The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (44 page)

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 answered 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.”

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.”