Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310060259
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Or, if you prefer a more romantic body part, the answer may be in strands of hair pressed in an old book.
Both are thought to be the only earthly remains of Anna Anderson Manahan, a Charlottesville legend who died in 1984 and who spent most of her 82 years claiming she was the surviving member of the ruling Romanov family - sort of the "Elvis is alive" story of the day.
Now scientists hope to use DNA testing to resolve whether Manahan was telling the truth.
The scheme has drawn a line between opposing sets of Anastasia buffs - the intestines camp and the hair camp - who each want to be associated with solving one of the great enigmas of the century.
Movies, plays, television shows and books have dramatized Manahan's story of fleeing the Bolsheviks who slaughtered Czar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their three eldest daughters in 1918.
Manahan surfaced in Germany in 1920. Scarred from old stab wounds, suffering from a broken jaw, the young woman was rescued by Berlin police from a suicide attempt. When she insisted she was Anastasia, relatives and associates of the Romanovs came from across Europe to investigate, and a number were convinced.
The most ardent supporter was Gleb Botkin, son of the Romanov family doctor, who said he recognized his childhood playmate. Botkin settled in Charlottesville, bringing Manahan there in the late 1960s. She had taken the name Anna Anderson to escape some of her notoriety. In Charlottesville, she married the wealthy John E. `Jack' Manahan, a Radford College history professor who had a fascination with genealogy and things royal.
When she died, her body was cremated and her ashes scattered on the grounds of a German castle where she lived in the 1920s and 1930s.
Her husband continued spreading her story with increasingly bizarre zeal - publishing incoherent pamphlets, making international press releases - until he died in 1990. After that, the Manahans' fantastic claims were relegated to legend and to two books by sympathetic historians. Then, two years ago, authorities in the newly opened Russia disclosed the location of the mass grave of the Romanovs.
Genetic tests conducted in England confirmed in July that the remains were those of the entire clan except for the son, Alexis, and Anastasia. Another burial pit nearby was said, but not confirmed, to contain the remains of Alexis and a nurse.
Anastasia buffs were energized.
Susan Burkhart of Durham, N.C., believed she had the means to prove finally Anna Anderson Manahan was the lost Romanov. Burkhart, 30, bought a sample of what was said to be Manahan's hair from a Chapel Hill bookstore in 1990 for $20. The hair was found among books the store bought from Jack Manahan's estate.
Burkhart's husband works at a DNA research lab. She had saved the ratty clump of gray and auburn hair for the day his science might be able to reward her faith.
Last fall, before the English completed their tests on the Russian remains, Burkhart arranged for author Peter Kurth to take five strands of the hair to the laboratory doing the work.
Kurth wrote the 1983 book "Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson," and knew Burkhart through a mutual friend.
The British lab isolated DNA in the hair, Burkhart said, but this summer demanded $1,000 to do a genetic comparison with the bones from Russia.
Burkhart and Kurth turned to her husband's company, Roche Biomedical Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Scientists there isolated DNA from the hair just last week, and have talked with Russian counterparts about collaborating to check Manahan's identity.
"This is bogus," is the response of the other great Manahan authority, James Blair Lovell, who wrote the 1991 book, "Anastasia: The Lost Princess."
Lovell says a researcher working for him discovered earlier this year that a far better genetic source exists for verifying Manahan's claims: a piece of her intestines removed in a 1979 operation.
Lovell said Kurth and Burkhart are promoting that hair sample for the purposes of financial gain. "I think that what they're doing is scandalous."
Lovell said the hair could be from the dead woman's Irish setter.
No one can question the source of the intestines, and Lovell will make that point tonight in a segment of the NBC television show "Unsolved Mysteries." A producer said the Anastasia story will lead off the program.
Burkhart will be watching.
by CNB