When they opened the grave, it was empty.

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. His widow never accepted the official story.

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.

1. The grave was empty. The exhumation took years of petitioning across two countries. When it finally happened, there was nothing to exhume.

The lawyer he trusted like a brother

Years earlier, 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 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.