Death of Laurel Canyon man who claimed to be a Rothschild was an accident, coroner says
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- The L.A. County medical examiner’s office said William de Rothschild’s death in November was an accident.
- Neighbors previously told The Times that the man said he was a member of the Rothschild banking family, but his brother refuted that claim.
- De Rothschild’s body was found after his Laurel Canyon house was badly burned in a fire.
The death of William de Rothschild — the Laurel Canyon man who neighbors said claimed to be a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family — was an accident, the L.A. County medical examiner’s office said, with heart disease and smoke inhalation as contributing factors.
De Rothschild, 87, was found dead at his fire-damaged Laurel Canyon home after the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a blaze at the Lookout Mountain Avenue residence Nov. 27.
Neighbors said the classic-car-collecting man had told them he was a Rothschild, a member of the prominent European family whose collective fortune is worth billions of dollars. But De Rothschild did not appear in the official genealogy maintained in the family’s archive, and other details of his life that were shared by acquaintances could not be verified.
The Times reported in December that De Rothschild was born William Alfred Kauffman and adopted the famous surname in 1985, according to a name-change petition he filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court. His estranged brother, Richard Kauffman, previously said, “My brother is not a Rothschild, as far as I know.”
The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s website said De Rothschild’s death was an accident caused by “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” commonly known as heart disease. It also listed “inhalation of products of combustion” — an apparent reference to the fire that tore through his home — as a secondary issue. A spokesperson for the medical examiner said Rothschild was “positively identified by DNA” on Jan. 28.
The cause of the Lookout Mountain Avenue conflagration, which was put out by 45 firefighters in a little more than 30 minutes, had been under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Fire Department. Both departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A man found dead after a fire at his Los Angeles home was said to have been part of the Rothschild banking family, but The Times has found no evidence supporting the claim.
The Rothschilds, a sprawling Jewish family originally from Frankfurt, Germany, long dominated European banking, with its English and French branches playing major roles in finance and politics, most notably during the 18th and 19th centuries. At one point, the Rothschilds were widely considered to have amassed the largest private fortune on Earth.
Today, the family is spread across the globe and maintains interests in financial services, energy, real estate and other sectors, while several of its prominent members have become high society and philanthropic fixtures in London, Paris and elsewhere.
Oregon resident Richard Kauffman reiterated that his late brother was not a Rothschild, telling The Times on Monday, “I am 100% sure my brother was a Kauffman and not a Rothschild.” Until December, when he was contacted by a Times reporter about De Rothschild’s death, Kauffman had thought that his brother died decades ago. At the time, Kauffman — who noted that he and his kin were not Jewish — said his brother had “disappeared” from their home state of Oregon in the 1960s or ‘70s.
The elderly man’s body was discovered after his home on Lookout Mountain Avenue burned Wednesday afternoon.
By 1972, the man who would become William de Rothschild had bought the Lookout Mountain house, which was in an artsy enclave then famed for its musician residents, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and “Mama Cass” Elliot. Kauffman said he and his brother spoke briefly on the telephone in the 1970s or ‘80s and never again after that.
“I had no communication with my brother,” Kauffman said. “I was glad to know he actually did [live] a long life. It would be nice if the fire was not the cause of death. I would not want anyone to experience death by fire.”
Public records show that Margaux Mirkin married De Rothschild in Nevada in 1999. Mirkin, a daughter of the late Morris Mirkin, founder of Budget Rent a Car, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There have been a few notable Rothschild impostors over the years, including Inna Yashchyshyn, who posed as Anna de Rothschild while visiting President Trumop’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 2021.
While there, the Ukrainian-born Yashchyshyn, who speaks Russian, met Trump and his friends and family, according to a report by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Kauffman said he would remember De Rothschild as an artist. He said his brother had been a gifted painter and sculptor as a boy growing up in Salem, Ore.
“The artist part of him was the line that went through his whole life when I knew him,” Kauffman said. “He worked on that constantly. That was his passion.”
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