How did Othmar Hitz die?

Officially of kidney failure in Caracas on July 4, 1958, at age fifty-nine. His former wife believed he was murdered and said so publicly. When the family later won an exhumation, the grave was empty.

Why does the empty grave matter to the inheritance?

Without a properly completed Venezuelan death certificate, the Swiss banks holding Hitz accounts would not act. The missing body, the misspelled will and the incomplete certificate each kept the estate out of reach.

How much would the Hitz fortune be worth today?

The estate was reported at $10 million in 1965, counted at 30 to 50 million bolivars in the Venezuelan press. In today's money that is roughly $150 million. No one in the family ever collected it.

The Empty Grave of Othmar Hitz

Othmar Hitz, the Swiss businessman whose Venezuelan fortune the press counted in the tens of millions, died in Caracas on July 4, 1958, at fifty-nine. The official cause was kidney failure. His widow never accepted it.

She believed, to the end of her life, that he had been murdered. That was her conviction, and the record neither proves nor disproves it. What the record does show is a set of facts that no one has ever explained, and each one made the fortune harder to reach.

The grave was empty. The exhumation took years of petitioning across two countries. When it finally happened, there was nothing to exhume.
The will misspelled his own name. “Othmar John Hitz,” not Othmar Jakob Hitz, in his own will. Raised in the 1966 Caracas press, never settled.
The death certificate was never completed in the form the Swiss banks required. Without it, the Swiss accounts could not be opened, and the estate could never be fully counted.

The lawyer he trusted like a brother

Years earlier, to shield his assets during a tax fight, Othmar had signed everything he owned, properties, companies, accounts, into the name of the lawyer he trusted, in his own words, “like my own brother.” Against that, he held signed counter-documents proving the assets were really his. In the words of a family member who lived it, those counter-documents “disappeared, of course.”

An empty grave. A misspelled will. A missing certificate. A lawyer holding the paper. Separately, each is a coincidence. Together, they read like a design. And in January 1966 the whole thing exploded in a Caracas courtroom.