Truesee's Daily Wonder

VANCOUVER - The search is on for a Vancouver woman living in the city's notoriously impoverished Downtown Eastside who may be the only heir to a small fortune sitting in a German bank.

Toronto lawyer Robert Price was hired by a German bank to help locate a woman named Lucia Leiser, who is the rightful owner of an estate worth an estimated $360,000 Cdn that was bequeathed by a relative of her father. Since her father died about a decade ago, the money now belongs to Leiser.

But the challenge is finding her to let her know.

Price contacted The Vancouver Sun this week after reading a 2007 story in which the newspaper quoted Lucia Leiser-Maika, a resident of the Downtown Eastside hotel Bourbon.

"I believe that Lucia Leiser-Maika may be one and the same person as Lucia Leiser and I would like to be able to contact this woman," Price said in an e-mail to the newspaper.

In an interview, Price said Lucia's father left Germany in 1952, married a woman in Fiji and settled in Vancouver where he raised two children - a son, and a daughter named Lucia.

A Vancouver Sun reporter and photographer spent two days in the Downtown Eastside showing Leiser's picture - taken by the newspaper in 2007 - to residents and service providers.

Many people said they recognized her in the photo. Several said they had not seen Leiser for a year or more, while a few believed they had spotted her in recent days or weeks. A handful thought she was of Polynesian descent.

A shelter worker said Leiser was well known for her attire, often wearing brightly coloured leis around her neck.

Fellow Downtown Eastside resident Yolanda Dyck said she last saw Leiser in 2007, when the two spent a handful of months together in a drum group run through the Aboriginal Front Door. Dyck thought she had a connection to Hawaii or some similar place because she often spoke about how the native Canadian culture was different from her own background.

"She was outgoing," said Dyck, a Crown witness during serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial. "She had a big heart."

She believes Leiser was living on the street at that time.

In a February 2007 interview about welfare shelter-allowance rates being increased by $50, Leiser said she was being kicked out of the Bourbon Hotel on Vancouver's Cordova Street. She said she had survived her first three years in the Downtown Eastside without social assistance and spent much of her time helping other women at the Aboriginal Front Door and the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre.

She dismissed the $50 welfare increase as a "Band-Aid" that wouldn't heal the larger problems festering in the Downtown Eastside.

"You think $50 is going to help? That's one trick for the women who live down here," Leiser said at the time. "That place where I live is not a home. It's full of mice and bedbugs and the ceiling leaks."

Glen Miller, longtime manager of the Bourbon, said this week his hotel is in good shape and that Leiser was evicted in 2007 after scribbling on the walls and exhibiting other unstable behaviour.

Lucia Leiser-Maika could inherit $360,000 Cdn, but she's believed to be lost in the bowels of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

Steve Bosch