Her late daughter’s wedding gown disappeared. 17 years later, a bride-to-be found it

It had been 17 years since Sue Webber-Brown had seen her late daughter’s wedding dress after it was misplaced by a wedding dress preservation company.

For Webber-Brown, a former investigator with a Northern California narcotics task force, the A-line white gown — with a medium-length train, minimal sparkle beading and thin straps — is more than just a memento of her daughter’s marriage on May 19, 2007.

It’s a reminder that Webber-Brown’s daughter Heidi Webber McClellan is still watching over the family. The gown’s sudden reappearance is a marvel wrapped in a mystery, she noted. Its return is the result of an astute observation by a Chicago bride-to-be — a woman she calls a guardian angel — who now needs to find her own missing heirloom gown.

McClellan, who had been ill, died Oct. 25, 2009, at the age of 28 after her body rejected a bone marrow transplant. Within a couple of months of her daughter’s death, Webber-Brown said, her son-in-law asked her for assistance in sorting through McClellan’s clothes and other items in their home.

“When we were doing that, we came across her filthy wedding dress, and I mean filthy,” she said. “It looked like somebody dragged her through a field with a tractor and in the mud with cow pies.”

In between small bouts of laughter, Webber-Brown described her daughter as someone with a bold personality: “Nothing got her down.” McClellan was “super happy.”

Heidi Webber McClellan is shown on her wedding day. Her dress disappeared after her mother sent it out to be cleaned.

(Tonya Paul)

And she embraced life. The stains, her mother remembers, were caused by chocolate syrup from a chocolate fountain, strawberries, tequila, catered Mexican food from their favorite restaurant — all from the wedding reception.

“It was a great night,” Webber-Brown said.

Upon finding the dress, Webber-Brown said, she decided to get it cleaned. She drove to a David’s Bridal in Chico with a friend to buy a wedding dress preservation kit, which involved packaging up the dress and shipping it off to be cleaned.

Little did she know she would not see the dress again for nearly two decades.

After several weeks went by, she said she began inquiring about the gown’s whereabouts. At first, she was told the dress had arrived at a warehouse and would be delivered.

Eventually, Webber-Brown said she was told: “We’re sorry, it’s nowhere to be found.”

“At that point I remember being quasi-hysterical and sobbing, saying, ‘What happens to all of those lost items ... that are precious heirlooms in David’s Bridal boxes?’” she said.

On Friday, just days after the anniversary of McClellan’s death, the missing wedding dress was delivered to Webber-Brown.

She said she had Lexie Ippolito to thank for it, a bride-to-be who discovered the long-lost dress in her Chicago family home and worked to reunite the gown with its rightful owner.

It started with a plea on TikTok.

In August, Ippolito opened her mother’s wedding dress box and discovered the dress that was stored away for more than a decade wasn’t her mother’s.

“If you were a Chicago-land bride who bought your dress at David’s Bridal, we have it,” Ippolito said in a video post. “And we would love to see if you have my mom’s wedding dress.”

The Times reached out to Ippolito but did not receive an immediate response.

Ippolito, 28, said she went home to Chicago to go wedding dress shopping with her mom. Her intention was to try on her mother’s dress first with plans to wear it as a rehearsal dress at her upcoming 2027 wedding.

Attached to the box that contained the mystery dress was a David’s Bridal receipt along with an invoice for Memories Gown Preservation, a Houston-based business that has since closed, according to the Chicago-Tribune, which first reported on the gown mix-up.

Ippolito called the company, only to find out that it had been acquired in December by Wedding Gown Preservation Co. “and apparently with that, all of their files are gone.”

When Wedding Gown Preservation Co. acquired the company, it was an asset purchase of their wholesale customer list only, said Colby Schapiro, co-owner of the company.

Schapiro told The Times he did not receive any order records or customer files from before the purchase.

He said his family has been in the wedding gown preservation business since 1913 and he’s the fourth generation to lead it.

Regarding the accidental mix-up by the previous company, Schapiro said, it “can happen at a single step, such as two shipping labels being swapped, without pointing to a wider problem.”

“We process about 1,500 gowns each week, and every one is tracked by barcode from the day it arrives until the day it ships back to the bride,” he said.

“This system is built to prevent exactly this kind of mix-up.”

In conversation with the new wedding gown preservation company, Ippolito was advised to look for a barcode or tag on the inside of the dress, information that could help lead them to “the family or the bride that owned the dress that I had and basically hope that they had my mom’s dress in their box,” Ippolito said on TikTok.

There wasn’t a tag or barcode, but when the bride-to-be took a closer look at the dress, she saw embroidered in light blue thread was “Heidi and Jake May 19, 2007.”

Ippolito said she immediately started a Google search of the names and found from an online obituary that the owner of the wedding dress was Heidi Webber McClellan of Oroville, Calif.

Through a social media search, Ippolito was able to connect with Webber-Brown and ultimately send the dress from Chicago to Oroville.

“I think I will forever be indebted, and I already feel like [Ippolito’s] a guardian angel,” she said.

Webber-Brown said that they’d formed a bond and that she was going to stay in touch with the bride-to-be.

Now she’s hoping that others will do what Ippolito did for her. She wants to spread the message about Ippolito’s mother’s missing wedding dress in the hope that the gown will be returned to them.