Anna Maria Hitz was a seventeen-year-old Swiss-Venezuelan heiress who disappeared from Washington, D.C. in November 1965, twenty-six days before she could claim her father's $10 million estate, roughly $150 million in today's money. Her face ran on the front page of The Washington Post under the headline “D.C. Heiress to $10 Million Fortune Missing,” and for three days the search for her ran on front pages across two continents. This site is written by her granddaughter, from the archive the family kept.
On paper she was a Washington schoolgirl. She attended the Maret School, worked part time as a department store model, and lived with her mother, who worked as a housekeeper at the St. Matthew's Cathedral rectory. The papers would call her “a tall and pretty brunette.” What the papers could not fit above the fold was everything that had already happened to her: a childhood on the front pages of three continents, courts in two countries, and a father who had died in Caracas under circumstances his own family never accepted.
The clock mattered. On December 20, 1965, Anna Maria would turn eighteen and could demand, for the first time, a full accounting of the estate of her father, Othmar Hitz, the Swiss coffee and industry man whose fortune the Venezuelan press counted in the tens of millions of bolivars. Twenty-six days before that birthday, she was gone.
The last confirmed sighting
The trail ended at the Nevada state line. On October 28, 1965, she and a twenty-five-year-old German student named Ulrich Bierschenk cashed a $200 check in Stateline, money her mother had wired after a call from Utah. Then the phone calls stopped. The letters stopped. After three weeks of silence, her mother went to the Washington police missing persons squad, and then, when the police shrugged at a runaway heiress, she went to the newsrooms.
On Tuesday, November 23, 1965, the story crossed the whole top of The Washington Post's front page, next to the weather forecast: mostly sunny, high near 60. A seventeen-year-old heiress. A ten-million-dollar estate. A birthday approaching. A mother working a rectory. And a history, mentioned almost in passing, of international custody fights and a fortune nobody could locate.
Three days later, a cable arrived from Caracas, and the story got stranger than any of the papers guessed. She was not missing at all. She was married. And she was already a mother. The cable from Caracas is its own dispatch.
The search lasted three days in public. The questions it opened have now lasted sixty years. Who was hunting her, and why? What was the fortune she was about to touch, and where did it go? The family kept about 144 documents that hold the answers. Ten of them are public.