California teacher gets surprise gold fortune

CARSON CITY - A substitute teacher from California has been declared the sole heir to a fortune in gold coins found in the Carson City home of a cousin who died this summer.

First District Judge James Wilson signed an order Tuesday certifying Arlene Magdanz of San Rafael as the rightful heir to the $7.4 million left by Walter Samaszko Jr.

Her 69-year-old cousin had died from heart problems about a month before authorities discovered his body in late June. A crew sent to clean out his house found piles of gold stashed away in the garage of his modest ranch-style home.

Magdanz has had no comment on her newfound wealth. Carson City clerk Alan Glover, the public administrator handling her estate, said she has gone into hiding and won't even tell him where.

Samaszko was a loner whose death went largely unnoticed. That all changed when a crew sent to clean out his house found a fortune stashed away in the garage of his modest ranch-style home.

There were ammunition boxes stuffed with thousands of gold coins, from Austria, Mexico and the United States. There was enough gold to fill up two wheelbarrows - more than $7.4 million worth.

"There was every kind of coin you could think of," Glover said .

City officials searched through records to find an heir and discovered Magdanz .

Officials were able to track her down using a funeral bulletin at Samaszko's home that led to his father's service in Chicago in the early 1960s and then newspaper clippings that listed survivors.

When a lawyer told her that her cousin's estate was valued in the millions, officials said, she was surprised, just like everyone else, including his neighbors on their quiet street.

No one seemed to know him at all, though he had lived in the house since the 1960s. His mother lived with him until her death in 1992. The house was generally well-kept.

"I don't think I saw him in the year I was out here," said Curtis Hastings, who dropped mail into a slot in Samaszko's garage. A woman who lived two doors down said she didn't know him.

Samaszko's body was found in June after neighbors called authorities, though it was not clear what prompted them to do so. He had been dead of heart problems for at least a month, according to the coroner.

Officials don't know what Samaszko did for a living. They also don't know how he earned the money that was used to buy the gold.

There were meticulous records of the purchases, since at least 1964, leading Glover to suspect that the gold coins may have been mainly bought over the years by Samaszko's mother.

His bank account stood at $1,200. He had a money market and mutual fund with a combined value of more than $165,000 when it was closed. His three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house was sold for $112,000.

While the coins themselves were "nothing spectacular," Glover said, there were a lot of them - thousands, some wrapped up neatly in foil or plastic cases, others loose in bags.

There were more than 2,900 Austrian coins, many from 1915; 4,500 from Mexico; 500 from Britain; 300 U.S. gold pieces, some dating to 1880; and more than 100 U.S. gold pieces as old as the 1890s. They were stored mostly in 2-foot-by-2-foot-by-2.5-foot ammo boxes stacked on top of one another .

The variety of coins impressed Howard Herz, the appraiser of the fortune for the estate who has seen a lot as curator of gambling collections at Harvey's Resort at Lake Tahoe from 1960-93.

"It was an extraordinarily well-calculated investment in gold," Herz said.

The real money will come when the gold is sold. A lucrative investment in the past few years as the economy remained stuck in a slump, gold is worth about $1,700 an ounce, up from about $400 a decade ago.