The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Learning that Anastasia Manahan had been cremated, Remy began searching for a blood or tissue sample she might have left behind. He asked Dr. Willi Korte to investigate Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville. Having found that, indeed, a tissue sample existed, Remy next asked Thomas Kline, of Andrews & Kurth, to approach the Manahan family and James Lovell for permission to analyze the tissue. This approach foundered. Meanwhile, on Remy’s behalf, Korte was busy in Germany and Greece, collecting comparative blood samples from Princess Sophie of Hanover and Xenia Sfiris. In this same period, tracing an alternative identity for Anastasia Manahan, Remy located a niece of Franziska Schanzkowska and persuaded her to donate blood.

  Remy revealed the reason for William Maples’ attack on Peter Gill. In June 1993, Korte, as Remy’s agent, had signed a contractual letter of agreement with Maples and Lowell Levine. Maples and Levine promised to use Dr. King to do DNA tests on the Romanov and Hessian comparative materials which Korte would supply. They also promised to keep Korte’s work “in strict confidence.”* The only consideration promised by Korte in return was payment of travel expenses, but, the letter said, “all travel will have to be approved in advance by Dr. Korte.” Maples, thereby, became a part of Remy’s team. When, in November 1993, scientific testimony was needed to support the Russian Nobility Association’s petition to intervene in the Charlottesville case, Maples supplied his aggressive, ill-informed affidavit.

  Learning that Richard and Marina Schweitzer were filing a court petition seeking access to the Martha Jefferson Hospital tissue on behalf of Dr. Gill, Remy recruited Scherbatow and the Russian Nobility Association. Throughout the two lawsuits which followed, the nominal client of Andrews & Kurth, proclaimed in every court document, was the Russian Nobility Association, although Remy stressed that Prince Scherbatow was not told exactly how he was being used. But the direction of the case and the payment of all legal expenses came from Remy, locally managed by Korte.

  Remy also described to Schweitzer his relationship with Dr. King: In the summer of 1993, he said, the Forensic Institute of the University of Munich withdrew from the investigations and, as a replacement, Maples suggested King. An oral agreement with King was struck, supplementing the written agreement between Korte and Maples, and Korte thereafter carried to California the blood samples from Sophie of Hanover and Xenia Sfiris. But, with the Anastasia Manahan tissue still locked in a fierce court battle, Remy had no comparative material from the primary claimant, the woman in whom he was most interested.

  In his confession to Schweitzer, Remy attempted to smooth over the court battles of the previous winter. This unpleasantness, Remy told Schweitzer, was the result of misunderstanding, bad advice, and loose organizational discipline. Korte had reported inaccurately what was happening in America, he said, and he blamed himself for not maintaining tighter control. He and Korte, Remy added, had severed their relationship.

  When the tissue went to England, seventeen months of legal maneuvering and battling in Charlottesville came to an end. In retrospect, one significant question pertaining to the case remained unanswered. It was the role of Dr. Mary-Claire King. Originally, Dr. King, a famous scientist, deeply involved in research into the causes of breast cancer, agreed at the persuasion of Dr. Maples and Dr. Levine to accept bones and teeth from the Ekaterinburg skeletons and to attempt to establish whether these were the remains of the Imperial family. This report, despite increasingly urgent telephone calls from Maples, was never released. Nevertheless, King accepted a second Romanov assignment, orally agreeing to receive, test, and compare a slice of Anastasia Manahan’s tissue to material from Romanov relatives and descendants brought to her by Korte. Over many months, wearied, perhaps even disgusted, by the seemingly endless squabbling in Charlottesville, King remained unwilling to make any commitment on paper as to how the tests should be performed and how, when, and where the results should be released.

  The question arises as to why, busy as she was with critical research into a disease which threatens and takes the lives of millions of women, King agreed to involve herself and her laboratory in Romanov identities in the first place. She did not do it for money; in order to retain absolute control, King refuses to accept money in cases of this kind. If she did it to enhance her reputation or because she was intrigued, why did she not follow through? The fact is that without King’s name and reputation behind them and the prospect that she was available to test the tissue, the Russian Nobility Association and Andrews & Kurth would have found it almost impossible to block the testing arrangements agreed on by Richard Schweitzer, Peter Gill, and Martha Jefferson Hospital. In the end, many people spent many months and many thousands of dollars waiting for Dr. King. She did not deliver.

  * Subsequently, Dr. Kevin Davies, the editor of Nature Genetics and Ivinson’s superior, made an even stronger statement: “Gill’s lab is, obviously, the leading lab in this kind of thing in the world.” Davies also explained that Andrews & Kurth had, at Mary-Claire King’s suggestion, solicited his participation as an expert witness. Because he was unavailable that day, Ivinson had traveled to Charlottesville in his stead. Davies was surprised that Andrews & Kurth had not only not paid his colleague the customary expert witness fee but “didn’t even give him lunch.”

  * This interest in Russian history failed to sustain Crawford when she wrote in her final memorandum to the court that Anastasia Manahan claimed “that along with her brother Nikolas [sic], she survived the murders in the cellar.” In fact, Anastasia Manahan never said that any other member of the Imperial family survived. And, of course, the brother of Grand Duchess Anastasia was named Alexis.

  * Although there was nothing in Maples’ agreement with Korte that prohibited Maples from revealing their professional relationship, the anthropologist was eager to keep it a secret. I first heard of Willi Korte from Dr. Michael Baden in one of my initial interviews for this book. “You ought to talk to Willi Korte,” Baden told me expansively. “He knows everything that’s going on.” When, in January 1994, I asked Maples about Korte, Maples seemed alarmed: “Korte is extremely knowledgeable, but he won’t talk to you. He would be rabid if he knew that Michael had been talking to you. He and the German outfit he works for are extremely secretive.” After the lawsuit was over, when I knew about the agreement with Korte, I asked Maples about it. He denied that an agreement ever existed.

  CHAPTER 17

  AS GOOD AS THE PEOPLE USING IT

  During the summer of 1994, while Peter Gill and his colleagues at the Forensic Science Service were working to extract DNA from the Anastasia Manahan tissue slices which Gill had brought from Charlottesville, Maurice Philip Remy was still trying to acquire for himself some source of Anastasia Manahan’s DNA. The dismissal of the Russian Nobility Association’s suit against Martha Jefferson Hospital for lack of standing did not, in itself, prevent Remy from obtaining from the hospital a piece of tissue identical to the one taken by Gill. Indeed, Judge Swett’s dismissal of the case left Remy entirely free to apply to Ed Deets, the administrator of Manahan’s estate, for a tissue sample to send to Mary-Claire King in California. Remy was dubious, however, about Dr. King’s reliability. In deciding what to do next, he turned unexpectedly to his recent adversary, Richard Schweitzer. How did Schweitzer think he ought to handle King? Schweitzer tried to be helpful. “Mary-Claire King didn’t do the actual work on those materials,” he told Remy. “It was done by a man named Charles Ginther. He’s now persona non grata in her lab, but he continues in another lab out there, and I can give you his number.” Remy promptly called Ginther. Soon, he found himself in further difficulties.

  Charles Ginther, a young DNA scientist working in Dr. King’s laboratory, had extracted mitochondrial DNA from the Ekaterinburg materials brought by William Maples and from the Xenia Sfiris and Princess Sophie blood samples supplied by Remy. Ginther, King explained to Richard Schweitzer, “has finished his report and turned it in, but I can’t release it. He’s a good scientist, but he’s not a good report
writer. I’ve had to send it back to him to work on so that I feel that we can put it out as a regular report of this laboratory.” This may be true, but another circumstance also may have contributed to King’s failure to release this report: that is that the tests on the Ekaterinburg bones in King’s laboratory produced results which were the same as or inferior to those already announced by Dr. Gill. If this was the case—as another DNA scientist has pointed out—King would not want to say, “Here are our results. They are not as good as Gill’s results.” Probably, she felt it was better to say nothing.

  In any case, as the Charlottesville lawsuit was coming to an end, King and Ginther had a disagreement, and Ginther moved across the hall, into the laboratory of Dr. George Sensabaugh. “Dr. King put their falling-out in the harshest terms to me,” said Richard Schweitzer. “I have never heard one scientist degrade another that way. She said, in essence, that she had to put Chuck Ginther out of her laboratory. For a scientist to say that to a layperson seemed to me extraordinary.” Ginther, junior to King at the same university, speaks of this relationship with circumspection: “Mary-Claire King is a very famous scientist. She is the right person, at the right time, working on the right disease [breast cancer]. She is a woman, working on a woman’s disease, at a famous university. And a lot of people very much want her to succeed. But she is very difficult to work for.”

  It was in this context that Remy turned to Schweitzer. “Remy didn’t know how to go about writing a commitment letter from a lab,” Schweitzer recalled. “And he also had problems about how to get the Ekaterinburg specimens out of the hands of Mary-Claire King and transferred to Ginther across the hall. So I helped him. I drafted documents for him.” Why did Schweitzer, who had just concluded a grueling seven months’ battle with Remy in court, try to help his former antagonist make an arrangement with Ginther? “Because I wanted to get more testing done, comparing the Manahan tissue with the Hessian,” Schweitzer explained. “I knew that Charles Ginther was an excellent scientist and technician in that field. I had no objection to Remy being the person to get it done. My problem all along with Remy and his group was that they did not care what damage they did as long as they could get their way. They didn’t understand that they could get their way without doing a lot of damage. I told Remy that I thought that was his major flaw.”

  In June, Remy—with Schweitzer’s help—asked Ginther to accept a commission so that he could make a proper request to get a tissue sample from Ed Deets. Except for the Manahan tissue, Ginther already had what he needed to go ahead. He had done Hessian and Romanov profiles in King’s laboratory; by that time he also had the same profiles published in Nature Genetics by Peter Gill. Had Ginther received tissue from Charlottesville, he could have smoothly completed Remy’s commission.

  But Ginther (who was not being paid for his work) posed two preconditions: First, he wanted Mary-Claire King to state unequivocally in writing that she was not willing to accept the proposed commission from Remy and that she had no objection to his doing so. Also, Ginther asked that Remy arrange for King to release to him the comparative Romanov and Hessian materials in her lab. In an attempt to do this, Remy telephoned Dr. King. He had difficulty reaching her, and, when he did, he failed to persuade her.

  Remy thereupon hired the Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny and Myers to intercede. The lawyers told him that when they called King, she said she would be happy to release the blood samples if she could find them … she didn’t know exactly where they were … this was just one of many projects in her laboratory. She also complained that she could not deal with Remy, who had ranted and raved on the telephone, telling her what to do. She was not going to waste her time on somebody like that, she said. Remy’s response was “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Ultimately, King did turn over the comparative samples to Ginther. Subsequently, however, Remy complained to Schweitzer that she gave Ginther very little material to work with. “She just threw most of it away,” Remy said, “the stuff we had worked so hard to get.” Whether, in fact, she had failed to save the blood samples or whether she wanted to keep some for future purposes, no one knew. Remy believed that her motive was spite. Schweitzer disagreed. “I just don’t think she gave a damn anymore. She was doing something else, and she just didn’t care.”

  Ginther, like Remy, felt that Mary-Claire King did not permit him to take enough material by volume or weight from her laboratory. Gill, Ginther told Schweitzer, was working with a gram and a half of DNA material, whereas he had less than a gram. Nevertheless, Ginther started over. He already had done most of this work in King’s lab, but he wanted to do it over in order to avoid being accused of using her work. Once again, he derived mitochondrial DNA from the Hessian and Romanov materials. Once again, he extracted mtDNA from a blood sample, sent to him by Remy, taken from a woman named Margaret Ellerick. (Mrs. Ellerick was a niece of Franziska Schanzkowska, the Polish woman who disappeared in Berlin about the time that Fräulein Unbekannt was pulled from the canal.) Nevertheless, even as he did this work in July 1994, Ginther still had no material—no tissue, no blood, no bone or hair—from which to extract the DNA of the woman Remy had commissioned him to identify, Anastasia Manahan.

  Remy, frustrated by his inability to get results from Mary-Claire King and by the time it was taking to meet Charles Ginther’s conditions to work, got busy elsewhere. He realized that, for all the words uttered in court regarding the benefits of parallel testing, any results Ginther obtained from testing Charlottesville tissue would provide only a duplicate of the tests already being done by Peter Gill. Coming in second in this race was not Remy’s objective. “I think by then Remy decided to circumvent the Gill sample by finding his own sample somewhere else,” said Ginther.

  Remy and his assistants began searching in Germany, through hospitals, sanatoria, and doctors’ offices, for stored samples of Anna Anderson’s blood which might have resulted from medical examinations during her four or five decades of living in that country. One of his researchers located a trace of blood in a canule (a tube) used during a routine examination in the late 1950s and kept by her local physician as a curiosity. But nothing useful could be derived from this canule.

  In July, Remy found Professor Stefan Sandkuhler, a former hematologist from Heidelberg University, who had examined Anna Anderson on June 6, 1951. She had been brought to him to be tested as a carrier of hemophilia, presumably to reinforce her claim to be a daughter of Empress Alexandra. After taking a blood sample, Sandkuhler had followed the usual procedure and smeared a drop of blood on a glass plate, where it dried and was preserved. The professor located the sample and gave it to Remy. Scratched into the glass was its only source of legitimacy, the patient’s name. Remy said he read there “Anastasia.” The result of the 1951 test for hemophilia carriership, Sandkuhler told Remy, had been inconclusive.

  Remy divided the slide he had acquired from Sandkuhler into two pieces. One half was sent to Professor Bernd Herrmann, a specialist in short tandem repeat (STR) identification of nuclear DNA at the Anthropological Institute of Göttingen University. The other half of the slide went to Dr. Ginther in Berkeley. The only clue to identity was the name Anna Anderson (not “Anastasia,” as reported by Remy) etched in the glass. Ginther tried and failed to extract DNA from the dried blood. Subsequently, however, Herrmann managed to get DNA from his half of the slide. He sent this DNA material to Ginther to sequence and obtain a profile. Ginther found that this DNA did not match the Hessian profile (that is, the donor of the blood was not related to Empress Alexandra), nor did it match the Schanzkowska profile as derived from Margaret Ellerick. Because the blood on the slide did not match, as Ginther put it, “any of the characters of interest,” he wondered about the integrity and origin of the slide. “It was an open slide. It could have been contaminated. It didn’t even have a cover slip on it. Somebody had just smeared blood which dried,” he said.

  Over the summer of 1994, Peter Gill’s findings about the Charlottesv
ille tissue were awaited anxiously in English palaces and German castles. The earlier report that Anastasia’s skeleton was missing from the Ekaterinburg grave had stirred uneasiness in dynastic families in both countries. Almost without exception, royal Britons and Germans had always firmly rejected Anna Anderson’s claim to be the daughter of the tsar. The British Royal family, following the lead of Prince Philip’s patriarchal uncle Lord Mountbatten, habitually referred to Mrs. Manahan as “the false Anastasia.” The Hessian cousins of Prince Philip used stronger language. Now, as Gill was about to give his report, a ghastly pit opened before these families. What if a morally appalling and politically embarrassing injustice had been committed against a helpless Royal cousin?

  For several years, Maurice Remy had done his best to involve the Hessians—that is, the descendants of the family of Empress Alexandra and her brother, Grand Duke Ernest Louis—in the attempt to block the Schweitzers. Prince Philip’s elder sister, Princess Sophie of Hanover, now eighty-one, had given blood to Remy, which he sent for comparative purposes to Mary-Claire King. Remy also had approached Princess Margaret of Hesse, the eighty-two-year-old widow of Prince Louis of Hesse, whose father, Grand Duke Ernest, had been the claimant’s nemesis in the 1920s. Born Margaret Geddes in Scotland, Princess Margaret inherited Wolfsgarten, the Rhineland castle where Empress Alexandra spent her childhood. She also controlled the private Hesse family archives, which, for a while, she opened to Remy’s researchers. A third concerned Hessian was Prince Moritz, who would inherit Schloss Wolfsgarten after the death of the childless Princess Margaret.