Questions
The questions people actually ask about the 1965 Hitz case, answered plainly and sourced to the family archive.
Anna Maria Hitz was a Swiss-Venezuelan heiress, born in Caracas on December 20, 1947, and the sole heir of the businessman Othmar John Hitz. At seventeen she was reported missing from Washington, D.C., and appeared on the front page of the Washington Post on November 23, 1965. She died in Miami on February 4, 2019.
The Hitz Inheritance is the true story of the 1965 disappearance of Anna Maria Hitz and the fortune that was never found, reconstructed by her granddaughter from an archive of more than 500 documents in four languages. It is a book in progress and a documented case file published online.
Yes. She was located in Caracas within days of the front-page story, married to Ulrich Bierschenk and with a newborn daughter. The person was found quickly. The estate was never resolved, and that is the part of the case that remains open.
Not in 1965. As a child she was removed by each of her parents in turn during a custody war fought across Swiss and Venezuelan courts, and the Swiss press covered both episodes. In 1965 she left of her own accord. When the word kidnapped attached to her a third time, it was the first time it was wrong.
The estate was reported at $10 million in Washington in 1965, at 30 to 50 million bolívares in Caracas, and at 40 to 150 million francs in the Swiss and European papers; one lawyer put it below five million bolívares. In 1963 UPI reported the money frozen in a Swiss bank.
La Verdad reported on 12 January 1966 that Hitz had handed his assets to third parties in 1948 to evade a claim by the Venezuelan state, and El Nacional reported on 18 January 1966 that they were held in Lina Rosa Fuentes's name. Últimas Noticias reported on 13 January 1966 that the will naming who held what was never found. Jewels and securities were seized from two Caracas banks in January 1966. No member of the family ever collected the estate. The full record is in File 06.
Goldspatz means golden sparrow. The Swiss press used the name during her childhood, when she was the subject of a public custody dispute and a fortune she could not reach, and used it again when she disappeared in 1965.
Elisabeth Bierschenk Hitz, her granddaughter, who holds the family archive and sole life rights. The project began as an oral history at New York University and includes recorded interviews with family members who lived the events.
Yes. Life rights are held solely by Elisabeth Bierschenk Hitz, which makes the chain of title a single signature. Details are on the rights page.
A dated chronology from 1946 to the sixtieth anniversary is at the timeline.
See the screen comps for Inventing Anna and Dropout-style positioning, and the book comps for literary agents.
For producers, and the machine-readable rights.md.
For literary agents · proposal and sample chapters on request.
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