The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (45 page)

Brien Horan, a Connecticut lawyer who first met Anna Anderson in 1970 and subsequently produced a never-published dossier of all
the evidence, pro and con, pronounced himself “stunned” by the Schanzkowska identity. “You have to forgive me,” he said. “I’ve learned about the Schanzkowska results so recently that, after so many years, it’s virtually impossible for me to process this information. But it is just not possible that a Polish peasant in the 1920s, long before television made us all so similar, could have become this woman. I would have had much less trouble if they had found simply that she was not Anastasia. But for them to say that she was a Polish peasant, that’s difficult for me to swallow.”

Richard and Marina Schweitzer, like Brien Horan, refused to accept the Schanzkowska identity. “I know one thing for certain,” said Schweitzer immediately after the London press conference. “Anastasia was not a Polish peasant.” Schweitzer made clear that he did not challenge Peter Gill’s findings that the Charlottesville tissue Gill had tested was unrelated to Empress Alexandra and probably was related to the Schanzkowska family. Instead, he challenged the legitimacy of the samples Gill had tested.

“To say that Gill was correct, but that Anna Anderson was not Schanzkowska, means that the tissue tested was not Anna Anderson’s,” Schweitzer explained while he was still in London. “We now feel that there had to be some form of manipulation or substitution. Specifically, that means that somehow, somebody got in and switched or substituted tissue at Martha Jefferson Hospital. The first thing I will do is go back to the hospital and get the documentation on all of their procedures: how the hospital kept its archives, how certain their security system was, how sure they were that it could not have been breached. Then I want to investigate various potential scenarios. When Willi Korte came to see Penny Jenkins in November 1992, how much material did she have on her desk in front of her at the time? Did she have files out that might have had numbers that showed? Were the files arranged in a way that somebody might have read the numbers upside down? Or were the files in her office so that somebody could slip in later, open the file drawer, and say, ‘Here it is,’ take it out and get the numbers themselves? Penny did tell me that when the doctors first went to find the tissue, they couldn’t find it and she had to get up and together they found the right box in the right hole. Then the hospital put it under special guard, in ‘proprietary custody.’ ”

What could be the motive for such a conspiracy? Schweitzer suggested two: “When it looked as though they were going to be thwarted by Lovell from getting access to the tissue by legal means, they took the real tissue away and put something else there [the “something else” would have been Schanzkowska family tissue]. Then, later, after feigning a long search, they could come up with the lost tissue, the real tissue, produce the right results, and get credit for solving the mystery. Or, if their objective was to make sure that she was recognized as Schanzkowska, a substitution would achieve that nicely. Who might ‘they’ have been? Many people had many reasons—family reasons, almost hereditary reasons—for not wanting her to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Money would not be a problem for these people.”

Schweitzer intended to ask other questions: “Can we determine the sex and the age of the person from whom the tissue was taken? [Gill subsequently informed Schweitzer that the tissue had indeed come from a woman.] Can we determine how old the specimen was as a specimen? That is, was it about fifteen years old, as it would have been as a result of a 1979 operation? What part of the human body was it from, the lower bowel or somewhere else? Was the same kind of preservative used by the hospital at that time? Do the medical records support the fact that the tissue brought out was gangrenous?”

Richard Schweitzer’s friends, even those who shared his views, believed that the odds against him were great. Brien Horan, a loyal Anna Anderson supporter, said, “The conspiracy theory is not going to be taken seriously. It’s just too hard to imagine that a substitution could be pulled off. It boggles the mind!” But Schweitzer was not backing away. Asked if he minded being called a conspiracy theorist, he said, “I’m seventy years old. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t have a theory. All I have is a series of conjectures. I’m looking for the truth.”

Penny Jenkins, who was responsible for keeping Martha Jefferson Hospital’s medical records, including blood and tissue samples, had great respect for Richard Schweitzer, as he did for her. Knowing that he was focusing on a possible substitution of the tissue at the hospital,
she telephoned him and said, “That’s not possible and here’s why.” Later, she repeated what she had said to him: “We have two separate backups. In 1979, when Dr. Shrum did surgery on Mrs. Manahan, we took slides of the tissue, in addition to preserving in paraffin the larger blocks of excised tissue. Taking slides when doing surgery is routine; you take it, look at it, and say, this is cancer, or it’s not cancer, or it’s an infection, or whatever. We preserve these slides in one place and the tissue in paraffin wax in a totally different place.

“Further, when we moved this tissue from storage back to the hospital early in 1993, Dr. Thomas Dudley, the assistant pathologist, cut some new slides from one of the blocks. We compared these new slides cut in 1993 with those original slides cut in 1979. They were identical. If someone had swapped them in storage during the last couple of years, they would not have matched. And the chance that somebody was able to get to both locations and switch both slides without access to specimen numbers is impossible. I don’t think Dick wanted to hear this, but I had to tell him.”

While he was in London, Richard Schweitzer learned the results of two other DNA tests, one on tissue, the other on hair, both alleged to have come from Anastasia Manahan. Neither was encouraging to Schweitzer’s belief that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia. The tissue report came from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Scientists there had extracted mitochondrial DNA from the tissue sample which Susan Barritt had brought to Bethesda from Charlottesville. This profile was compared to Peter Gill’s published profile of Prince Philip. The result was the same as that achieved by Gill: there was no match. Thus, AFIP’s Charlottesville tissue, like Gill’s, was excluded from a relationship with Prince Philip and Empress Alexandra. The institute did not make a comparison with the Polish profile obtained from Karl Maucher. They did not report, therefore, who the donor might be, only who she was not.

Further confirmation of Gill’s results came from a surprising source. Susan Burkhart, a thirty-one-year-old Blue Cross-Blue Shield supervisor in Durham, North Carolina, had been intrigued by
the Anastasia mystery since she was twelve. In 1992, learning that John Manahan’s large library had been sold to a Chapel Hill rare book store, she began spending time in the basement of the store, going through hundreds of boxes of old books. One day, the store’s owner, Barry Jones, discovered in one of these boxes an envelope on which Manahan had penciled, “Anastasia’s hair.” Inside was a matted clump of hair, which appeared to have been removed from a hairbrush. The hair was “salt and pepper with some strands of auburn” and, significantly, still had follicles attached at the roots. Burkhart, married to a DNA researcher, knew the importance of follicles and bought the envelope and its contents for twenty dollars. Eventually, Peter Kurth put Burkhart in touch with DNA enthusiast Syd Mandelbaum, who arranged for Dr. Mark Stoneking at Penn State to test the hair for DNA.

On September 7, 1994, Susan Burkhart sent six strands of hair to Stoneking. He managed to extract mitochondrial DNA and confirmed that it had the same DNA sequence as that obtained from the Charlottesville tissue by Peter Gill. Stoneking then compared the profile obtained from the hair with the published Hessian profile taken by Peter Gill from the blood sample provided by the Duke of Edinburgh. Stoneking found that the two did not match; therefore, not being related to Prince Philip, the owner of the hair could not be related to Empress Alexandra. Stoneking concluded that “if the hair samples are from the claimant Anna Anderson, this analysis indicated that she could not be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
^*

Stoneking’s results on the hair greatly reassured Peter Gill about the accuracy of his own DNA tests. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology had used the same source, the Charlottesville tissue, and derived the same results; Mark Stoneking, using a different source, had come up with the same DNA sequence and the same results. For
Richard Schweitzer’s theory of tissue substitution, however, Stoneking’s hair results were harmful: how likely was it that conspirators had not only penetrated Martha Jefferson Hospital to substitute Schanzkowska tissue for Anastasia Manahan’s but also had planted a clump of hair in an envelope with John Manahan’s writing on it and left it to be found years later in the basement of a North Carolina bookstore?

As Schweitzer continued to fight, he was criticized for his refusal to accept the findings of science. The London
Evening Standard
described him as “displaying the tireless enthusiasm of the sort which keeps the Flat Earth Society in business.”
Nature Genetics
, a usually authoritative journal, editorialized, “Why is it that Schweitzer and his supporters refuse to accept the results and are even now exploring other ways of proving themselves and the late Anna Anderson right? What, given such reluctance, does the scientific community have to do to convince the public that it knows what it is talking about?” Unfortunately for its own reputation,
Nature Genetics
stumbled badly in handling the editorial. The writer was the same Dr. Adrian Ivinson who had testified on behalf of the Russian Nobility Association in the Charlottesville courtroom. In addition to displaying an ill-tempered bias against the Schweitzers (Richard Schweitzer was described as being “married to a woman who claimed to be the granddaughter of Dr. Botkin”), the editorial was marred by numerous errors involving the persons concerned in the case, the sequence of events, the findings of various scientists, and even the science of genetics. Eventually, the journal apologized.