File 01 · The Vanishing
Twenty-six days before she could inherit a ten-million-dollar fortune, roughly $150 million in today's money, a seventeen-year-old girl walked out of Washington and did not come back.
Her name was Anna Maria Hitz. On December 20, 1965, she would turn eighteen and could finally demand a full accounting of her dead father's estate. Someone did not want her to reach that birthday in the open. The last confirmed sighting was a gas-station check: October 28, 1965, Stateline, California, where she cashed a $200 money order her mother had wired, countersigned by a twenty-five-year-old German student. Then the phone calls stopped. The letters stopped. Three weeks of silence.
Her mother, a housekeeper at the St. Matthew's Cathedral rectory, went to the Washington police missing-persons squad. The police shrugged at a runaway heiress. So the mother did the one thing that had ever worked for her before. She went to the newsrooms.
Seventy-two hours, two continents
On Tuesday, November 23, 1965, the story ran across the top of The Washington Post's front page: “D.C. Heiress to $10 Million Fortune Missing.” By Friday it was in Logan, Utah and Philadelphia. Within two weeks it was in Zurich, Hamburg, Paris and Caracas. The wire services carried her face across the world in seventy-two hours. This was a viral story decades before the word existed, and the girl at the center of it had not asked to be famous. She had asked to disappear.
The papers had a runaway. They did not yet know they had something far stranger.
The wire, as it moved →
Continue the case file · File 02
Three days later, a cable arrived from Caracas. Her own mother said it did not sound like her daughter.
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