The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (35 page)

Anastasia and John Manahan lived together for more than fifteen years. They had separate bedrooms in his classically elegant house on a quiet street in Charlottesville, only a few blocks from the university and Thomas Jefferson’s famous library and quadrangle. She called him—inexplicably—Hans; he called her Anastasia. They drove almost daily to his large farm in the nearby countryside and frequently dined at the Farmington Country Club. There, Anastasia, a tiny figure with dyed auburn hair, often dressed in a blouse and bright red pants several sizes too large for her, carefully collected scraps from the plates of everyone at the table and placed them in foil to take home to her new and growing population of cats. It did not take long for the house and garden to begin to resemble her chalet at Unterlengenhardt. Overgrown bushes, vines, and weeds filled the front yard and blocked the front door. Inside, the floor of the living room was piled high with books and covered with newspapers, spread to cover messes made by the cats. When one of the cats died, she cremated it in the fireplace. Manahan seemed not to mind. “That’s the way Anastasia likes to live,” he explained. The neighbors minded, however, and in 1978, the Manahans were taken to court over the smell—“I think it could be described as a stench,” one friend admitted—rising from the property.

Manahan enjoyed being Anastasia’s husband; he sometimes described himself as a “Grand Duke-in-Waiting.” His wife seemed uninterested. “That is so far back and so dead,” she said, “all so past. Russia doesn’t exist.” Gradually, the couple descended from eccentricity into derangement. On one occasion, Manahan told a gathering
that his wife was a descendant of Genghis Khan; subsequently, he added Ferdinand and Isabella to her ancestral tree. In 1974, he sent out a nine-thousand-word Christmas card entitled “Anastasia’s Money and the Tsar’s Wealth,” in which he accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of aiding the Marxist conspiracy to communize the world and described an episode at the end of World War II in Europe as the arrival of “American negroes with leveled guns.” He and his wife, he said, were under surveillance by the CIA, the KGB, and the British Secret Service. She told a visitor that, in the Ipatiev House, the entire Imperial family except the tsarevich had been repeatedly raped, all of them being forced to watch as each was violated. In November 1983, she was institutionalized. A few days later, her husband kidnapped her, and for three days they drove down Virginia back roads, stopping to eat at convenience stores. A thirteen-state police alarm finally produced an arrest and her return to a psychiatric ward.

Three months later, on February 12, 1984, Anastasia Manahan died of pneumonia. Her body was cremated that afternoon, and in the spring her ashes were buried in the churchyard at Castle Seeon. Manahan died six years later.

At her death, the controversy over Anna Anderson’s identity was unresolved. Unknowingly, however, she left behind a piece of evidence that would tell the world who she was.

CHAPTER 15
 
 A MATTER OF FAMILY HONOR

Four and a half years before her death, Anastasia Manahan underwent a severe medical crisis. On August 20, 1979, after several days of vomiting and stubbornly refusing help, she was rushed to Charlottesville’s Martha Jefferson Hospital. Dr. Richard Shrum operated immediately. He found obstruction and gangrene in the small intestine, caused by attachment to an ovarian tumor. He removed almost one foot of the intestine, resectioned the bowel, and closed the wound. Mrs. Manahan was a difficult patient. At first, after surgery, she repeatedly pulled tubes from her body. Eventually, her behavior improved. “She remained reclusive, did not like to talk to people, and smiled rarely,” Shrum recalled. “She would sit around with a handkerchief held up to her nose as if she were afraid of catching something.”

Immediately after the operation, Shrum followed standard hospital procedure and sent the tissue he had removed to the pathology laboratory, which retained five inches of the intestine. This tissue was divided into five one-inch segments, and each segment was bathed in
a tissue preservative called formalin, sealed inside a block of paraffin wax one inch square and half an inch deep, and placed in a small blue and white box on a shelf filled with other similar boxes containing tissue specimens. The purpose of preserving excised tissue after surgery is purely medical: should the same or a similar condition recur, having actual tissue previously removed can be an invaluable diagnostic tool. In 1979, the Martha Jefferson Hospital pathology laboratory was new, having opened only the year before. “We have kept everything since it opened,” said a hospital employee, “every sample from all patients, regardless of who the patient is.” Once stored, tissue specimens, like written medical records, remain legally the property of the hospital. The hospital, observing a fiduciary obligation to the patient and the patient’s family and heirs, guards these materials fiercely. Any release of records or specimens to anyone other than the patient, family, heirs, or executors, requires a court order.

After Dr. William Maples’ July 1992 announcement that Grand Duchess Anastasia was missing from the grave in Ekaterinburg received international publicity, it was perhaps not surprising that exploratory probes as to whether Martha Jefferson Hospital possessed any of Anastasia Manahan’s blood or tissue samples began. On September 22, Syd Mandelbaum, a Long Island blood analysis expert connected with several major laboratories, wrote to the hospital that he intended to write a book on the use of DNA testing as a forensic tool and wished to include a chapter on Anna Anderson. “As remote as this sounds,” Mandelbaum’s letter declared, “we are trying to obtain a genetic sample … in the form of a blood sample, follicular hair, or tissue culture” to test at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or at Harvard Medical School. D. D. Sandridge, the executive vice president of Martha Jefferson Hospital, replied to Mandelbaum that “we have nothing here that could be useful to you.” Later the hospital explained this mistake to me as a clerical error: “The wrong person was asked to look for it.”

The right person to ask was Penny Jenkins, the director of medical records, and it was she who dealt with the next two applicants Who inquired
about the tissue. The first of these, writing in November 1992, was Mary DeWitt, who described herself as “a student of forensic pathology at the University of Texas” and said that she would like the tissue because she was “writing a paper.” Jenkins assumed that De Witt was a young student, “writing a paper like my daughter in high school. It was not a case of ‘medical need to know’ or ‘patient care,’ ” Jenkins decided, “so I said, ‘No, I can’t help you.’ ” Mary DeWitt, however, did not go away. Instead, she contacted James Blair Lovell, a Washington author who had written the last Anastasia biography, and explained to him that she knew that the hospital had the tissue but that she needed the cooperation of the Manahan family in order to obtain the required court order. Proposing to Lovell that they work together, she offered to pay for a lawyer if Lovell would approach the Manahans. Lovell agreed and obtained a letter from John Manahan’s cousin Fred Manahan, granting him authority to dispose of the tissue. DeWitt retained a Charlottesville lawyer. In the spring of 1993, however, DeWitt wrote to Penny Jenkins that, henceforth, she, Mary DeWitt, would deal with the hospital on anything to do with the tissue, while James Lovell’s role would be restricted to that of a historian recording the process. Lovell, hearing about this letter, became enraged and said to Jenkins, “They’re cutting me out!” Jenkins had to choose. “Because I felt that Jimmy Lovell’s agenda was a little bit cleaner, I decided that we weren’t going to communicate anymore with Mary DeWitt,” she said. Jenkins never heard again from Mary DeWitt, but later she was told that DeWitt was a woman in her forties, the wife of a private investigator.

Two days after receiving her first letter from Mary DeWitt, Jenkins received a telephone call from Dr. Willi Korte, who identified himself as a German lawyer and historical researcher. He told her that he was associated with the Forensic Institute of the University of Munich and was working as part of an international team to identify the Ekaterinburg bones and solve the mystery of Anastasia. “He was very smooth, very charming,” Jenkins remembered. “He dropped a lot of names: Dr. Maples in Florida … Dr. Baden in New York … and others. He told me that his job was to wander around the world looking for comparative tissue samples. He asked whether we had any. I said, ‘Yes,
we do have a specimen.’ A short time after that, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Thomas Kline, of the firm of Andrews & Kurth, called to ask about the tissue. Kline said that Korte, with whom he worked, was out of the country. I repeated to him, ‘Yes, we do have the tissue.’ That was the last I heard from either of them,” said Jenkins. “I never saw Korte again until we were sitting in court. Then he did not speak to me.”