The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (42 page)
Read The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Online
Authors: Robert K. Massie
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #War, #Biography, #Politics
Gill had lunch that day with the Schweitzers and then went to the hospital to collect the tissue. He was greeted there by Ed Deets, Matthew Murray, Penny Jenkins, and Dr. Hunt Macmillan, director of the hospital pathology laboratory. While the lawyers and nonscientists watched from the back of the room and a documentary film crew recorded everything that happened, the process got under way. Macmillan, Gill, and Betty Eppard, a registered histology technician
who actually cut the tissue, appeared wearing sterile masks, gowns, and gloves. The five blocks of paraffin containing the embedded tissue of Anastasia Manahan were produced, and the same procedure was repeated five times: Macmillan handed Gill a tissue block and identified it. Gill sterilized it and handed it to Eppard. Eppard mounted it on a microtome, a machine resembling a bacon slicer, and deftly sliced three to six dark brown pieces, each equal in thickness to two hairs. Gill, using tweezers, gently lifted the sliced tissue and placed it in sterilized vials. Macmillan placed the sterilized vials in tamper-proof, transparent plastic bags and sealed and labeled each bag. After each block, the microtome was wiped with absolute ethanol and its cutting blade was changed. Afterward, at a hastily summoned press conference, Gill warned that “I can’t be sure at the moment how likely it is we’ll get DNA from the samples.” He had no idea, he said, what effect the age of the tissue or the use of the chemical preservative formalin would have had on the DNA. If the DNA extraction process went well, he hoped to have a comparison between Anastasia Manahan’s DNA and the DNA profiles of the Imperial family taken from the Ekaterinburg bones within three to six months.
On June 29, ten days after Peter Gill collected the tissue in Charlottesville, Maurice Remy wrote Richard Schweitzer a remarkable confessional letter. In the letter, in a subsequent press release, and in a mass of other documents which he forwarded to Schweitzer, Remy revealed everything that had happened in his camp before and during the long court battle. His enterprise began, he said, when he met Geli Ryabov in Moscow in 1987 and decided to produce a documentary on the murder of the tsar and his family. In July 1992, he was present at the Ekaterinburg conference on the remains of the Imperial family. There he met Dr. Maples and his team, who told him that the skeletons of Alexis and Anastasia were missing. At that moment, Remy said, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the missing grand duchess and to expand his research to include a DNA test on Anastasia Manahan.
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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
AS GOOD AS THE PEOPLE USING ITDuring 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.
