The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (17 page)

This single mismatched base pair letter caused great anxiety at Aldermaston. In their paper, the two scientists presented their interpretation of what they had found: “We consider … that the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the tsar was genetically heteroplasmic. This complicates the interpretation because the strength of the evidence
depends upon whether we accept a priori that a mutation has occurred in the tsar. The probability of a single mutation was calculated to be approximately one in three hundred per generation, but this estimate does not take account of the incidence of heteroplasmy (much of which may be undetected).”

Gill understood that this one-letter mismatch raised questions about the validity of his findings. He believed that a mutation did occur, although he admitted that the odds against a mutation in any given generation were long. “A mutation is thought to occur [in a family] about once in three hundred generations,” he said. But he insisted that he is talking primarily about a heteroplasmy, which he found, not a mutation, which he could not prove but which is the probable cause of that heteroplasmy. “Heteroplasmy is different from a mutation in nuclear DNA; it means that there are two types of mitochondrial DNA in the same person. What we did was demonstrate that there are two types of mitochondrial DNA in the tsar. One of these types differed by just one base; the other was identical to the relatives.’ That’s pretty good evidence that there has been a real mutation. Bear in mind that we’re working right at the frontiers of knowledge. The actual incidence of this type of phenomenon is not really known, and we suspect that it is much more common than originally had been anticipated.”

In July 1993, after ten months of work, Gill and Ivanov were ready to announce their results to the world. The Forensic Science Service convened a press conference and, on July 10, a large hall at the bleakly modern Home Office building in Queen Anne’s Gate was filled with reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. Dr. Janet Thompson, the director general of the FSS, presided. Aware that questions might be asked as to who had borne the cost of this research, she began by expressing hope that “the FSS will soon be able to put the techniques used, once validated, into practice in criminal casework to the benefit of the criminal justice system as a whole.”

Gill explained what he and his colleagues had done. He described how the sex of the specimens had been determined, how the family
relationship between five skeletons had been established, how Prince Philip’s blood had made certain the identity of Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters, and how the heteroplasmy found in the tsar’s DNA had complicated the effort to make an absolute statement about Nicholas. Nevertheless, the Aldermaston team announced that, given the DNA evidence and adding it to the anthropological and historical evidence provided by others, they were 98.5 percent certain that these were the Romanovs. This percentage, Gill said, was based on the most conservative interpretation of the DNA evidence. A more generous interpretation would increase the probability to 99 percent. Pavel Ivanov took a broader view of what had been done. “We are very close to the last part of this mystery, to one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century, one of the great mysteries of my country, of Russia,” he said.

The press conference produced headlines: R
IDDLE OF
R
OMANOV
R
EMAINS
I
S
S
OLVED
(
Financial Times
), DNA T
ESTS
I
DENTIFY
T
SAR’S
S
KELETON
(
The Times
), T
SAR
N
ICHOLAS’S
B
ONES
I
DENTIFIED
(
The Washington Post
). Tass told Russian readers that “British scientists” were “almost without any doubt” that the remains found in Siberia were those of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Seven months later, in February 1994, Peter Gill, Pavel Ivanov, and others put their findings in print in their own words, publishing a description of their work in
Nature Genetics
, the authoritative journal of their profession. Their findings and article have never been challenged or even mildly criticized, in print or orally, by another DNA scientist.

CHAPTER 9
 
 DR. MAPLES VERSUS DR. GILL

William Maples, after his examination of the bones and his presentation of his findings at the Ekaterinburg conference in July 1992, was unwilling to let go of the Romanov inquiry. In his talk at the conference, he recommended that there be further archaeological exploration of the burial site and more extensive photo documentation and DNA testing of the remains. Apparently, he intended to do—or at least to supervise—most of this himself. In April 1993, Maples, Dr. William Hamilton, and Mrs. Maples returned to Siberia, assisted by two airline tickets provided by the television program
Unsolved Mysteries
. In Ekaterinburg, Maples rephotographed the skeletal remains more carefully than he had been able to do on his previous trip. He also removed one tooth from each of the skulls, except that of Dr. Botkin, which had few teeth to spare, and that of Kharitonov, where only the top of the skull was available. From Botkin and Kharitonov, he took leg bone fragments. The teeth, he believed, would be far more suitable for accurately identifying the Imperial family by DNA testing than the pieces of femurs taken to Britain by
Pavel Ivanov. Along with these teeth, Maples carried away from Ekaterinburg a decree from the Sverdlovsk regional prosecutor authorizing him to export the bones, oversee DNA tests, and report the results back to the Sverdlovsk authorities. Curiously, no one bothered to tell Dr. Vladislav Plaksin, the chief medical examiner of the Russian government, or Pavel Ivanov, then in his seventh month working with Peter Gill at Aldermaston.

Returning to Florida, Maples held the Russian teeth in his laboratory for six weeks, then “transferred custody” to Lowell Levine, who carried them to California and, in June 1993, gave them to Dr. Mary-Claire King, who held two professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, one in epidemiology in the School of Public Health, the other in genetics in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. According to Maples, Dr. King “is the foremost forensic genetics scientist in the United States and one of the most highly regarded scientists in this field anywhere in the world.” She drafted the report prepared for the National Academy of Sciences on the use of DNA for forensic identification purposes. She has worked with a United Nations team in Argentina to identify kidnapped children and reunite them with their families. She has assisted the United Nations in El Salvador to try to identify the remains of victims of a mass murder in the village of El Mozote. Doctors Maples, Levine, and Baden knew her because she had worked with them on the remains of American servicemen brought back from Vietnam. By 1993, Maples said, she had more experience with mitochondrial DNA than the British Forensic Science Service. And she had a far larger database. According to Maples, Dr. King’s database held mitochondrial DNA information on one thousand people; Peter Gill and Aldermaston had only about three hundred. “In this field,” said Dr. Maples, “there simply isn’t anyone to compare with Dr. King.” Michael Baden and Lowell Levine agreed.

Maples and his colleagues had a secondary regard for Peter Gill, and, until they met him at the Ekaterinburg conference in 1992, they had never heard of Pavel Ivanov. Unable to understand Russian, they were not sure what Ivanov had told the meeting about his arrangements to test the bones in England. Nevertheless, Ivanov was friendly
and tried to be helpful. Their return to Moscow that summer was disagreeable for the American team: a dog ran up and down the aisle of the Aeroflot plane; at the domestic airport in Moscow, people shoved and shouted at them. Dr. Ivanov, whose English is fluent, appeared and confidently steered the Americans to safety. The following day, wearing his FBI Academy T-shirt, he showed them through Red Square. He explained what he was doing, that he had been in touch with Gill and was making arrangements to do DNA tests in England. The Americans attempted to change his plans. “We offered him the chance to come and work in an American laboratory,” said Baden, “but he went to England because he could get there quicker and they would pay his way.” “The best thing for Ivanov,” Levine said, “was that he personally was going to take the bones to England and he was going to get to stay there.”

William Maples met Peter Gill for the first time and Pavel Ivanov again in July 1993, soon after Gill’s press conference announcing identification of the Romanov bones. Maples was in England, returning to America from his third visit to Ekaterinburg, where he had been filmed by
Nova
examining and describing the remains. From London, Maples and his wife drove to Aldermaston, where they took Peter Gill and Pavel Ivanov to lunch. The luncheon conversation was polite, this ambience being achieved by both sides ignoring feelings of mutual grievance. Maples was annoyed that Gill had just announced that he was 98.5 percent sure that the bones he had tested belonged to the Romanovs; this event had occurred just as Dr. Maples was arriving in Russia to be filmed by
Nova
. Ivanov was indignant that Maples, with the permission of the Sverdlovsk authorities, had initiated a second round of DNA tests at Dr. King’s laboratory in California without his being informed and while his own tests with Gill were still under way. There was no discussion at lunch about the heteroplasmy which Gill had discovered in Tsar Nicholas II, or the possibility that it had been caused by a mutation. The scientists did talk briefly about the Aldermaston finding that the three young females had the same mitochondrial DNA as one of the older females and therefore undoubtedly were mother and daughters.

Until their meeting at lunch in July 1993, Peter Gill had been only dimly aware of William Maples. Within six months, this situation
radically changed as Maples became the source of a vigorous attack on Gill’s findings, his administrative procedures, even his competence as a scientist.