The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (37 page)

On the afternoon of November 1, 1993, Circuit Court Judge Jay T. Swett, a young-looking man with blond hair, gathered his black robe around him, seated himself high above everyone else in his courtroom, and prepared to deal with the matter of Anastasia Manahan’s tissue in Martha Jefferson Hospital. In front of and beneath him were three lawyers: Richard Schweitzer, attorney for his wife, Marina, who wanted the tissue made available for DNA testing in England; Matthew Murray, attorney for the hospital, who was willing that this happen providing the court approved; and an attorney for the
Richmond Times
, who wanted to make sure that the hearings were not closed to the press and public. This last matter was quickly dealt with when Schweitzer conceded that all hearings should be in open court and that no court documents should be sealed. There seemed little more to do, and Judge Swett instructed Schweitzer and Murray to get together and draft an order which he could sign. The case, apparently, was concluded; the tissue would soon be available to Dr. Gill.

“Is there anything else the court should know before we move on?” Judge Swett asked.

“Well, Your Honor, there are some other people here who want to be heard because they think they have an interest in this,” replied Matthew Murray.

At this point, a young woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail stood up in the back of the room. She introduced herself as Lindsey Crawford, an attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of Andrews & Kurth, where Thomas Kline also worked. “Your Honor, we
have a client who wishes and deserves to be heard,” she said. “I have just heard from Prince Nicholas Romanov, the head of the Romanov Family Association, whom most living Romanovs accept as the legitimate pretender to the throne. He has just literally this morning asked me to come and investigate what’s going on here and what effect, if any, this could have on his family.” She asked Judge Swett to hold up proceedings to give her time “to protect his interest and that of the Romanov family.” Crawford added that her firm also represented another client with an interest in the Anastasia Manahan tissue. This was a New York corporation called the Russian Nobility Association.

“Do you have a petition to file?” asked Judge Swett.

“No, we don’t, Your Honor, because our client spoke to me only this morning.”

Richard Schweitzer, recognizing the name Andrews & Kurth, objected to any delay. “The real client of this law firm,” he told the court, “is not any member of the Romanov family or the Russian Nobility Association. It is a Mr. Korte.” Schweitzer pulled out a copy of the letter Thomas Kline had written in June to James Lovell in which Kline described the work of Willi Korte. “This firm, Andrews & Kurth, has been representing Mr. Korte for months before this hearing date,” Schweitzer told the judge. “They have been trying to get hold of this tissue for Mr. Korte’s purposes and to prevent others from getting access.”

For several minutes, Judge Swett pondered. Then he told Crawford that he would hold things up for three days so that she could file a petition. Penny Jenkins, sitting near Lindsey Crawford in the courtroom, heard her say in disbelief, “There’s no way we can do this in three days.” Jenkins also noticed a tall, curly-haired man probably nearing forty, with a sharp nose, sitting next to Crawford. He wore no necktie, had sandals on his feet, and was carrying a backpack. Jenkins realized—“I don’t know how. I just knew,” she said later—that this was Willi Korte. Before the hearing was over, Korte rose and quickly left the courtroom.

Looking back after the case was settled, Richard Schweitzer hypothesized what had happened up to this point: “Andrews & Kurth wanted to block Marina’s access to the tissue and gain exclusive control
for their real client. I believed then that this client was Willi Korte. He had worked on acquiring the tissue for months, but, once he had failed with the Manahans and Jimmy Lovell, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t come into court in Virginia on his own because he had no standing. He needed a client who would be permitted as an intervenor in our lawsuit. So he and his colleagues in Europe went swinging through the world looking for a client—or a couple of clients. They came up with Nicholas Romanov and the Russian Nobility Association.”

In Europe, one of Korte’s co-workers, Maurice Philip Remy, was trying to involve the Romanov princes in blocking the Schweitzers. Prince Nicholas, who lived in Rome, telephoned his cousin Prince Rostislav, who lived in London, and said he was being pressured to become involved in the Virginia case. Rostislav telephoned New York and Prince Alexis Scherbatow, the president of the Russian Nobility Association, whom he didn’t know, to ask what was going on. Rostislav and Scherbatow spoke for half an hour, and then Rostislav telephoned a London friend, Michael Thornton. “When Rosti got off the phone with Scherbatow,” Thornton said, “he called me and said, Jesus Christ! What is wrong with that man?’ Then he started telling me all the things Scherbatow had said: Schweitzer was a crook … he had a very dubious background … there were things about him that, if we knew, would make our hair curl.… They saw this as a sinister conspiracy to have the claimant recognized as genuine.” Scherbatow also had told Rostislav that Anna Anderson’s tissue must not be tested in England. “The only place it could be properly done,” Scherbatow had said, “was in California by a Dr. Mary-Claire King.”

Thornton’s reaction to Rostislav was “This is all rubbish! For God’s sake, fax Nicholas and tell him to leave this thing in Charlottesville alone. It will be chaos.” Thornton himself then wrote a letter to Rostislav, which Rostislav faxed to Nicholas, saying that it would be a disaster for the Romanovs to become involved with the case. “I said they would be very badly criticized, having rejected Anna Anderson all her life, if they now started to claim parts of her body after her death,” Thornton recounted. “The media would crucify them. Furthermore, I said, it would represent a shift in the long-held policy of the Romanov family, which was that she wasn’t genuine. If you now start
claiming parts of her body, it’s going to make everyone think that you’ve made a mistake. The best thing is to stay out.”

Michael Thornton’s message had effect. Prince Nicholas Romanov immediately withdrew as a potential client of Andrews & Kurth, and there was no mention of him or of any Romanov in subsequent court documents.

On Thursday, November 4, Lindsey Crawford was ready as instructed by Judge Swett to submit her petition to intervene. The document named only a single client, the Russian Nobility Association. Crawford had signed the petition, along with Thomas Kline of her law firm, and Page Williams, a Charlottesville attorney hired as local counsel. In the petition, the association represented itself as “an historic [
sic
] and philanthropic organization whose purpose is to protect the authenticity of the line of the Imperial family of Russia and the events prior to 1917 in Russia.” The association challenged the fitness of Marina Schweitzer to petition for the tissue, saying that she was not related by blood to either “Anastasia Romanov [the daughter of the tsar] or Anastasia Anderson [the claimant].” It denied that identifying the tissue samples in Martha Jefferson Hospital would be helpful in verifying Dr. Botkin’s remains. It agreed that mitochondrial DNA testing might be useful in determining the true identity of Anastasia Manahan but went on to say that “it is essential that any tests conducted on the tissue samples be of the highest scientific integrity which cannot be achieved in the manner requested by Schweitzer” (that is, in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Gill).

In a memorandum attached to the petition, the Russian Nobility Association heaped further calumny on Dr. Gill: his laboratory was said to represent “second-best scientific testing,” and his samples were said to have been possibly “contaminated.” Finally, the association argued (inaccurately, it turned out), “There is no scientific evidence that the tissue samples can be split so that parallel testing could be conducted at two laboratories.” The Russian Nobility Association’s argument was that if the court awarded the tissue to Gill, it would be throwing away any chance of proving the claimant’s identity. The only solution, it urged, was for the tissue to be sent to its nominee,
“the foremost genetics scientist in the United States,” Dr. Mary-Claire King at Berkeley.

Attached to the Russian Nobility Association’s petition were affidavits from Prince Alexis Scherbatow, the organization’s president, and Dr. William Maples. Scherbatow’s affidavit mostly parroted the petition. What was significant was that the scientific statements and recommendations in all three of these documents—the Russian Nobility Association petition, its memorandum, and the affidavit of Prince Scherbatow—rested on the affidavit of Dr. Maples. Maples’ statement praised Dr. King and denigrated Dr. Gill. It said that Gill’s finding of 98.5 percent certainty that the Ekaterinburg remains belonged to the Romanovs was “not scientifically significant.” It referred to the heteroplasmy Gill and his colleagues had discovered in Nicholas II’s DNA as “more likely the result of contaminated samples.” It attempted to frighten the court that there would not be enough to go around: “If any blood or tissue samples from Anastasia Manahan are used in mtDNA testing, they are likely to be completely consumed in the process.… Therefore, it is unlikely that there would be sufficient genetic material for the sample to be split and tested by two different laboratories.”

The Russian Nobility Association is an assemblage of descendants of the aristocratic families which once helped to rule Imperial Russia. In the 1990s, it is made up of perhaps one hundred dues-paying members, most of whom are children and grandchildren of men and women who emigrated from Russia at the time of the revolution. If they still lived in Russia under a tsar, many of these people would be called prince and princess, or count and countess. In America, they wear their honorifics only at charity events, hoping to add a little glitter and thus attract Americans impressed by titles. The organization’s primary source of income is a ball every May, which helps to pay the rent on a second-floor apartment on First Avenue where the association’s library of crumbling Russian genealogical books is housed. The rest is doled out to children, needy old people, and the sick.

No one in the world at this time is more expert at tracing the bloodlines of the Russian aristocracy than the president of the Russian Nobility Association, eighty-four-year-old Alexis Scherbatow Scherbatow has lived his life as an emigre. His family lost everything except their lives in the revolution. They moved to Bulgaria; he lived in Italy, graduated from the University of Brussels, came to the United States in 1938, and, during World War II, was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. After the war, he taught history at Fairleigh Dickinson College in New Jersey and translated documents in Russian and Latin for other historians and writers. His views are typical of many Russians of his generation: he hates Communism, is suspicious of post-Communist Russia, and despises England (“They are a bunch of liars in England”). He never accepted Anna Anderson’s claim to be Anastasia. As an argument he cites the fact that he personally saw the grand duchess in 1916, when he was five years old.