The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (36 page)

In January 1993, Thomas Kline contacted Fred Manahan, who Kline believed controlled the tissue. Manahan referred Kline to James Lovell. On April 1.6, after several telephone conversations, Kline wrote a three-page letter to Lovell, formally asking for help in obtaining access to Anastasia Manahan’s tissue for DNA testing to be done by the Forensic Institute in Munich. He said that the institute already had access to a number of living relatives of the Imperial family whose blood could be used to make DNA comparisons. To buttress his appeal, Kline cited two scientific articles which dealt with DNA analysis. One was the work of the British Forensic Science Service team led by Dr. Peter Gill. On June 18, Kline wrote to Lovell again to clarify Dr. Willi Korte’s role in the Munich institute’s investigation. Korte, Kline said, was an experienced researcher, not a medical doctor. Kline added that the Munich institute had established working relationships with forensic scientists in the United States, “in particular, Dr. Mary-Claire King, [who] has agreed to work with the Forensic Institute.”

James Lovell found his encounters with Thomas Kline alarming. Unsure of his own legal status, Lovell consulted Richard Schweitzer, a Virginia attorney, who, like Lovell, believed in Mrs. Manahan’s claim to be the tsar’s daughter. Speaking of Kline, Lovell told Schweitzer, “He’s just harassing me to death. He keeps saying, ‘We have to have an answer! We just can’t leave it! We must act! We must have an answer from you right now!’ ” Lovell asked Schweitzer what he ought to do. “Jimmy, you don’t have to do anything,” Schweitzer advised. “You don’t even have to talk to him on the phone.” “So,” Schweitzer said later, “the next time the man called, Jimmy—on his own, I didn’t tell him to do it—did the best thing he could do. When he heard, ‘You’ve got to answer right now, yes or no!’ Jimmy said, ‘Then the answer is no,’ and hung up. Then Jimmy said to me, ‘Do you
think I did right? What can they do next?’ And I said, ‘Jimmy, they can’t do anything. They don’t have any standing. They cannot participate in a lawsuit in the State of Virginia unless they have standing. The only person I know of who’s a resident of this state, who can come in and have any connection with this case, is Marina.’ ”

Marina Botkina Schweitzer, Gleb Botkin’s daughter, is a Virginia gentlewoman with a quiet demeanor and soft southern accent. Her Russian origins, not immediately apparent to outsiders, are of profound importance to her. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Sergei Botkin, was the father of Russian clinical medicine and the friend and personal physician of Tsar Alexander II; her grandfather, Dr. Eugene Botkin, played the same role for Tsar Nicholas II and, as a consequence of his loyalty, died with the Imperial family in the cellar in Ekaterinburg. She reads and speaks Russian and German and every day sits down to watch the
Vremenya
evening news broadcast from Moscow on cable TV. The only daughter among Gleb’s four children, Marina was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Smith College. While working in a law office in Charlottesville, she met her future husband, Richard Schweitzer.

Schweitzer, who, on his wife’s behalf, was to fight a single-handed court battle with a nationwide law firm employing 250 attorneys, is of Swiss descent. His ancestors came to America from the canton of Basel in the early nineteenth century, intending, as religious missionaries, to convert Indians in Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Virginia and served for four years during World War II on antisubmarine duty in the North Atlantic. For a while, he was a member of a secret U.S. Navy raiding team, trained to blow up German U-boat pens. Schweitzer practiced law in the field of international reinsurance and finance and retired in 1990. At seventy-three, he is feisty and, when aroused, fierce. He has a straight back, a sharp face behind rimless glasses, and thinning white hair. His language is lawyerly, but underneath there is an ironic sense of humor. In the lawsuit that was to come, Richard Schweitzer’s opponents tended to patronize him and treat him as a small-town country lawyer. They made a mistake.

The woman called Anna Anderson had been a part of Marina Schweitzer’s life since Marina was five, when her father visited the claimant at Castle Seeon. Marina knew the claimant slightly when Anna Anderson was in America at the end of the 1920s. In the 1950s, Schweitzer said, “when she was living in poverty in the Black Forest, we put money in envelopes and sent it to her by registered mail. Finally, somebody wrote to Gleb and said, ‘Please tell Mrs. Schweitzer to stop sending money because she is taking it to buy meat for the dogs and not food for herself.’ We never stopped. So she was aware of us as people who wanted to help.” After Anna Anderson returned to America in 1968 and became Anastasia Manahan, Marina Schweitzer continued, “we saw her two or three times a year. But it was more because of her closeness to my father than to us.”

In fact, Marina Schweitzer was always somewhat wary of Anastasia Manahan. “She talked to us on the phone a lot … especially when she was having trouble with Jack. I purposefully kept her at a distance because she had a history of quarreling with every person who was close to her. And the truth is we never quarreled. She called me ‘Marina’ and she called Dick ‘Mr. Schweitzer.’ Another reason we did not go there often was that I could not stand the sight of Jack and the way he treated her as a prize possession, something to brag about. I think he did her case more harm than all her enemies put together. He used her to prop up his own ego. One thing that infuriated me was that, before he married her, he took my father and her to his bank and made her swear that she was Anastasia, and then made Father swear that he knew that she was Anastasia.”

Whatever she did—and during her final years, the Schweitzers admit, she was often difficult—Marina and Richard Schweitzer never doubted that the woman they knew was the daughter of the tsar. Her behavior, they believed, was not abnormal for a woman who had been through the experiences she had endured. The crux was her identity “For us,” Richard Schweitzer said, “having known Anastasia all those years, it was a matter of family honor to try our utmost to fulfill her lifelong wish to have her identity as the Grand Duchess Anastasia recognized.”

The Manahan family and James Blair Lovell did not realize, early in 1993, that they were not entitled by Virginia law to control of Anastasia Manahan’s tissue. In Virginia, in cases where there is no will and no surviving spouse or children, an estate devolves on next of kin by blood. John Manahan’s cousins were his wife’s next of kin, but not by blood, and when Martha Jefferson Hospital learned that the matter was being discussed, it politely informed the Manahans of this law. If the Manahans did not have control, then, by extension, they could not assign it to James Lovell, who, in turn, could not pass it to Mary DeWitt, or Thomas Kline, or anyone else.

Informed of this by the hospital’s attorneys, Penny Jenkins began to worry She had already spoken to Richard Schweitzer when DeWitt had hired a Charlottesville lawyer to try to obtain the tissue. At that time Schweitzer had said, “Listen, if these people come to you and you don’t want to give them anything, tell me immediately. I will come to Charlottesville and file an intervenor in Marina’s name, insisting that nothing should be delivered unless the hospital is protected and part of the samples are kept.” Intervenor is a legal term describing a court-approved intervention by an outside party in an ongoing lawsuit. Because Marina was both a citizen of Virginia and a direct descendant of one of the victims of the Ipatiev House massacre, Schweitzer felt sure that she would be permitted to intervene.

After Mary DeWitt disappeared, Schweitzer and Jenkins continued to talk. Jenkins realized that the hospital was vulnerable to an avalanche of demands for the tissue. Again Schweitzer offered to help. He looked up the appropriate statute and, working with Jenkins and the hospital lawyers, began drafting a petition which would permit Martha Jefferson Hospital to release the tissue to a qualified laboratory. The work proceeded slowly. The hospital’s attorneys, Schweitzer remembered, were “hand-holding lawyers, the kind that hold the hands of the trustees, fuddy-duddy lawyers, office lawyers, fiduciary lawyers, desk lawyers who work with wills and estates and never go to court, very thorough and picky and slow. They never met a date with me. They kept changing position, and I constantly drafted and redrafted to meet their demands. Finally, they put it into the hands of a skillful litigator, Matthew Murray, and we got it done. It
took from May to September, but if Matt had handled it from the beginning, we’d have been finished in June.” By September, Schweitzer had satisfied everyone and written a nonadversarial document of which the hospital could say, “Yes, this is the kind of petition we want you to pose in court.”

While working with the hospital, Schweitzer also began looking for a laboratory which could test the tissue once it was available. He contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland, but he and they could not agree on terms. In addition, the AFIP had no DNA materials from the Romanovs or Hessians for use in comparing the Manahan tissue. Schweitzer therefore approached Dr. Peter Gill and the British Forensic Science Service, which, of course, possessed not only the DNA profiles taken from the Ekaterinburg remains but also the blood sample from Prince Philip linking him to the bones of the purported Empress Alexandra. During the summer, Schweitzer began negotiating with Home Office solicitors to work out a private commission. Ultimately, a written agreement was signed. Schweitzer made an initial down payment of five thousand pounds and placed another five thousand pounds in escrow in an English bank to be drawn on if needed.

On September 30, 1993, Richard Schweitzer filed his wife’s petition for release of the tissue with the Virginia Sixteenth Judicial Circuit Court. Marina Schweitzer, the petition declared, had standing in the court on three counts: as a Virginia citizen, as the granddaughter of Dr. Eugene Botkin, and as the only resident of Virginia having a prolonged, serious connection with the life and identity of Anastasia Manahan. The basis of his wife’s suit, Schweitzer explained to the court, was that, as Dr. Botkin’s granddaughter, she had a right to know what had happened to her grandfather: “Identification of a putative survivor of the murders [that is, Grand Duchess Anastasia] would assist in the more certain identification of all, including petitioner’s grandfather, Dr. Botkin.” In the petition, Schweitzer did not ask the court to authorize release of the tissues to his wife; he asked only that the court permit access by Dr. Peter Gill to small samples of the tissue so they could be tested. Marina Schweitzer, her husband concluded, was prepared to pay all the costs and expenses of this DNA testing.

Martha Jefferson Hospital took no position on the petition and told the court it would do whatever the court ordered. Informally, Matthew Murray declared, “If the plaintiff can prove she has a right to the tissue and that’s what the court orders, we don’t have any problem with that. We don’t stand to gain or lose anything.” Schweitzer believed that things were going smoothly. “I had even drafted the order for the judge to issue, the way the hospital wanted it,” he recalled. “The judge set a hearing for November 1. I thought we’d sail right through.”