The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (43 page)

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 Charlottesville 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.

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.