The Record
Every claim below is sourced to a document in the family archive. Plain, dated, and checkable, for journalists, researchers and anyone verifying the case.
Anna Maria Hitz was a Swiss-Venezuelan heiress born in Caracas on December 20, 1947. She was the only child and sole heir of Othmar John Hitz, a Swiss businessman who built a coffee and real estate fortune in Venezuela. She died in Miami, Florida, on February 4, 2019.
She was reported missing from Washington, D.C. in November 1965, weeks before her eighteenth birthday. The Washington Post ran it on the front page on November 23, 1965, under the headline “D.C. Heiress to $10 Million Fortune Missing.” Three days later she was located in Caracas, married and with a newborn daughter.
The estate was reported at $10 million in 1965, and at 43 to 129 million Swiss francs in the Swiss press. Othmar Hitz had signed most of his holdings into other people’s names, chiefly his lawyer’s. He died on July 4, 1958. No member of the family has ever collected the fortune.
Goldspatz means golden sparrow. The Swiss press used it, and the golden caged bird, during her childhood, when she was the subject of a custody war fought across two countries and was removed by each of her parents in turn, once from a street outside her school in Flurlingen in January 1961.
A will was registered in Caracas in the third quarter of 1954 and later disappeared from the registry. In January 1966, jewels and securities valued at about 1.5 million bolivars were seized from safe-deposit boxes at two Caracas banks. Per the family, a court-ordered exhumation of Othmar Hitz found the grave empty.
The case is documented in about 144 original items from 1965 and 1966 in four languages: The Washington Post, The Evening Star, The Washington Daily News, the Herald Journal of Logan Utah, the Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia, BILD, BLICK, the Prättigauer Zeitung, El Nacional, La República and La Verdad, along with court papers, letters and photographs held by the family.
The Archive
Every fact on this page is drawn from the family archive: about 144 original documents from 1965 and 1966 in four languages, kept by the women of the Hitz family for sixty years.