The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Remy’s effort was thwarted primarily by Prince Philip and his private secretary, Sir Brian McGrath. The prince had no objection to his sister providing a blood sample—after all, he had given his own blood to Peter Gill to help verify the Ekaterinburg bones. But when Remy went further and tried to draw Sophie, Margaret, and Moritz into the Charlottesville litigation, McGrath, speaking for Prince Philip, sternly “advised” these German relatives to stay away. It was not that the British Royal household was seriously worried that the claimant might turn out to be Anastasia; in fact, they were unflappably convinced that she was not. Rather, their concern was that the controversy over Anastasia Manahan’s identity and the resulting lawsuits in Charlottesville might somehow compromise Queen Elizabeth II’s upcoming state visit to Russia. No one wanted this diplomatic event overshadowed by a pronouncement—especially while Elizabeth was actually in Russia—that Anna Anderson had been Tsar Nicholas II’s daughter. The queen’s advisers, therefore, favored a solution to the claimant’s identity before Her Majesty left for Moscow on October 17.

  Early in September, Peter Gill told Richard Schweitzer that he was close to achieving results. Schweitzer and the Forensic Science Service mutually agreed on a date, October 5, on which Gill would announce his findings at a press conference in London. Simultaneously, Ed Deets would file the results in court and hold a press conference in Charlottesville. The FSS made it clear to Schweitzer that, as this was a private commission, he, not they, was responsible for arranging and presiding over the press conference.

  Neither Gill nor Schweitzer sought exclusivity for Gill’s tests. On the contrary, said Schweitzer, “from the day Peter Gill came to Charlottesville to take the tissue, he insisted that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology do another set of tests to verify what he is doing. Gill wanted this confirmation before he made his own public announcement. Actually, he hoped to have a joint news conference with these other scientists.” During this same period, Schweitzer—also with Gill’s encouragement—began arranging a third test of the Manahan tissue, with Dr. Mark Stoneking, a mitochondrial DNA specialist at Pennsylvania State University. An agreement with AFIP was finally worked out on September 21, only two weeks before the London press conference. Susan Barritt, an AFIP scientist, drove to Charlottesville and collected two sets of Anastasia Manahan tissue slices, one for AFIP and one for Dr. Stoneking. Thereafter, Dr. Gill did everything possible to help AFIP accelerate its testing. Rather than leave the U.S. government scientists to work only with his published results, he dispatched all his protocols and codes to Maryland; the same data went simultaneously to Dr. Stoneking. Schweitzer was enormously pleased by this exhibition of scientists working together and wholeheartedly approved Gill’s proposal of joint publication of the results of their mutual investigations.

  Maurice Remy continued to wish to play a dominant role in solving the Anastasia mystery. After Richard Schweitzer assisted him in June in working out an agreement with Charles Ginther, Remy and Schweitzer lost contact with each other. Nevertheless, Schweitzer and Gill heard rumors that Remy had commissioned further tests on the 1951 blood slide, and Remy picked up the news that Gill’s press conference was scheduled for October 5. Remy reacted to this in two ways: he began pressing Schweitzer to allow him to attend and participate in the press conference, and he readied plans to release new information apparently obtained by Dr. Herrmann from the 1951 blood slide.

  Remy’s request to participate in the London press conference met with partial acceptance from Schweitzer, who, having paid for Gill’s testing, had the right to make this decision. “I told him I’d be happy for him to come,” Schweitzer said. “I told him that we fully intended to acknowledge that he was the original discoverer of the tissue at Martha Jefferson Hospital, and that we intended to speak of his many years of work. And I said that I would announce that he would be available afterward. But it was not to be a joint press conference.” However, a secondary role was not what Remy envisaged. Unless his demands were met, Remy warned, he might release his own findings before October 5. He mentioned that the London Sunday Times, which routinely pays thousands of pounds for exclusives on premium stories, was interested. Schweitzer and Gill were unwilling to make the arrangements Remy demanded.

  On Sunday, October 2, the Sunday Times trumpeted its scoop: Anna Anderson had been “unmasked as the conwoman [sic] of the century,” said the newspaper. “Genetic tests have established beyond all doubt that Anna Anderson … was one of the biggest imposters the world has known.… The news came at the end of a global race to solve the mystery.… Yesterday’s results beat a British team led by Dr. Peter Gill who is to announce his findings on Wednesday.… The existence of the sample was discovered by Maurice Philip Remy, a German television producer who has spent five hundred thousand pounds to find the genetic keys that would unlock Anastasia’s past.” The Sunday Times reported that the test had been done by Professor Bernd Herrmann of the Anthropological Institute of Göttingen University; otherwise, there were no scientific details. Essentially the same story appeared that weekend in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

  The rest of the London press ignored the Sunday Times and crowded into Dr. Gill’s press conference. Richard and Marina Schweitzer were on the dais with Dr. Gill and his colleague Dr. Kevin Sullivan. Facing them in the front row, Prince Rostislav Romanov, grandnephew of Nicholas II, sat next to his friend Michael Thornton, who had once had power of attorney for Anna Anderson in Britain. Next to Thornton sat Ian Lilburne, a supporter of the claimant who had attended every session of the grueling Hamburg court battles in the 1960s. Against a side wall sat a tall, white-faced, bespectacled man with slicked-down blond hair. He was Maurice Philip Remy.

  Schweitzer introduced himself and his wife, and, before anything else, credited Remy with discovering the tissue samples at Martha Jefferson Hospital. Then, assisted by photographs and charts projected onto a screen behind him, Peter Gill described what he had done: he had extracted both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from the Charlottesville tissue (which, he always said carefully, was “said to have come from Anna Anderson”). He had compared the DNA profile of the Charlottesville tissue with DNA profiles of the presumed tsar and empress (obtained from the Ekaterinburg bones), with the blood sample donated by Prince Philip, and with a blood sample obtained from a German farmer named Karl Maucher, who was a grandnephew of Franziska Schanzkowska. Using the short tandem repeat technique on nuclear DNA, Gill said he determined that “if you accept that these samples came from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could not be related to Tsar Nicholas or Empress Alexandra.” Gill then compared mitochondrial DNA from the tissue to the DNA sequence obtained from Prince Philip; if Anna Anderson was Grand Duchess Anastasia, her mitochondrial DNA sequence would match Philip’s. In this case, in one distinctively hypervariable area, there were six base pair differences. This was enough for Gill to conclude that “the sample said to have come from Anna Anderson could not be associated with a maternal relative of the empress or Prince Philip. That is definitive.” Finally, Gill compared the mitochondrial DNA profile of the Charlottesville tissue with that of Franziska Schanzkowska’s grandnephew, Karl Maucher. He achieved “a one hundred percent match, an absolute identity.” Again speaking cautiously, Gill said, “This suggests that Karl Maucher may be a relative of Anna Anderson.”

  At the press conference, Peter Gill never flatly said that Anna Anderson was not Grand Duchess Anastasia and that she was Franziska Schanzkowska. He explained that he had used his own database of three hundred Caucasian sequences along with additional DNA sequences supplied by AFIP and Mark Stoneking. He said that while he had found the Maucher and Anderson DNA profiles to be identical, he had found no similar profiles in his own database. Therefore, he said, the odds that Anna Anderson was not a member of the Schanzkowska family were three hundred to one, perhaps more.*

  The journalists had other questions. Gill was asked how certain he was that the tissue he tested had come from Anna Anderson. He answere
d carefully. “I can’t really speak for procedures at Martha Jefferson Hospital,” he said. “But when I was there, they showed me pretty good documentation; the numbers on the wax blocks tied up perfectly with numbers on the case notes.” He was asked whether he thought that DNA profiling was infallible. “A technique always is only as good as the people using it,” he said. “But providing you always put your findings into the correct context, then, yes, it should be infallible.” He was asked to compare his work with the studies done in Germany. “When I compared our results with their results, they were”—Gill paused—“different. And from that I concluded that the sample which I analyzed and the sample they analyzed almost certainly came from different people.”

  This was a surprise. Immediately, Michael Thornton stood up and stared at Maurice Remy across the room. Thornton was a friend of Richard Schweitzer and had not appreciated Remy’s attempt to overshadow Dr. Gill’s research and press conference. Gill’s revelation that the DNA extracted from Remy’s blood sample did not match the DNA extracted from the Charlottesville tissue left them, Thornton declared, “with the fact that the blood sample used for Der Spiegel and the Sunday Times is false. It is not from Anna Anderson.”

  Remy, his face coloring, rose to defend his tests and his blood sample. Apparently, he had known before he flew to London that the DNA profile his scientist had obtained differed from that achieved by Peter Gill. “I don’t want to bore you with some problems whether the sample is right or not right,” he told the audience. “We’ve done our work properly. I think the best way now is it should be solved by the scientists. While leaving Germany yesterday, my scientists told me that there are ten reasons the DNA might be different. One might be the provenance [chain of custody] of the sample and nine other possibilities could lie in the examining of the samples. I am an intermediary between scientists and we will work it out. But to me there is no doubt of the provenance of the blood sample we used.”

  Thornton persisted. “Then why do you have a different DNA?” he asked.

  “I’m not a scientist, so I’m maybe not the right one to answer this question,” Remy said, “but we’ll try to work it out. Anyway, the results are the same.”

  “No,” said Thornton implacably, “they are not the same. The DNA is different.”

  “The DNA is not so different. And I don’t want to bore you.”

  “The DNA is different,” Thornton repeated. He turned to Peter Gill. “Will you confirm that it is entirely different DNA, Dr. Gill?”

  “They looked pretty different to me,” Gill admitted.

  “So the DNA is different and the blood sample is false,” Thornton said.

  Remy tried again: “Let’s leave it to the scientists and not start a war between an intestine and a blood sample.”

  “There is no war,” said Thornton. “It’s a question of the truth.”

  Remy, badly flustered, wanted Thornton to leave him alone. “We’ll find out at the end,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll hand it over to the scientists. We have nothing to hide. We will show all of our results at the end. They will be published. Then we’ll see.”

  “We look forward to that,” Thornton said coolly and sat down.

  When the press conference concluded, many journalists remained, interviewing principals. Schweitzer told one group that while he accepted the science of Dr. Gill’s findings, it was “contrary to the rational experience of all the people who knew Anna Anderson, talked to her, and stayed with her, to believe that she was a Polish peasant.” Remy moved through the room handing out a five-page press release claiming that he and his German scientist had achieved “the breakthrough … a result of almost 100% significance. Not one of the four DNA particles obtained from the cell nucleus … tallied with the DNA of the Tsar and his wife.” On another side of the room, Thornton continued his criticism of Remy: “He tried to undermine Dr. Gill’s announcement with a scoop of his own, which has failed to stand scrutiny. It is also the worst kind of bad manners to come to someone else’s press conference and distribute his own self-glorifying press release, which, incidentally, is riddled with factual errors.”

  * The language of scientists, cautious and replete with qualifiers, often moves backward toward its goal. Thus, in this case, Gill actually said, “The chance of finding matching profiles if Anna Anderson and Karl Maucher are unrelated is less than one in three hundred.” Later, in his published report, Gill was more direct: “This finding supports the hypothesis that Anna Anderson and Franziska Schanzkowska were the same person.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE CLEVEREST OF THE FOUR CHILDREN

  Game, set, match! Anna Anderson is out! This is the scuppering of the pro-Anna party!” exulted Sir Brian McGrath, who was with Prince Philip at Sandringham when the news got out. “It’s over,” declared Prince Rostislav Romanov in London. “It’s about time,” said Prince Nicholas Romanov in Switzerland. No one was happier than Prince Alexis Scherbatow. “I’ve been vindicated,” he rejoiced in New York. “From the beginning I knew she was a fraud.”

  On the other side, Anna Anderson’s supporters and Anastasia Manahan’s friends were shocked, dismayed, and incredulous. “I knew her for twelve years,” said Peter Kurth, the author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. “I was involved in her story for nearly thirty years. For me—just because of some tests—I cannot one day say, ‘Oh, well, I was wrong.’ It isn’t that simple. I think it’s a shame that a great legend, a wonderful adventure, an astonishing story that inspired so many people, including myself, should suddenly be reduced to a little glass dish.”

  Brien Horan, a Connecticut lawyer who first met Anna Anderson in 1970 and subsequently produced a never-published dossier of all the evidence, pro and con, pronounced himself “stunned” by the Schanzkowska identity. “You have to forgive me,” he said. “I’ve learned about the Schanzkowska results so recently that, after so many years, it’s virtually impossible for me to process this information. But it is just not possible that a Polish peasant in the 1920s, long before television made us all so similar, could have become this woman. I would have had much less trouble if they had found simply that she was not Anastasia. But for them to say that she was a Polish peasant, that’s difficult for me to swallow.”

  Richard and Marina Schweitzer, like Brien Horan, refused to accept the Schanzkowska identity. “I know one thing for certain,” said Schweitzer immediately after the London press conference. “Anastasia was not a Polish peasant.” Schweitzer made clear that he did not challenge Peter Gill’s findings that the Charlottesville tissue Gill had tested was unrelated to Empress Alexandra and probably was related to the Schanzkowska family. Instead, he challenged the legitimacy of the samples Gill had tested.

  “To say that Gill was correct, but that Anna Anderson was not Schanzkowska, means that the tissue tested was not Anna Anderson’s,” Schweitzer explained while he was still in London. “We now feel that there had to be some form of manipulation or substitution. Specifically, that means that somehow, somebody got in and switched or substituted tissue at Martha Jefferson Hospital. The first thing I will do is go back to the hospital and get the documentation on all of their procedures: how the hospital kept its archives, how certain their security system was, how sure they were that it could not have been breached. Then I want to investigate various potential scenarios. When Willi Korte came to see Penny Jenkins in November 1992, how much material did she have on her desk in front of her at the time? Did she have files out that might have had numbers that showed? Were the files arranged in a way that somebody might have read the numbers upside down? Or were the files in her office so that somebody could slip in later, open the file drawer, and say, ‘Here it is,’ take it out and get the numbers themselves? Penny did tell me that when the doctors first went to find the tissue, they couldn’t find it and she had to get up and together they found the right box in the right hole. Then the hospital put it under special guard, in ‘proprietary custody.’ ”

  What could be t
he motive for such a conspiracy? Schweitzer suggested two: “When it looked as though they were going to be thwarted by Lovell from getting access to the tissue by legal means, they took the real tissue away and put something else there [the “something else” would have been Schanzkowska family tissue]. Then, later, after feigning a long search, they could come up with the lost tissue, the real tissue, produce the right results, and get credit for solving the mystery. Or, if their objective was to make sure that she was recognized as Schanzkowska, a substitution would achieve that nicely. Who might ‘they’ have been? Many people had many reasons—family reasons, almost hereditary reasons—for not wanting her to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Money would not be a problem for these people.”

  Schweitzer intended to ask other questions: “Can we determine the sex and the age of the person from whom the tissue was taken? [Gill subsequently informed Schweitzer that the tissue had indeed come from a woman.] Can we determine how old the specimen was as a specimen? That is, was it about fifteen years old, as it would have been as a result of a 1979 operation? What part of the human body was it from, the lower bowel or somewhere else? Was the same kind of preservative used by the hospital at that time? Do the medical records support the fact that the tissue brought out was gangrenous?”

  Richard Schweitzer’s friends, even those who shared his views, believed that the odds against him were great. Brien Horan, a loyal Anna Anderson supporter, said, “The conspiracy theory is not going to be taken seriously. It’s just too hard to imagine that a substitution could be pulled off. It boggles the mind!” But Schweitzer was not backing away. Asked if he minded being called a conspiracy theorist, he said, “I’m seventy years old. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t have a theory. All I have is a series of conjectures. I’m looking for the truth.”