Do you remember a story about a Teacher inherits her cousin's $7.4M gold coins after a judge declared in December 2012 she is a lone surviving first cousin of Walter Samaszko Jr., a loner whose death went largely unnoticed.
The last chunk of a reclusive hoarder’s multimillion-dollar coin collection sold for nearly $3.2 million on Tuesday at an auction in Carson City, Nevada.
An early auction netted $3.5 million in February.
On Tuesday, auctioneers sold the second half of the collection — more than 2,600 coins, mostly gold heirlooms — in six lots, Carson City Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover told the Daily News.
Samaszko's body was found in June 2012 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.
"He was not a coin collector," Glover said. "He was a gold investor."
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 each other.
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