by Greg King
How about the chain of custody for the samples tested? Was it, as some of Anderson’s supporters suggested, so legally questionable that the tests would be thrown out of any court?22 No. To avoid any such challenges, Gill never allowed the samples out of his possession until he arrived at the Forensic Science Services Laboratory in Great Britain, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology employed similar safeguards in collecting and conveying a different section of bowel tissue from Martha Jefferson Hospital to their own laboratories.23 Susan Grindstaff Burkhart preserved the hair she found in sterile conditions in a safety deposit box; the samples tested by Forensic Science Services and Pennsylvania State University were prepared by a trained lab technician, sealed in protective containers, and delivered to the laboratories by hand and by documented courier.24 The chain of custody, the documentation of the samples during their collection, transfer, and analysis—at least according to American and European standards of legal admissibility—is pristine and presents no judicial difficulties.25
If not changes in methodology, conflicting results from a blood slide, or issues over the chain of custody, how about contamination? Could the results simply be wrong because the samples were corrupt? No. The uniformity observed in the samples precludes such a possibility. The mitochondrial sequence derived by Gill’s team from the bowel tissue matched that derived from a separate section of bowel tissue analyzed by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology; the profile from the hair sample tested by Gill matched that obtained by Pennsylvania State University. Contamination would have meant not just variation from facility to facility but noticeably corrupted profiles, sequences that would have been of no use for genetic comparison. The fact that the hair samples came from a different source than the bowel tissues yet all matched proved not only common origin but also demolished any contention that contamination had taken place.26
This leaves only one avenue: conspiracy, an idea fully in keeping with decades of erroneous claims that the Romanovs had recognized then rejected Franziska to seize tsarist funds, that Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig had invented the entire “Schanzkowsky legend” to discredit a woman he knew to be his niece, that Gilliard had repeatedly lied to undermine her claim. Such a theory presumably imagines some nefarious royal plot—by the Hessians? by the Windsors?—to subvert the truth, some shadowy figure who tampered with the genetic material prior to testing. Was this possible? No. Had someone accessed the tissue sample at Martha Jefferson Hospital and somehow injected it with mitochondrial DNA drawn from a living Schanzkowsky relative, the end result would have been a completely useless sequence of disparate genetic codes matching no one. How about someone substituting the claimant’s sample with tissue derived from a member of Franziska’s family? Again, no. The five-inch Anderson bowel tissue was gangrenous and came from a living female patient whose mitochondrial DNA matched that of Karl Maucher and his mother, Margarete Ellerik. So what mysterious, living female Schanzkowsky relative suffering from a gangrenous bowel obstruction had willingly donated five inches of her lower intestine? For that matter, how did a conspirator even find the Anderson tissue sample? It was stored in the hospital’s pathology archives, listed only by patient number, and the identities behind those numbers were kept in a different registry. That nothing of the sort took place became clear in 1993, when the hospital discovered slices of the bowel tissue, sectioned after the 1979 operation and preserved in slides, separately from the bowel tissue, in its histology department. Comparison of the slides to the bowel tissue showed that they were identical.27
But the real nail in the conspiratorial coffin was the hair. The samples owned by Susan Grindstaff Burkhart had no association with Martha Jefferson Hospital. They had been stored in a safety deposit box since 1990; this was a year before the Koptyaki grave was exhumed, a year before anyone knew that two bodies were missing, and three years before scientists established a DNA profile for the Romanov remains. Grindstaff Burkhart even had an additional test privately performed, analyzing hairs from the large clump—from which Forensic Science Services and Pennsylvania State University had derived their genetic profiles—against the cut hair she discovered in one of the small florist envelopes tucked into several of John Manahan’s books: the hairs proved to be identical, indicating a common source.28 When did this conspiracy to tamper with the samples begin? In 1990? In 1989? The logistics demanded of such a conspiracy are matched only by its absurdity. Perhaps more to the point, what are the odds that in the Berlin of 1927, in a city of millions where thousands had gone missing, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig’s conspiratorial agents would just happen to pick the one missing woman whose mitochondrial DNA—some seventy years later—would exactly match that of the claimant? If the chances that something went wrong with the DNA are nonexistent, so, too, is the likelihood that Franziska Schanzkowska was plucked at random from obscurity and coincidentally ended up sharing Anna Anderson’s genetic sequence.
But decades of earnest belief die hard, particularly when fed by whispers of conspiracy and rumors of nefarious royal goings-on. Even if the 1994 DNA results seem conclusive, doubts about their validity linger. The only way to offer definitive resolution is new testing, using the most up-to-date technology and taking into account the advances made in genetic science—and here is where this extraordinary story takes a final, unexpected turn. In October 1990 author Greg King received strands of Anna Anderson’s hair from the same clump discovered by Susan Grindstaff Burkhart the previous month and tested in 1994. In an unexpected and generous turn, Dr. Michael Coble, formerly of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and now Forensic Biologist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland—and a man involved in the identification of the Romanov remains—suggested that the hairs King had received be tested. Professor Daniele Podini of George Washington University agreed to work with Coble on this new sequencing: if a genetic profile was derived, it could then be tested against those found in the Romanov remains and that established for Franziska’s great-nephew Karl Maucher.
Coble and Podini selected five hairs to use, one of which included follicular tissue; these were cleaned to remove any possible external contamination. The results were replicated multiple times to ensure that there was no mistake. The nuclear DNA profile obtained by Coble and Podini matches that established by Gill and his colleagues from the Anderson bowel tissue and samples of her hair. Coble and Podini tested fifteen STR markers, of which eight provided reproducible—and thus reliable—results. All eight are incompatible with the idea that Anna Anderson was Anastasia—the Federal Bureau of Investigation requires only two exclusions for definitive results in criminal cases. “We can absolutely exclude this individual as being a child of Nicholas and Alexandra,” Coble and Podini report. The mitochondrial DNA profile from these new hairs also fails to match that found in the remains of Empress Alexandra, again excluding any possibility that Anderson had been Anastasia. It does, though, match the sequence established for Karl Maucher by Gill and his colleagues—exactly. When Coble and Podini checked DNA databases in America and in Europe, they found that this mitochondrial DNA shared by Anna Anderson and Maucher remains extremely rare.29
These new tests, arriving just as we complete this book, are important. Thanks to Dr. Coble and Dr. Podini, we can now dismiss any idea of contamination, worries about changes in methodology, or hints about possible corruption in the Anna Anderson DNA tests. Having been in Greg King’s possession since 1990—before the exhumation of the Romanov grave or the discovery of the Anderson bowel tissue—the hairs, like those belonging to Susan Grindstaff Burkhart, lay waste to any notions of some far-reaching conspiracy. Anna Anderson matches the Maucher profile; she does not match Empress Alexandra.
Memorial statue outside the Cathedral on the Blood, Ekaterinburg, depicting the Romanovs descending the staircase to the murder room in the cellar.
So it’s impossible to impeach the DNA evidence, that uncomfortable and uncompromising string of codes that forever shattered this most per
sistent of twentieth-century myths. The myth portrayed the recognitions, the asserted memories, the handwriting and photographic comparisons, the alleged matches between her ears and those of Anastasia—all of it as compelling, convincing, plausible. It wasn’t. The DNA not only stands in direct opposition to this body of favorable evidence, it also demolishes it, and conclusively so.
And, in a roundabout way, this brings us to the present book. Ours has been a thirty-year journey through the Anna Anderson story, a journey down this long, tangled road that has taken us from belief in her claim to firm conviction that she was indeed Franziska Schanzkowska. It has, in many ways, been a very personal book, a search for resolution, for answers to the very real questions that we, and so many others, had in the wake of the 1994 tests. We had read books and magazines, watched films and documentaries, and most importantly enjoyed extraordinary access to rare unpublished materials and to those personally involved in the case, and it all seemed so convincing. How to reconcile this with the DNA?
This was the power of the myth. It took a full decade for us to wade through the case files assembled by Darmstadt, through the dozens of bound volumes of Hamburg testimony, through the boxes of letters, newspaper clippings, and books that told the story, a story that made us realize just how pervasive the myth had been, how it had distorted the truth, how it had portrayed Gilliard and Doris Wingender as liars, had painted the investigation by Knopf and the Berliner Nachtausgabe as unreliable. None of it was true. The world had largely been exposed to only one side of the case, the side that the world preferred, that Anastasia had indeed survived the massacre in Ekaterinburg, and had survived in the person of Anna Anderson. The world had been led to believe that evidence in her favor was overwhelming. How wrong we all were.
And we were wrong, all of us who believed, who bought into the myth. The only way to find the answers we sought, the answers history needed, was to question everything in this case, every piece of evidence, every assertion, every test. All too often, important, lingering questions over Franziska’s claim were dismissed on the pretext that the DNA tests resolved the mystery. Such reasoning did nothing to illuminate the case. We needed to understand not just how it had happened but also why it had happened, so we began in reverse. We spent years pursuing arguments that Anderson was Anastasia, investigating the DNA, poring over hundreds of unpublished documents, only to reject the idea; we then investigated charges that Anderson wasn’t Franziska, only to find that she was. But without asking these questions, without investigating these objections and the mass of evidence, we would never have found just how shaky the myth really was, how distorted the story had become, how Franziska had actually managed to seem so convincing. Had it been otherwise, had we been able to discover new and compelling information refuting the DNA tests, or conclusive proof that Anderson was Anastasia, we would have been delighted to challenge history.
The Cathedral on the Blood, Ekaterinburg, built 2000–2003 atop the former site of the Ipatiev House.
Some questions will always remain. No one knows what went on inside Franziska’s mind, and her early years are doomed to remain matters of shadowy conjecture. It would be wrong, though, to assume that if some events remain unexplained, some contradiction lingers, that the question of Anderson’s identity remains unresolved. It doesn’t. Contradiction and coincidence, uncertainties and speculation do not negate the massive accumulation of evidence proving that she was Franziska Schanzkowska. People like their mysteries neatly resolved, with all conflicts explained and all doubts erased; life, though, seldom fits into such a box, and history—and historical mysteries—are always fragmentary in nature. This is the appeal of Franziska’s story, the pull of the myth, the hope that somehow, in some way, fate was more humane to Anastasia than the fusillade of Bolshevik bullets that rang out that hot summer night nearly a century ago.
So what did really happen in Ekaterinburg? Woken in the middle of the night, a sleepy Anastasia had followed her family down the narrow Ipatiev House stairway, followed Yakov Yurovsky out into the courtyard and back inside the mansion’s ground floor, through a warren of corridors to the small storeroom from which there was no escape. They waited, the Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, and the three retainers imprisoned with them, Alexandra sitting in one chair, a sickly-looking Tsesarevich Alexei in another, and the four grand duchesses standing near the back of the room. It was two-thirty in the morning.30
And then Yurovsky reappeared, standing with a grim-looking group that filled the room’s only exit. There were gasps, low screams, sobs when Yurovsky announced that the Ural Regional Soviet had condemned Nicholas II to death; even in these last few seconds, did the Romanovs believe that only the tsar was to be killed? Yurovsky mercifully said nothing of the rest of the family; then the guns appeared, shining in the light of a single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling, the shots began, and mercy disappeared in a haze of smoke. Nicholas fell under a barrage of bullets; so, too, did valet Alexei Trupp and cook Ivan Kharitonov; Alexandra had time only to cross herself before a shot tore through her skull, knocking her backward, off her chair, and onto the floor where her daughters stood, untouched. Bullets ricocheted around the walls; within a few seconds, smoke from the guns filled the room with a noxious fog that sent the assassins stumbling for air as the cellar echoed with terrified sobs and pleas for help.31
Anastasia was still alive, at the back of the room, with her sisters, screaming, when the men came back. Trying to raise himself up from the floor, Dr. Botkin was shot through the head; Alexei sat petrified as the bullets poured into his frail body until he finally collapsed. Then they came for them, the grand duchesses who had flirted with young officers, who had danced across the deck of the imperial yacht, who had walked in white dresses and elegant picture hats before newsreel cameras, who had nursed and tended to wounded soldiers as their father’s empire edged toward disaster, and who now stumbled and slipped across a floor slick with their parents’ blood. The bullets came now, hitting them, striking the protective layers of jewels concealed beneath their blouses, driving them back but leaving them alive. The men came closer: Olga and Tatiana fell, shot through their heads. And then the men turned on the two youngest daughters, stabbing at them with bayonets as they hurled themselves in vain against a set of locked doors at the back of the room. And still they lived, hidden jewels deflecting the flashing blades. Finally one of the men drunkenly aimed his gun and shot at their heads as the others turned their bayonets on the maid Anna Demidova until the room fell silent.32
The silence of death: it lay across the terrible jumble of bodies and blood-spattered walls. But Anastasia was still alive, and Marie, too, for as their bodies were carried to a Fiat truck that stood waiting in the courtyard, first one, then the other, suddenly sat up, coughing blood, moaning, screaming. They were outside now, and the men couldn’t shoot them; the bayonets came out, slashing through the air, but the knives struck the hidden jewels. And so someone grabbed a rifle, turned it around, and hammered away at the barely conscious faces, driving the wooden stock down again and again and again.33 Battered into silence, choking on splintered bone and shattered teeth, drowning in her own blood—this was how Anastasia died.
Two days passed, days in which Anastasia’s stiff and bloodied body, stripped naked, was cast down the abandoned Four Brothers mine shaft in the Koptyaki Forest with the rest of the victims; in which it, and the other bodies, was tied with ropes and pulled back out of the shaft, thrown on the ground, and covered with brush; in which it, bruised and bloated in the Siberian summer, was hurled onto the back of a truck and driven through the night until the truck broke down in a forest clearing called Pig’s Meadow. Yurovsky’s men dug a pit in the rutted roadway and tossed the corpses into the grave—all, that is, except for Anastasia and Alexei, who were dragged some two hundred feet across the wet grass and through the muddy meadow, where a bonfire had been hastily built. First one, then the other was flung atop the glowing timbers, doused with gasoline, consigned to the consuming
flames. Two shallow pits received what, after ninety minutes, remained of the charred bodies, covered with dirt and ash, packed down, concealed, hidden for nearly ninety years.34
For sixteen years following the 1991 exhumation of the nine sets of remains from the mass grave, geologists, archaeologists, historians, and amateur investigators searched through the Koptyaki Forest, searched for this missing grave, for these missing remains. They mapped every foot of Pig’s Meadow, dug it up with shovels and spades and tractors, sifted through the upturned soil for a single bone splinter, a single tooth. It wasn’t a question of endless acres of forest: if Yurovsky was telling the truth about burning and burying the two corpses in the meadow, someone, sometime, should have found something. But sixteen years passed, years without a single, identifiable bone fragment. The DNA tests had resolved the Romanov mystery and the identity of Anna Anderson, but history and science could not definitively answer the most intriguing question—the fate of Anastasia.
But then it happened—unlikely; unexpected; perhaps, even, to the more conspiratorially minded, unconvincing: in August 2007, a group of Ekaterinburg historians and archaeologists discovered two shallow pits in a low rise at the edge of Pig’s Meadow, two hundred feet from the cross marking the site of the mass grave. Within, they found forty-eight highly fragmented bones, including a piece of skull, a pelvic bone, shattered femurs, seven teeth, ribs, and arm bones: all showed signs of having been burnt, and several bore indications of possible gunshot wounds and possible hacking apart by axes prior to being consigned to the bonfire.35 Examination established that they came from two separate individuals, a male of between twelve and fifteen years, and a female approximately fifteen to nineteen years old. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Maryland, which had previously worked on the Romanov and Anderson cases, as well as the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, received samples for genetic testing. Analysis by Dr. Michael Coble of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and his colleagues revealed, using nuclear DNA testing, that both sets of remains had been Nicholas and Alexandra’s children, while mitochondrial tests confirmed their maternal descent from the empress. Only one teenage male, Tsesarevich Alexei, had disappeared, making his identification easiest.