The Category
Four cases people search for when they search for vanished heirs. Three are mysteries about a person. One is a mystery about a fortune.
The Cases
A 25-year-old heiress to a perfume importing fortune walked out onto Fifth Avenue in December 1910 and was never seen again. Her family hid the disappearance for six weeks before going to the police. The case remains New York’s oldest open missing-persons file. (background)
The 23-year-old son of Governor Nelson Rockefeller disappeared after his boat capsized off the coast of what is now South Papua. His body was never recovered. He was declared dead in 1964. (background)
A 17-year-old Swiss-Venezuelan heiress vanished from Washington twenty-six days before she was due to inherit her father’s estate, reported at $10 million. The Washington Post put her on its front page on November 23, 1965. Three days later she surfaced in Caracas, married and holding a newborn daughter.
The disappearance was solved in days. The estate never was. A will registered in Caracas in 1954 later disappeared from the registry, jewels and securities were seized from two bank vaults in January 1966, and no one in the family ever collected the fortune. It has now been missing for sixty years. (the documented facts)
The widow of the Brach candy fortune left the Mayo Clinic in February 1977 and disappeared. She was declared legally dead in 1984. A later investigation produced dozens of indictments and a conviction connected to her death, but her body was never found. (background)
In the other cases, the person is the mystery and the money is background. In the Hitz case it is the reverse: the girl was found within days, alive and well, and it was the fortune that stayed missing.
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.