by Greg King
Soon, though, even this peculiar theory was eclipsed when Mrs. Manahan related that none of the Romanovs had been killed; instead, she insisted, they had all escaped from Russia to Warsaw, aboard a train that they somehow themselves operated. Nicholas II, she said, had died in Denmark in 1928, while Tsesarevich Alexei was still alive and in hiding.50 The extraordinary historical revision reached a kind of zenith when the claimant insisted not only that the imperial family had not been killed, but also that they had all left Russia before World War I. Empress Alexandra and her daughters, she said, had moved permanently to Germany in 1911, while Nicholas II and Tsesarevich Alexei joined them in 1913.51
What to make of such tales? Was Mrs. Manahan merely entertaining herself with increasingly mischievous remarks, each more absurd than the next? Was she attempting, in so confusing the details of her case, to finally wrest back control of her own life? Or did all of these outrageous, conflicting stories reflect a mind falling victim to senility? Several of those who knew her in these years believe that it was Jack rather than his wife who was responsible for most of these theories. Manahan, recalls Ruffin, “was forever trying to put words in the mouth of his taciturn spouse. He had a detrimental effect on Anastasia’s credibility. His wife’s peculiarities were abetted and magnified by his even greater eccentricity, especially as he encouraged her penchant to repeat stories.”52 Jack was fascinated by conspiracies, claimants, and royal intrigues, and loved few things more than feeling that he had stumbled upon previously hidden historical mysteries. More to the point, it was Manahan, not his wife, who repeated these bizarre tales, eagerly sharing with newspapers and magazines his latest “discoveries”; his wife usually sat in silence, occasionally nodding if prompted—if she was present at all, for Jack liked to present his own ideas as a kind of shared revelation.53
On August 20, 1979, after several days of serious illness, Mrs. Manahan collapsed in pain and was rushed to Charlottesville’s Martha Jefferson Hospital. “She obviously needed to be operated on,” recalled Dr. Richard Shrum, “but she was in such bad shape I was scared that we’d kill her giving her an anesthetic.” Finally, though, Shrum was forced to act: he found an ovarian tumor that had blocked her intestine and resulted in a dangerous case of gangrene. He removed the tumor and nearly a foot of the infected bowel tissue.54 Although the wound itself healed, Mrs. Manahan never really recovered; suffering from severe arthritis, she was soon confined to a wheelchair, increasingly retreating into a world of confused infirmity.55
Unable to walk, she still insisted on joining Jack as he drove back and forth across Charlottesville on his innumerable errands. She would sit in the front seat of their rather battered station wagon for hours at a time, seemingly impervious to the discomfort; occasionally, though, when she felt well and thought that her husband had been gone too long, she poked her head out the window, screaming, “Hans! Hans!” in her weakened voice until he returned. Passersby stopped and stared, uncertain what to do; even when they had returned home, she often continued to stubbornly sit in the car, shouting at Jack. To the concerned questions of neighbors, though, Jack usually offered a shrug and a smile. “Oh, you know those Russians!” he would say. “They’re never happy unless they’re miserable.”56
“I have lived much too long,” she once told Ruffin. “It is time to leave this shell. I hope that the next time you come here, poor Anastasia will be cold. And when you hear that poor Anastasia is no more, think of me as happy, because then I will suffer no more.” The last time he saw her, she whispered, “Pray, pray very much for my death.”57 After a lifetime of turmoil, she was simply worn out, but the miserable conditions in which she lived became increasingly dangerous. By the fall of 1983, living conditions in the house on University Circle had deteriorated so badly that the authorities once again stepped in after both of the Manahans fell ill, unlikely victims of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. A hearing in a Charlottesville circuit court found Manahan incapable of sufficiently caring for his wife, and the judge appointed a local attorney, William Preston, as her legal guardian. Preston found Mrs. Manahan’s mental state so alarming that on November 28 he had her committed to the psychiatric ward of the Blue Ridge Hospital for observation.58
The captivating fairytale of the tragic, lost princess was but a distant memory, but the story was still not yet finished, for the very next day Manahan abducted his frail wife from the hospital, launching a media frenzy about the “missing grand duchess” and a multistate police search for the pair. It took four days to find them, living in their broken-down station wagon off a country road, and a dehydrated and confused Mrs. Manahan was returned to the hospital ward.59 It was to be the last adventure in a lifetime of almost unbelievable twists of fate. A court found that while Mrs. Manahan was most likely suffering from senile dementia, she could not legally be kept in a psychiatric facility, and so Preston placed her in a privately run nursing home. The woman whose story had intrigued the world and spawned countless books and motion pictures was a mere shadow of her former self, emaciated and confused, her weight barely sixty pounds, her once-vibrant blue eyes clouded as she slipped into a haze of the unknown.60
Manahan visited her daily, decorating her room with photographs of the imperial family, but on January 28, 1984, a possible stroke sent her to Martha Jefferson Hospital.61 Just two weeks later, at 11:40 a.m. on Sunday, February 12, 1984, she died, at peace, the years of intrigue finally behind her. Manahan later insisted that his wife had been murdered, claiming that either members of British intelligence or operatives from the KGB had disconnected her oxygen tube.62 In fact, she had died of pneumonia. Her death certificate duly recorded her name as “Anastasia Nikolaievna Manahan,” born June 5/18, 1901, at Peterhof in Russia; listed her parents as Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt; and gave her occupation as “Royalty.” In death, the commonwealth of Virginia granted her the identity she had claimed for sixty-three years.63
Many years before, when she was still lucid, the claimant decided that she wished to be cremated, and this was carried out on the afternoon of her death at a nearby funeral home. Two days later, her memorial service took place at the Chapel of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Some three hundred friends, neighbors, and supporters crowded the structure, which Manahan had decorated with Romanov photographs and brass altar candelabra bedecked with imperial double-headed eagles. Although she had long before abandoned organized religion, an Episcopal clergyman conducted the service, though it was the widower who commanded most attention, offering up what he termed “historical comments” on the Romanovs and on his late wife.64 Like so much of her storied life, even the memorial quickly became a circus as Jack railed against those he termed her “former friends” in Europe who had abandoned her and against the Romanov family, for “rejecting Anastasia”; and, in a truly odd twist, blamed Queen Elizabeth II for his wife’s misfortunes, proclaiming that the British monarch was “an international drug dealer.”65
Anderson’s death certificate.
For a few months, Manahan kept his late wife’s ashes in an urn. He faced some difficulty in carrying out her final wish, that her ashes be interred at Seeon. In 1934, the Nazi government forced the Leuchtenberg family to sell the estate to authorities in Berlin, though they preserved burial rights to the small, enclosed yard surrounding the Chapel of St. Walburg. Here, beneath a tomb he himself had designed before his death in 1929, rested Georg, duke of Leuchtenberg, joined by his wife, Olga, in 1953. Duchess Catherine of Leuchtenberg, widow of Duke Dimitri, protested the claimant’s interment. Neither she nor her husband had ever believed she was Anastasia, and did not want a woman they regarded as an impostor buried alongside exiled members of Russia’s aristocracy. Then, too, she objected that cremation was contrary to the teachings of the Orthodox Church.66 It was left to the ever-loyal Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg to see to the details, and not until he provided a sworn statement offering assurances that Duchess Olga had personally granted permission did the Catholic offic
ials who maintained the churchyard agree to Manahan’s request.67
Anderson’s grave in the churchyard of the Chapel of St. Walburg at Seeon.
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.”68 Here, beneath a tombstone emblazoned with the name Anastasia, the most famous royal claimant in history rests for eternity.
PART THREE
FRANZISKA
18
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.”1
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 1899.2
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.3
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.4
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.5 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.6 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.7
Illness forced Lovell out of the suit, and in the fall of 1993 retired internation
al 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.”8 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.9 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.10