She Was a $200 Million Hotel Heiress. Her Body Sat Unclaimed in the L.A. Morgue: Francesca Hilton

Conrad Hilton left his empire to a foundation for the poor. His only daughter slept in her car in the same city.

There’s a photograph of the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, that Conrad Hilton carried in his wallet for the last sixty years of his life.

He bought the Mobley in 1919 with $40,000 (around $770,000 today), some of it raised from his mother, and he called it the beginning of everything he built. After he acquired the Waldorf-Astoria in 1949 he added a second photograph next to the first, and for the next thirty years he carried both.

But his only acknowledged daughter isn’t in either wallet.

Francesca Hilton collapsed inside a Sunset Boulevard restaurant on the evening of January 5, 2015, and was pronounced dead at 10:20 that night at Cedars-Sinai, a few blocks from her father’s flagship Beverly Hilton.

She was 67 years old, and her estate was worth only $10,000.

In the year that preceded the collapse she had been cycling between a weekly rental in West Hollywood and the front seat of her own car.

However, her father’s estate at his death in 1979 had been worth approximately $200 million.

97% of it went to a foundation her father had chartered in 1944 to fight poverty.

Francesca received $100,000 from her mother’s estate, along with a no-contest clause that threatened anyone who challenged the will. She sued anyway.

But the final twist came after her death.

For days, her body lay unclaimed in a Los Angeles morgue as the two men who had spent years fighting over her mother’s fortune battled over one last question: who had the legal right to bury her?

The heiress to a $200 million empire had become the woman no one would claim.