The Resurrection of the Romanovs (41 page)

Monday, June 18, 1984, was a beautiful, warm, late spring day at Seeon. Snowcapped Alps glistened in the distance, and a gentle breeze from the Klostersee kissed the shading elms as a contingent of cars approached the former abbey. The procession halted at the high walls overgrown with wisteria and honeysuckle surrounding the small Chapel of St. Walburg, and a group of black-clad mourners left their cars, passing the open wrought-iron gates to enter the cemetery. It was a curious assemblage: Jack, looking confused and sobbing as he clutched a small, heart-shaped locket containing his late wife’s hair; Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg; Princess Ferdinand von Schoenaich-Carolath, widow of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s stepson; Ian Lilburn; Brien Horan; and a small group of German aristocrats bearing titles made obsolete in the aftermath of the First World War. The service coincided, not by accident, with what would have been Grand Duchess Anastasia’s eighty-third birthday. The mourners gathered in a semicircle around a small depression set against the cemetery’s eastern wall, heads bowed in prayer. No priest presided, and when a few words had been said, the group left the burial ground, strolling past its lines of marble monuments and wrought-iron crosses peeking from fragrant clusters of roses. Behind them, decorating the wall above the space where the box of ashes had been interred, was a memorial plaque adorned with a Russian Orthodox cross and an inscription selected by Prince Friedrich: “Our Heart Is Unquiet Until It Rests With You, Lord.”
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Here, beneath a tombstone emblazoned with the name Anastasia, the most famous royal claimant in history rests for eternity.

PART THREE

FRANZISKA

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The Fairy Tale Crumbles

The mystery lingered, it deepened; with Anastasia Manahan’s death in 1984, it passed from the shadows of modern myth to legend, the solution to her true identity beyond the reach of man. She now belonged to a realm of unsolvable intrigue, forever destined to remain a historical question mark. The courts could not resolve her claim, but a few months before her death author Peter Kurth published his biography
Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson
, a book that did more to enshroud her case in a gauzy veil of probability than any other, such was its popularity and acclaim. And the case Kurth presented, to be sure, was inarguably compelling, though he later added a comment that must have echoed the views of many: “In a way, however, I am glad that Anastasia’s case has never been proved past dispute.”
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And so it seemed destined to remain. Then, in April 1989—five years after Anna Anderson’s death—a Moscow newspaper published a story that shocked the world: a decade earlier, a trio of Soviet investigators had obtained a statement by Yakov Yurovsky, leader of the squad that had presumably executed the Romanovs. In it, he described not only the horrific massacre at the Ipatiev House but also how, contrary to what Sokolov and twentieth-century history had believed, the victims’ bodies had not been chopped apart, burned, and dissolved in acid, but instead had been buried. The mass grave, in the old Koptyaki Forest, had been found a decade earlier, but not until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost had the men dared to reveal their sensational discovery.

Memorial marker at the Romanov mass grave in Pig’s Meadow outside Ekaterinburg.

Two years passed, years filled with questions and speculation as wild as anything in the Anderson saga, before the grave was finally exhumed. And then, a surprise: there were remains: shattered bones, fragmented skeletons, and hollow-eyed skulls with gaping bullet holes, but only for nine of the eleven victims who had presumably been executed that summer night in 1918. Russian and American forensic and anthropological experts all agreed that thirteen-year-old Tsesarevich Alexei was clearly missing from the grave, as was one of his four sisters. Which sister, though, was a matter of controversy. Most Russian scientists insisted, based on photographic comparison of archival photographs to the terribly damaged, reconstructed skulls, that Marie had not been found; forensic, dental, and anthropological evidence, though, convinced two American teams that Anastasia was missing. Suddenly, the most persistent of twentieth-century royal legends again danced across the world’s imagination, the decades of hope and belief propelled into the realm of undeniable probability.

The controversy over which grand duchess was missing would never be settled, but other mysteries in the Romanov case were gradually peeled away as it became increasingly clear that the Koptyaki remains were indeed those of five members of the imperial family and the four retainers who had perished with them. The final proof came when femurs recovered from the grave were subjected to genetic analysis by an international team lead by Dr. Peter Gill of the British Home Office’s Forensic Science Service Laboratory. Humans carry two types of DNA: nuclear, and mitochondrial or mtDNA. Derived in equal measure from both parents and unique to each individual, nuclear DNA is considered the most reliable and stable of genetic indicators, being able to conclusively establish or refute identity. Mitochondrial DNA, on the other hand, is shared within families, passed through the maternal line from mothers to their children in a genetic chain unbroken for centuries; while it can exclude a genetic relationship, it can only confirm, with varying degrees of probability, common descent. A blood sample was donated by Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh: scientists found that he, as a direct matrilineal descendant of the empress’s mother, Princess Alice, and of her grandmother Queen Victoria, shared the same mitochondrial DNA pattern found in the remains of Alexandra and three of her daughters. The remains of Nicholas II were identified by comparing genetic samples donated by several relatives who shared his same matrilineal descent, and also by comparing his profile to that of his younger brother George, who had died in 1899.
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The science of DNA had solved one of the century’s greatest mysteries—what had happened to the Romanovs—but could it solve another? Could it finally establish the true identity of Anna Anderson? The prospect seemed unlikely: genetic material would be needed, and her body had been cremated following her death in 1984. Syd Mandelbaum, a Long Island geneticist, took the first steps toward solving the conundrum. “I had the idea that anyone who lived in one town,” he says, “would have needed to go to the hospital there. I thought perhaps the hospital in Charlottesville might therefore have biological material they could share, that would allow for DNA testing.” On learning of the 1979 operation to remove a bowel obstruction, Mandelbaum contacted Martha Jefferson Hospital; his inquiries, though, met a dead end when a representative told him that the hospital held none of the claimant’s genetic material.
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Others, too, shared Mandelbaum’s idea, and soon enough the administration at Martha Jefferson Hospital was sorting through inquiries from several fronts; this burst of interest apparently spawned a more thorough search of the facility’s holdings. Penny Jenkins, director of medical records for the hospital, soon found that Martha Jefferson did indeed possess pathology specimens taken during Mrs. Manahan’s 1979 operation: five inches of the gangrenous bowel tissue, preserved, sectioned into one-inch segments, treated with formalin, and sealed inside paraffin blocks. Assigned an anonymous patient number to preserve medical privacy, the samples had been stored in the hospital’s pathology archives.
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Discovery of the samples spawned an intense and bizarre legal battle over their potential genetic testing, a development entirely in keeping with the decades of controversy over the claimant’s case. Jack Manahan died in 1990, but author James Blair Lovell received legal authority over the tissue from one of his cousins.
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Objecting, on behalf of German producer Maurice Philip Remy, was a man named Willi Korte: Remy was making a documentary on the claimant and wanted to commission his own DNA tests.
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Korte hired a Washington, D.C., legal firm to oppose Lovell’s petition, and joined forces with the Russian Nobility Association, an émigré group based in New York that insinuated itself into the case.
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Illness forced Lovell out of the suit, and in the fall of 1993 retired international finance lawyer Richard Schweitzer, married to Gleb Botkin’s daughter Marina, became involved in the case. “For us,” he explained, “having known Anastasia and Jack Manahan all those years, it is a matter of family honor to try our utmost to fulfill her lifelong wish to have her identity as the Grand Duchess legally recognized.”
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Schweitzer, who wanted Gill to test the samples, filed a petition with the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Virginia on behalf of his wife, asking that the tissue be released to Gill’s facility for genetic testing.
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Six months of legal arguments followed; nothing was more bizarre, though, than the petition lodged by an Idaho woman calling herself Ellen Margarete Therese Kailing-Romanov, who insisted that she was the product of a 1937 liaison between Anderson and Prince Heinrich of Reuss. She wanted access to the tissue to validate her own claim, a claim that—like so much in the story—came in a haze of publicity and disappeared just as quickly.
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In May 1994 the court awarded custodianship of Anderson’s tissue to a third party suggested by Schweitzer, and Botkin’s daughter and son-in-law arranged for testing. On June 19, 1994, Dr. Peter Gill arrived in Charlottesville to collect a sample from the tissue. British producer Julian Nott, filming a television documentary on the case, recorded the process as five small segments were cut from the tissues preserved in paraffin blocks, transferred into sterile containers, and sealed. To avoid any contamination or challenges to the chain of custody, the samples remained with Gill until he placed them in protective storage at the Forensic Science Service Laboratory in Great Britain.
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While legal arguments had temporarily entangled the disposition of the Charlottesville tissue sample, another source of the claimant’s genetic material came to light. In September 1990, a North Carolina woman named Susan Grindstaff Burkhart learned that a Chapel Hill bookstore, the Avid Reader, had purchased much of John Manahan’s library following his death. Passionately interested in the Anastasia case since age twelve, she was looking through the boxes of books in the store’s basement one afternoon when she found several samples of Mrs. Manahan’s hair. One large clump, apparently collected from a hairbrush, was tucked inside an empty wine box packed in a box of books; other strands, cut locks of hair, were found in several of the books, held in tiny florist card envelopes inscribed by Manahan with “Anastasia’s Hair” and various dates. She purchased the volumes containing the envelopes, along with some of the large clump of hair, for $20; the remaining hair was sold to Lovell. When Grindstaff Burkhart closely examined the larger hair sample, she found that some of the hair still had roots attached, as if it had been pulled out of the head when being brushed. She discussed this with her husband, who worked in a DNA research laboratory, wondering if it would be possible to extract a usable genetic profile from the follicular strands; with this idea in mind, she carefully preserved the samples under sterile conditions in a safety deposit box. When the genetic identification of the Koptyaki remains was under way, royal genealogist and author Marlene Eilers put Grindstaff Burkhart in touch with Anderson’s biographer Peter Kurth, who arranged for the hair to be tested. Kurth traveled to Durham, North Carolina, in September 1992 to personally receive the hair sample, which Grindstaff Burkhart recalls was “prepared under strict procedures by a DNA researcher” at the lab where her husband was employed. Several strands of hair were taken to Dr. Gill at the Forensic Science Service, and six other strands were sent to Syd Mandelbaum; Mandelbaum, in turn, arranged for these strands to be tested by Dr. Mark Stoneking and Dr. Terry Melton of Pennsylvania State University.
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“My only hope in all of this,” Grindstaff Burkhart recalls,” was to help prove Anna Anderson’s claim.”
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Over the next few months, three independent scientific institutions analyzed samples of Anderson’s genetic material. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Gill and his colleagues at the Forensic Science Service Laboratory tested two tissue samples derived from different paraffin blocks preserved at Martha Jefferson Hospital, as well as strands of the claimant’s hair from the large sample found by Susan Grindstaff Burkhart. The tissue samples were degraded, but Gill and his colleagues obtained usable profiles; testing established that they had come from a female. The profile of the tissue also matched that of the hair, confirming all had come from the same person. Now the question turned on whether Anderson matched the Koptyaki remains. Gill and his team derived a nuclear DNA sequence for the bowel tissue through the use of short tandem repeats, or STRs, to determine parentage. But when this profile was compared with that found in the remains of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and confirmed in those of their three recovered daughters, it differed in four places; a difference of only two genetic loci excludes the possibility of descent. This mismatch, Gill’s team noted, was “inconsistent with the hypothesis” that Anderson was a child of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.
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Next, the scientists analyzed the mitochondrial DNA profile derived from the bowel tissue and the hair sample against the mitochondrial DNA sequence of the duke of Edinburgh that had been found in the exhumed remains of Alexandra and three of her daughters. This revealed six discrepancies between the Hessian sequence and Anderson.
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These two results were definitive. Nuclear DNA excluded the possibility that Anderson was a child of Nicholas and Alexandra, while deviations in the mitochondrial profile of the tissue and hair samples from the Hessian sequence precluded matrilineal descent from the empress. Scientifically, the woman known as Anna Anderson could not have been Anastasia.

Concurrent with the tests at the Forensic Science Service Laboratory, Syd Mandelbaum arranged for Dr. Mark Stoneking of Pennsylvania State University, assisted by his colleague Dr. Terry Melton, to test six strands of the clump hair discovered by Susan Grindstaff Burkhart.
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Only mitochondrial DNA testing was done on these samples; the genetic profile for the clump hair, down to the same six mismatches, was identical to those found by Gill. These tests again precluded the possibility that Anderson had been Anastasia.
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The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland, under the direction of Dr. Victor Weedn, performed a third test, commissioned, like the work of Gill, by Richard and Marina Schweitzer. This was meant to provide additional genetic reinforcement in the case and to ensure that all of the profiles derived remained consistent from facility to facility. Weedn examined new slices from the bowel tissue at Martha Jefferson Hospital and compared their mitochondrial DNA profile to that derived by both the Forensic Science Service Laboratory and by Pennsylvania State University. This new sequence matched those previously established for the tissue and for the two different hair samples. Again, the six mismatches, consistent in all of the samples, precluded any possibility that Anna Anderson had been Anastasia.
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