly after he graduated from law school. They have two children.