The Author
I did not choose this story. I inherited it, instead of the fortune.
My name is Elisabeth Bierschenk Hitz. Anna Maria Hitz, the girl in the 1965 front pages, was my grandmother, my childhood best friend, and my favorite person in the entire world.
I was nineteen, a student at NYU, when my mother first showed me the newspapers. The relief came before the shock. I had always felt I did not quite belong to the world I was living in, and there she was, my humble, superstitious, fiercely private grandmother, on the front page of the Washington Post: D.C. HEIRESS TO 10 MILLION FORTUNE MISSING.
She never told me. Not on our long walks to the supermarket in Miami summers. Not during the six weeks I spent with her in Switzerland every single year as a teenager. Not even at the end, when I found her alone and unwell and finally understood that the woman who raised me on almost nothing had once been the most famous missing heiress in America.
She died in February 2019. Since then I have done the only thing left to do: I found the records. One hundred and forty-four documents from 1965 and 1966, in four languages, from three continents. Front pages from Washington, Zurich, Hannover, Paris and Caracas. Court reporting. A guardianship scandal Switzerland called infamous. Two wills, one missing and one never accounted for. A fortune that, as far as anyone can prove, was never collected by the only person it belonged to.
I was born in Caracas, like my mother, like my grandmother's story says I would be. I was raised in Miami the immigrant way, the legal way, the long way. I spent a decade building a career in New York and a company of my own, and I have spent the last ten years, on and off, unable to leave this story alone. Now it is the only work that matters to me.
The book is written. The archive is real. The questions are still open.