Women living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside may be in line for $360,000
It’s got all the hallmarks of one of those Nigerian spam e-mails. A family fortune sits untouched in a German bank. A lawyer working for the estate just needs someone to come forward to claim it. But the fortune is real — roughly $360,000 — and the person who may stand to inherit it has spent years living in poverty in Vancouver’s grim Downtown Eastside. A Toronto lawyer tasked with finding an heir to the fortune contacted the Vancouver Sun this week in search of Lucia Leiser. The paper had interviewed her in 2007 for a story on increased welfare rates. At the time she dismissed the $50 housing allowance increase, saying “That’s one trick for the women who live down here.” But since that year no one in the neighbourhood has seen her.