When you find out that someone left money on the table, not because they were careless or didn’t plan ahead, but because life got too hard to deal with paperwork, it makes you sad. That story seems to be at the heart of Daveigh Chase‘s money problems, and it’s hard to see how it fits with the cultural mark she left behind.
Chase passed away in Los Angeles in June 2026. He was 35 years old and had been sick with meningitis, a blood infection, and sepsis. Most estimates put her net worth at between $3 million and $5 million at the time of her death. This amount was mostly based on a few roles she played before she was a teenager.
It’s important to think about what she did in those early years. In 2002, she did the voices of Lilo Pelekai in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, the main character in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and Samara Morgan in The Ring. Her role as the long-haired ghost girl crawling out of the TV set stuck in the minds of a whole generation. As Lilo, she won an Annie Award, and as Samara, the bad guy, she won an MTV Movie Award. That’s a huge range for any performer, let alone a kid who was only eleven.
John Ryan, who used to be her manager, said after she died that the real financial picture was much bigger than those estimates show. Ryan says that Chase’s first deal with Lilo & Stitch was set up differently than a normal one-time payment for voice acting. He told her that her contract gave her the right to residuals, merchandise sales, theme park use, and other money related to her voice as Lilo, a character whose use in advertising has only grown over time. SAG-AFTRA notices with unclaimed check numbers were said to have been coming to his office for years. His number, he told The California Post, was in the millions.
The difference between those two realities is what makes the situation hard to deal with. On one side is a well-liked Disney series, a horror icon that is still talked about in pop culture, and a career that included work in animation, high-end anime dubbing, cult films, and an HBO drama. In late 2025, there were reports that Chase was living in a trailer on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Ryan and Chase’s step-sister hired a private investigator to find her, and she was hospitalized for being malnourished just before she died.
Ryan said Chase couldn’t get the money herself because she was “too far gone” with her addiction. There may be more to that story than anyone outside the family can fully understand. Addiction doesn’t always show itself clearly, and the people closest to the addict often don’t have a full picture of what’s going on. Still, it’s hard to get rid of the image of unclaimed checks sitting in a system while the person who should have had them had, for the most part, lost touch with the normal workings of adult life.
Later in her career, she had a long-running part on HBO’s Big Love from 2006 to 2011 as Rhonda Volmer, a manipulative, troubled teen who grew up in a polygamist family. It was a real adult role, more difficult than anything her early Disney work made her seem like she’d be cast in. Her credits slowed down after that. She was in some smaller movies and independent productions, but she never quite got back to the level of fame she had as a child.
It is really not clear what will happen to her estate now. Ryan said that a performer’s next of kin can usually go after residual earnings after they die. This means that her father or other family members may be able to get those funds. He also said he was worried about a GoFundMe that was supposedly set up by a man saying he was her boyfriend, but Ryan and her family didn’t know that person. He also mentioned that there was a SAG-related trust account that could pay for her funeral costs.
No matter how you figure out Daveigh Chase’s net worth, it seems like a minor issue by the end. People remember the contrast between her voice, which made kids love a lonely Hawaiian girl, and her face, which made adults afraid of TV static. She also died at age 35 in a city that can swallow people whole.
