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00:00...are revealed in an Equinox special.
00:30February 1920.
00:33A young woman tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge in Berlin.
00:38Rescued, she refused to co-operate or even give her name.
00:45At a nearby hospital, doctors found her body covered with scars,
00:49her head showing signs of a severe battering.
00:52The doctors called her Miss Unknown.
00:55They believed she was Russian.
01:00Eighteen months later, she said she was Anastasia,
01:04the youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia.
01:12It was the start of a long and bitter battle for recognition
01:16by a woman the world came to know as Anna Anderson.
01:24She shared some unusual physical peculiarities to Anastasia,
01:28a cauterised mole on the shoulder,
01:30a faulty finger on the left hand,
01:32and a foot deformed with an unusually large bunion.
01:40Anna Anderson's plight caught the imagination of the world.
01:46There were countless books, movies, a ballet, and even a hit song.
01:50Could you be lonely?
01:54As lonely as I...
02:02To some, she was a brilliant imposter.
02:04To others, a tragic, lost princess.
02:08How shall I tell you who I am?
02:10In which way?
02:14Can you tell me that?
02:16Can you really prove to me who you are?
02:20You can believe it or you don't believe it.
02:26It doesn't matter.
02:28In no any way whatsoever.
02:30She died in 1984.
02:36Cremated, it was thought the truth would never be known.
02:40But recently, it was discovered that a piece of her intestine
02:44had been preserved in an American hospital,
02:46a pathology specimen from an operation she'd had in 1979.
02:52She was deeply, deeply upset.
02:54Dick and Marina Schweitzer,
02:56passionate believers that Anna Anderson was Anastasia,
03:00have organised DNA tests on the intestine.
03:03Marina Schweitzer's father, Gleb Botkin,
03:06knew Anastasia in Russia,
03:08and he was convinced Anna Anderson was genuine.
03:11It will vindicate her father.
03:14It will give us great satisfaction
03:16that we've gone ahead and carried through
03:18what is basically the loyalty of the Botkin family.
03:21to the original imperial family.
03:24And it was a matter of personal loyalty.
03:27The Schweitzers have allowed Equinox
03:29to follow every step in the resolution
03:32of the mystery of Anastasia.
03:40The Romanovs were a close family.
03:42Tsar Nicholas and the Tsarina, Alexandra,
03:45four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria,
03:50and Anastasia.
03:53The Tsarevich Alexis, a haemophiliac,
03:56was the heir to the throne.
03:58The Tsar's belief in autocracy
04:00caused much political turmoil,
04:02but his children were sheltered from the anguish.
04:05Anastasia, the youngest child,
04:09was the family joker, an excellent mimic.
04:12She was also difficult and temperamental.
04:15Their lifestyle of spectacular wealth and privilege
04:19ended abruptly with the advance of the Bolsheviks
04:22during the Russian Civil War.
04:25The family were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg, Siberia.
04:29On the night of July the 17th, 1918,
04:33the family were ushered down these stairs to a basement room.
04:37With them were three servants and their physician, Dr. Botkin.
04:42Ten gunmen opened fire.
04:44The Tsar and Tsarina died immediately.
04:46But the children were harder to kill.
04:48Diamonds hidden in their underclothes deflected the bullets.
04:52For years, their bodies were never found.
04:55Then, in 1991, a grave in swampy ground
05:00just outside Ekaterinburg was excavated.
05:03Newly released documents from the Russian Communist Party archive
05:07suggested these remains might be those of the Tsar and his family.
05:13Bones segments were sent to the British Forensic Science Service
05:19at Aldermarston for DNA tests.
05:22One of the world's most renowned researchers
05:24into new forensic DNA testing, Dr. Peter Gill, led the team.
05:30We have nine sets of bones
05:34and what we have to do is to try and find out who these bodies are.
05:41So what we're going to do is to extract the DNA from all of these sets of bones
05:48and to compare that DNA with DNA from other relatives.
05:55However, there is very, very little DNA left in there to analyse.
06:02And that is the main difficulty with this sort of work is that you have so little starting material
06:11that we have to be very aware of issues such as contamination from other sources.
06:18The DNA in the remains was compared to the DNA of living relatives of the Romanovs, including the Duke of Edinburgh.
06:29After almost one year of work, Dr. Gill's team concluded these were indeed the remains of the Tsar's family.
06:37They were 98.5% certain.
06:42But there was a sensational discrepancy.
06:45The bodies of one of the Tsar's daughters and the Tsarevich were missing from the grave.
06:51Russian officials were bewildered that two bodies were missing.
06:55A group of American forensic scientists were called in to assist the investigation.
07:00Team leader was Dr. William Maples.
07:03None of the vertebra show any really open rings that aren't more or less united.
07:13And Anastasia was 17 years, one month at the time of her death.
07:19If she were present, then some vertebra should show immaturity, marked immaturity.
07:26And they don't. None of the bones show immaturity.
07:31So, in my opinion, Anastasia wasn't among the nine buried in that grave.
07:38But Russian government scientists seemed anxious to disprove Dr. Maples' conclusions.
07:43Using computers to compare the skulls of the victims to photographs of the Tsar's family,
07:49they announced Anastasia was there and another daughter missing.
07:53The bones simply are in too bad of condition to reliably use any sort of facial comparison of bones to photographs.
08:03It's just not reliable.
08:05With a computer like I have in my laboratory, I can change the face of President Bush into the face of President Clinton.
08:13And if you can change Bush into Clinton, then you can fit the wrong skull onto the photograph of the wrong sister.
08:20The area surrounding the grave was dug extensively by archaeologists searching for the two missing bodies.
08:28They found nothing.
08:32For Anna Anderson, coming six years after her death, the revelation of Anastasia's missing body arrived too late.
08:40It might have changed the entire course of her battle for recognition.
08:45Penniless, she had lived much of her life as a recluse in this house in Germany,
08:50dependent on handouts from a few members of the European nobility who believed in her.
08:55She had been reviled by the Royal Houses of Europe, publicly branded by them a vulgar imposter,
09:01an insult to the memory of the Tsar's family.
09:04She even lacked her own name.
09:06Anna Anderson was one of convenience chosen one day to confuse pursuing journalists.
09:11Only in 1968 did she acquire her own undisputed legal identity as the wife of an American history professor.
09:18A year before her death in 1984, severed from the family she claimed her own,
09:23she suffered the final indignity of being placed in care by American social services,
09:29deemed mentally unstable and incapable of looking after herself.
09:34My family have always believed that her claims were bogus.
09:44We may be wrong in that, and that may be proved.
09:51This whole episode, in many ways, I think, has been a bothersome and unpleasant episode for my family,
09:58and I, for one, will be very pleased to see the end of it.
10:09European royalty, with the financial backing of Lord Mountbatten,
10:13had joined forces to fight Anna Anderson through the German courts for over 30 years.
10:19It was one of the longest and most acrimonious legal battles in history.
10:25She sued for recognition, but the verdict, in 1970, was non-liquette, not proven.
10:33I believe that Anna Anderson was the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
10:36She was the daughter of Nicholas II.
10:38I believe the evidence is actually plain and convincing on that point,
10:41and I also believe that she was the victim of a terrible injustice in her life and now in history.
10:49One never had the impression that she was hiding in her room studying up on books or pictures or anything,
10:55practicing her walk, learning how to curtsy, learning how to reach out her hand,
10:58modeling herself in the mirror after photographs of the Tsar's daughter.
11:02There was not the slightest evidence ever that any of this took place.
11:06It was the many tiny, intimate details Anna Anderson knew about life at court which swayed many doubters.
11:13Felix Dassel, a wounded soldier, convalesced during the First World War in a hospital
11:18where he was visited by Anastasia two or three times a week.
11:21Ten years later, Dassel showed Anna Anderson a photograph of a fellow patient.
11:26Anna Anderson said, that's the man with the pockets.
11:29Dassel claimed Anastasia herself had given this fellow patient that nickname.
11:34No imposter, he said, could ever know such a small detail.
11:39She did know some amazing facts about the family, even though she didn't get all the facts right.
11:50But one thing she couldn't explain fully was how she'd survived the execution.
11:56She only remembered coming round some days after the shooting.
12:04She said a soldier named Tchaikovsky had smuggled her out to Romania.
12:09They had a child who was placed anonymously in an orphanage.
12:13When Tchaikovsky was killed in a street brawl, she fled to find an aunt in Berlin, but failed to make contact.
12:28In the very few interviews she gave, she was usually asked what she remembered about the execution.
12:33In a private conversation recorded in 1968, Anna Anderson answered with more passion.
12:46She said, I don't want to speak about the truth.
12:48Please, not.
12:50Please, not.
12:51Because of his tailor, I'm thinking, you know.
12:53Please, not.
12:54Please, not.
12:55A dreadful.
12:57A dreadful.
12:58A dreadful.
12:59A dreadful.
13:00My impression of Anna Anderson was, she was like an elder housemaid.
13:13not at all of imperial blood.
13:19Dr. Gunther von Berenberg-Gosler was the lawyer opposing Anna Anderson
13:24during the German court trials.
13:27Sie hat eine Hochstaplerrolle gespielt von einem großen Raffinement.
13:35Ein ganz berühmtes Beispiel ist der sogenannte Darling Brief.
13:42In a 1924 letter Anna Anderson sent to Anastasia's aunt, Princess Irena,
13:49she strangely included an apostrophe in the word Darling.
13:52Dr. Berenberg-Gosler explains the apostrophe by saying Anna Anderson,
13:58then unable to speak English, used this published note written by the Tsarina as a model.
14:04But Anna Anderson had mistakenly thought that a comma from the line above
14:08was part of the word Darling.
14:11Wenn das nicht tricky ist, dann weiß ich's nicht.
14:15With no hard evidence either way, so much of the argument was conjectural.
14:19Anastasia's medical and dental records had been lost,
14:23and no fingerprints were available.
14:25The many forensic tests done used less dependable techniques,
14:29which came out over the years with wildly conflicting results.
14:33Handwriting tests were among the first attempted.
14:36The most extensive was undertaken for the German court in 1960 by Dr. Mina Becker.
14:41She found so many similarities in the writing she was convinced Anna Anderson must be Anastasia.
14:48On the left are the letters written by Anastasia,
14:52on the right the letters by Anna Anderson, which Dr. Becker found so similar.
14:56In Luton Who, just outside London, some of Anastasia's school exercise books are kept.
15:07Equinox has asked David Ellen, one time head of Scotland Yard's questioned documents section,
15:13to compare Anna Anderson's handwriting to Anastasia's.
15:16We are looking always for detail in handwriting, that is, how letters are formed, the method of construction,
15:26and the proportions within those letters, and the combination of all the letters.
15:31And so, one finds that when you're looking at two people's writing, that there are consistently differences between them.
15:40And it's these consistent differences which are usually a good indication of two people having written two different documents.
15:48Anna Anderson wrote very little in her lifetime.
15:51A severe illness in the 1920s made writing difficult for her.
15:55But sufficient samples are available.
15:57Anastasia's writing is on the top, Anna Anderson's below.
16:02For instance, in the letter A, where the lead-in stroke starts very low down within the letter,
16:11and forms a complete loop, which is retraced before the letter is finally finished,
16:18where, in the Anna Anderson writings, they tend to come in at the top of the letter from the left,
16:25and then retrace without retracing much of the loop.
16:29I find no evidence that Anna Anderson was, in fact, the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
16:38When I say no evidence, I mean essentially that the writings are different in a number of respects, significantly different,
16:47that though one cannot be entirely sure that she hasn't varied her writing in some way, as is often the case,
16:55and perhaps in this case, where there's a history of considerable illness, there may be some reason to account for differences,
17:03but essentially I can really find no reason to believe that it was the same person.
17:08But it was probably physical identification that proved most contentious.
17:15People remembered Anastasia as a lively teenager.
17:18Nobody was sure how her features would have changed into adulthood.
17:22But most people agreed Anna Anderson's deep blue eyes showed an uncanny resemblance to Anastasia's.
17:28You must remember this all the way along the line. People kept coming back.
17:33So why did they keep sending people to see her?
17:35It's because they didn't know. It's not because they knew she was false or that she was genuine.
17:40It's because they did not know. They couldn't tell.
17:43She was a physical wreck. She had had tuberculosis.
17:46Her weight had dropped to about 75 pounds. She had lost all of her teeth.
17:50She couldn't walk. They couldn't even see her walking. They couldn't see her out of bed.
17:53It was a miserable situation. It was not the situation that you would base a serious judgment of her identity on.
18:00One visitor was Anastasia's tutor in Russia, Pierre Gulliard.
18:05He hesitated for a while, then denounced Anna Anderson as an imposter in his book The False Anastasia.
18:12Gulliard insisted that Anna Anderson bore not the slightest resemblance to the real Anastasia.
18:17Yet other visitors who had known Anastasia disagreed.
18:20Gleb Botkin, the son of the Tsar's doctor, was so convinced Anna Anderson was Anastasia,
18:26he devoted much of his life to her cause.
18:28Lily Dane, one of the Tsarina Alexandra's best friends, was another believer.
18:33And Princess Zenia of Russia, Anastasia's own cousin, never wavered in her belief that Anna Anderson was Anastasia.
18:41The German forensic scientist, Dr Moritz Furtmeier, was one of the many who objectively tried to compare the two faces.
18:50Using a technique which measured cardinal points on the face and skull, his conclusion in 1970 was,
18:57Anna Anderson was indeed Anastasia.
18:59Today, forensic scientists prefer to concentrate on the ears.
19:06Equinox has asked the forensic department of the Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School
19:11to compare the ears of Anna Anderson and Anastasia.
19:14OK, that's fine. This is photoset 00093, Michael.
19:21OK, Paul, we have number five now.
19:23Right.
19:25A previous ear test, commissioned for the German court in 1960, came out strongly in favour of Anna Anderson.
19:31But the judges rejected the conclusions of their own expert.
19:34We are basing this on the assumption, which has been validated over the years, that there are no two ears the same, even on identical twins.
19:43And once the person has passed the age of four months, then the design contours of the ear, its attachment to the face, remain the same.
19:56They don't change, even into advanced elderly age.
19:59Six operators are doing the ear test separately.
20:03Their conclusions are statistically combined to maximise accuracy.
20:08The testers are examining the ears of six different women.
20:12They have not been told which set of ears are those of Anna Anderson.
20:17Each set of ears is compared carefully to photographs showing the ears of Anastasia.
20:22Right.
20:24OK, slightly more turned, isn't it?
20:27Yeah.
20:29There is one particular set of photographs which has scored better than the others.
20:34And in our view, this, it's a possibility.
20:38Unfortunately, we can't say to what degree of possibility it could be, but certainly it's the set which has scored the best.
20:44And this is the set that you can see from this set here.
20:51This is the lady in question that, in fact, seemed to be the most likely of the other five candidates that we examined.
20:59The observations that were made would not lead us to say that that particular lady could definitely be identified as Anastasia.
21:09All we could say was that she could certainly not be excluded from being Anastasia and showed some similarities and scored highly more than the other ladies that were looked at.
21:22The tests that we devised with a scoring of one to five, with five being the best match and one being the poorest, I could only give it a five if the orientation was good and it was a perfect match.
21:41But in view of the fact that the orientation did vary, I would therefore give it a score of about four as being a very good match.
21:48On the other ear, Professor Verness is concentrated particularly on the inner part.
21:55And I don't think that this pattern on the inner aspect of the ear would have occurred purely by chance. I think this is significant.
22:05If one takes the inner part of that ear into consideration only, I would have said a five for that, most definitely a five for that part of the ear.
22:14But unfortunately, because of the angulation again for the rest of the year, as an overall pattern, it must be a...
22:21Support for Anna Anderson's claim sometimes came from surprising sources.
22:37Herluf Zahle, the Danish ambassador in Berlin, had been asked by Anastasia's family to investigate.
22:45He firmly concluded Anna Anderson was Anastasia.
22:49But to this day, the Queen of Denmark refuses all access to Zahle's papers.
22:54But the bulk of the Romanov family rejected this verdict from their own investigator and issued a formal statement in 1928 denouncing Anna Anderson as a fraud.
23:05Her supporters retaliated.
23:07Some claimed the Tsar had a secret fortune lying in the Bank of England, which other Romanovs wanted to inherit.
23:12Bank of England documents, now available, however, failed to support this allegation.
23:19Others said that the then claimant to the Russian throne, Kuril Romanov, wanted nobody to stand between him and a hoped-for restoration.
23:27Others believed the Tsarina's brother, the Grand Duke of Hesha, was desperate to discredit Anna Anderson.
23:33She had claimed that he had visited Russia during the First World War.
23:36For a German, this would have been treason.
23:41Gleb Botkin, whose father had been killed with the Tsar, wrote to the Tsar's sister Xenia,
23:46It is easier to understand the crime committed by a gang of crazed and drunken savages than the calm, systematic, endless persecution of one of your own family.
23:56I honestly believe that my family felt that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia for very good and sound reasons,
24:09and that they believed that they were doing the correct thing for the family, not for themselves, but for the family, and for the memory of the family.
24:20I don't understand where people get the sentimental idea about anybody's family, let alone about a royal family of that generation and that legacy in history.
24:29It was one of the most violent, bloody, autocratic, desperate, despotic families in history.
24:36We have this image of them all because we've all seen those photographs of those girls in their white dresses,
24:41and we all think Queen Victoria, and we think Windsor, and we think all of the gentility of the Edwardian age.
24:46And believe me, it had only been a generation since they'd been throttling each other behind the staircases.
24:55It is spring 1994. DNA tests on Anna Anderson have been stymied.
25:01The Russian Nobility Association of America, seen here at its annual ball,
25:06has challenged in the American courts the proposal made by Dick and Marina Schweitzer for DNA tests in Britain.
25:12A small fortune is being spent to stop the Schweizer.
25:17To many following the case, the true motivation of the Russian Nobility Association is a mystery.
25:23But the Schweizer are determined to fight on.
25:25They ask, if this woman was not a great priest, who was she?
25:34The answer is very simple.
25:37It is very clear for me that it is Franziska Szanskowski.
25:41Franziska Szanskowska is crucial to this story.
25:46She was a munitions worker of Polish-German descent living in Berlin.
25:51Supposedly injured in an explosion in 1916,
25:54she was incarcerated in two mental hospitals before disappearing for good in 1920.
26:00It was a private detective hired by the Grand Duke of Hesha,
26:03who pieced this identification together.
26:05It is utterly rejected by Anna Anderson's supporters.
26:10It may be unpopular now to talk about classes of society,
26:13but I guarantee you, at the time of the First World War,
26:16the difference between a Russian princess and a Polish hand grenade factory worker was immense.
26:22It was a chasm that could not have been bridged.
26:23It could not have been bridged.
26:24I can only say that she had a special discipline to learn.
26:32And I have to think of Pygmalion.
26:36And if you look at the history of the courtesans from the baroque time,
26:42there are maîtresses of priests,
26:45who came from the smallest relationships
26:49and later the very large women
26:53who often even made important things in politics.
27:02Computer technology has facilitated facial comparison tests.
27:06Geoff Oxley, a specialist in this field, is comparing the face of Franziska Shanskowska
27:16to that of Anna Anderson to determine whether they are the same person.
27:20We assume, to begin with, that they are the same person.
27:24We start off with that assumption.
27:26And we set up two points.
27:28In this case, the best two points is the interocular distance.
27:32That is the distance between the centre of the eyes.
27:34We've painted in red, so that you can tell the difference.
27:38And we've painted the other one of Francesca in green.
27:43Now, with this system, if those two points are correlated,
27:49and it is the same person,
27:51other points on the face should be correlated.
27:54And again, you'll notice as we fade in of one and out of the other,
27:58for example, let's take this point here,
28:00fade into the red, you can see,
28:02it coincides exactly with the point when we fade into the green.
28:08So those are consistent, and that's consistent.
28:10Now, let's have a look at the mouth.
28:12If you come into the mouth, the coincidence in terms of its size and its position is almost exact.
28:18If we can now have a look at the two pictures superimposed together, in this case in black and white,
28:27what we can do is to use what is known as a flicker technique.
28:31As you flicker them, and the faster you flicker them, the more objects that are different move.
28:37Objects that are the same stay exactly still, or more or less.
28:42And you can see there are areas where there is a great deal of stillness,
28:46and there are areas here where there's quite a lot of flicker, notably in the ears.
28:53If they were completely different, however,
28:56we would expect some really gross movements in the picture, particularly around these features there,
29:03and they hardly move at all.
29:04That, again, draws us to the conclusion that they are one and the same person.
29:10The evidence is consistent with that fact.
29:17Well, I'm sure it's very exciting and very impressive,
29:21but I hope you don't expect me to give up the case just because this computer has convinced him
29:27that Anna Andersen and Franziska Shanskovska are the same person.
29:30I don't know why you've wasted your time with this really anyway.
29:34That is the one and only known photograph of Franziska Shanskovska.
29:38It has never been verified as actually being Franziska Shanskovska.
29:41Its origin is completely uncertain.
29:44It was brought forward out of Poland, out of Pomerania,
29:47at the time the Shanskovska scandal first broke in 1927.
29:50There is absolutely no guarantee that it's authentic.
29:52We have taken hundreds of photographs of Anna Andersen
29:55and measured the distance between the eyebrows and the nose and the ears and the cheeks and the chin,
29:58and this eye and that eye and this mole and that mole
30:01and measured it against Franziska Shanskovska
30:03and it has not hitherto come up to be the same person.
30:06Isn't it common knowledge that photographs can lie?
30:08Doesn't everyone know, doesn't every school child know that photographs can lie?
30:13Because they certainly have lied a lot in this story.
30:15There is another way to test the Shanskovska connection.
30:18We can compare the recorded blood groups of Franziska Shanskovska's sister and Mrs Ellarick
30:25to those of Anna Andersen herself.
30:27If you look at two individuals who are indeed sisters,
30:32you will find that they have many groups in common with each other,
30:36far more than would be expected if they are totally unrelated individuals who have different parents.
30:40Remarkably, Anna Andersen and Franziska Shanskovska's sister share exactly the same blood group system.
30:49The immediate reaction to that is, oh, these two people are likely to be related.
30:54One does soon realise, however, that the groups on at least four of the systems are relatively common types
31:04and therefore quite a lot of people would have the same types.
31:07And it is only on one of the systems, the ABO system, where the subtype A2 occurs
31:13that one sees something that is a relatively unusual blood group occurring in the two individuals.
31:19Dr Lincoln calculates it is eight times more likely that Anna Andersen is from the Shanskovska family than any other.
31:28He qualifies this, however, by saying the A2 blood test in the past was occasionally unreliable.
31:37A figure of eight times is not a significant figure.
31:40I would certainly want to see figures of something of the order of a hundred times at least,
31:44or even a few hundred times before I would consider that that was a useful pointer from the legal point of view.
31:53I am absolutely suggesting, I am asserting, I am avowing that it was fraudulent,
31:59that the Shanskovska, the attempt to identify her with Franziska Shanskovska at the beginning was a fraud.
32:04That it was a calculated, concocted fraud on the part of the Grand Duke of Hesse and his minions,
32:09whose job it was in 1927 to eliminate Anna Andersen and to put an end to the Anastasia controversy.
32:16As a child, as a child, did you know that we girls were the first movie actresses for the movie? Did you know that?
32:28English was Anna Andersen's language of first choice.
32:33Although there is some uncorroborated evidence she did speak Russian,
32:38she always refused to be tested in that language publicly.
32:41Nevertheless, in her English speech, many people detected an unmistakable Russian accent.
32:46At the City University, Equinox has asked Dr Peter French, a forensic phonetician, to analyse Anna Andersen's speech patterns
33:04to search for clues about her origins.
33:06One of the features of her voice, which I understand the people who claim that they've heard a Slavic,
33:14or specifically Russian influence, often point to, is the pronunciation of the R sounds.
33:20There are lots of R's in these samples.
33:23These R's are not the sort of R's which are pronounced with the back of the tongue being brought up towards the soft palate,
33:30the way the Germans pronounce an R, often referred to in common parlance as a guttural R,
33:35but technically known as a uvular R.
33:38This is the R sound that Germans produce.
33:41We don't find that in these recordings.
33:44One finds an R produced by the tongue tip being brought towards the tooth ridge.
33:49So, for example, this is often heard as a tapping sound in words like
33:54Emperor, Precious, Secret, and so on.
33:57And so on.
33:58Now, this is the sort of R which occurs in Russian.
34:13But, and here's the big but, it also occurs in regional dialects of German.
34:18And the area of Germany from which Shanskowska is supposed to emanate,
34:25the northern part of Germany, close to the Polish border,
34:29this is in fact the standard R for the dialect of that region.
34:35The evidence to me is equivocal.
34:39.
34:41.
34:47.
34:48It is June 1994.
34:59At last, Dr. Peter Gill, of the British Forensic Science Service,
35:04has been given the go-ahead to collect the Anna Anderson intestine samples
35:08from Charlottesville in America.
35:10The Russian Nobility Association has now been defeated in court,
35:13and the Schweizer DNA tests can proceed.
35:17DNA tests are now the only hope of ending 70 years of controversy.
35:23At the hospital, Anna Anderson is known by her legal name of Anastasia Manahan.
35:29Dr Gill, the question may arise as to how do we know this is Miss Manahan's tissue, and I can assure you that the number that we have correlates to the number on the surgical pathology report, which also correlates to her history number, and I know full well that this indeed is the tissue of Anastasia Manahan, tissue received as a portion of small bowel from her.
35:52It has taken Dick and Marina Schweizer one year of legal wrangling to get Dr Gill to Charlottesville.
36:00Their conviction that Anna Anderson is Anastasia is based largely on the experiences of Marina's father, Gleb Botkin.
36:06My father, of course, was certain of the fact because they had known one another as children, and then he saw her for the last time in Tobolsk where he was also in exile with them.
36:22There was no way that he could have forgotten her in those trying circumstances.
36:33I'm confident because of my father's firm belief in her identity and the fact that he never once wavered.
36:45Dr Gill, I'm now going to seal this bag from the D block. This has the four tissue samples that you took and the control from that block.
36:52Okay, thank you.
36:54These bags have an adhesive on them that seal the bag, and the bag can only be re-entered one time.
37:04Thousands of miles away in Germany, blood is also being obtained from Franziska Shanskowska's great-nephew,
37:10so that Dr Gill can determine the Shanskowska family DNA profile and compare it to Anna Anderson's.
37:19Before Equinox contacted Karl Maucher for the sample, he had no idea the world's most famous Romanov claimant might be his missing great-aunt.
37:29In Birmingham, at the Forensic Science Service Laboratories, Dr Gill is finally starting work on the Anna Anderson intestine samples.
37:41But the first results are not ideal.
37:44Preservation chemicals placed on the intestine have badly degraded the DNA.
37:48Special extraction techniques need to be developed.
37:50It is a possibility that, after all this effort, that we may not actually be able to get a DNA result from these samples.
38:01Dr Gill thinks it will take him at least three months of work to sort out the problems.
38:06The intestine samples had been in the Charlottesville Hospital for 15 years.
38:15Anna Anderson had been living in the area since 1968, after her marriage to retired history professor Jack Managhan.
38:23Those years, until her death in 1984, were marked by increasing eccentricity.
38:28My chest must die for all of you.
38:32It's dirt, absolutely. Come on, sit down.
38:33This is the book, Russian America, about the sale of Alaska. Just have a seat.
38:37And the fire.
38:38Don't put the hat on. Take the hat off.
38:39I don't. I keep that hat on.
38:41Sit in the yellow chair, if you will.
38:43In which chair?
38:44Take the hat.
38:45No, sit in this yellow chair, right here.
38:47I don't sit there.
38:49You want to sit in that chair? All right, that's her favourite chair sitting in.
38:51Can you see her in that chair?
38:53Yes.
38:54Take the hat off.
38:55Many of Anna Anderson's opponents believed she was actually unbalanced and deluded.
39:00Her supporters saw the rifle butt blows inflicted on Anastasia during the execution
39:05as a possible explanation for Anna Anderson's occasionally odd behaviour.
39:09Dr David Enoch, a specialist in rare psychiatric disorders, has examined the psychiatric evidence.
39:14Well, Pseudoloda fantastica is a mental condition in which the person who suffers from it fabricates a tremendous story about themselves,
39:27with tremendous deception about themselves, with a change of identity of self, to such an extent that they no longer accept their own identity.
39:39That is the central core of the condition.
39:43And that comes about by conscious manipulation of their own feelings and of their own ideas.
39:48Then they begin to lie, they become pathological liars, and then they will lie to others in such a way that others will adapt to that and believe them.
40:00And I think this is a very plausible explanation.
40:04People accepted the fact that she herself believed that she was Anastasia.
40:09It's quite striking what people will say that they are, and how people will accept these fabrications.
40:19I think this theory of Pseudologia fantastica is to be described in a word that we're not allowed to use on television.
40:26I think it's a complete nothing.
40:28I think that if she were demented and deranged at that level, it would have been noticed by lots of people.
40:34Perhaps witnessing the murder of one's family, then being derided as an imposter by your relatives, might be good cause for eccentric behaviour.
40:44You read a book, but I was leaving this dirt.
40:49That's it? Living it?
40:50Dirt it was, and nothing else, Mr. Monaghan, not something comfortable reading a book.
40:55No.
40:56When you sit comfortable and eat nicely and read, I have been leaving this dirt. Dirt I was leaving.
41:03The DNA tests on Anna Anderson are continuing.
41:09Both the Anna Anderson intestine sample and the Maucher blood sample, to give the Shanskovska family DNA profile, are being analysed.
41:17Most normal DNA profiling uses DNA from the chromosomes.
41:22In historical cases like this, however, because comparisons are being made across generations, Dr. Gill must use DNA from the cell's mitochondria, the power packs of the cell.
41:32Mitochondrial DNA is inherited intact from the mother, so it remains unaltered through the generations.
41:39Like all DNA, mitochondrial DNA is made up of four bases, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
41:47These are repeated hundreds of thousands of times.
41:50Two unrelated people rarely share the same order of bases.
41:54Since the order of bases in any individual is inherited from the mother, Anastasia has the same order as the Tsarina Alexandra.
42:05The Duke of Edinburgh is the great-nephew of the Tsarina through the maternal line.
42:11Therefore, Anna Anderson's order of bases must match that of the Duke of Edinburgh, if she's Anastasia.
42:18His order is known because he provided a blood sample to help validate the remains of the Tsar's family.
42:25If Anna Anderson were proved by the current DNA test to be Anastasia, I would believe it.
42:37There's no reason to doubt it.
42:43The DNA from Anna Anderson's intestine has been isolated.
42:47More of the DNA from the intestine is manufactured by a process called amplification, since a good quantity is needed to allow analysis.
42:55To read the order of bases in Anna Anderson's DNA, the first step is to mark every occurrence of an A base green, C base blue, G base yellow and T base red.
43:10The DNA is now put through a process called electrophoresis.
43:15A strong electrical current is passed through the DNA.
43:18This causes it to move down through a supporting gel.
43:22A laser reads each base of Anna Anderson's DNA as it moves downwards.
43:27The laser detects the colour marker of each base and it passes that information to a computer.
43:36Anna Anderson's DNA can now be compared to the known DNA of the Duke of Edinburgh.
43:43The same process is undertaken for the Shanskowska family DNA profile.
43:47Karl Maucher is descended down the maternal line from Franziska Shanskowska, so he will have the same mitochondrial DNA profile as Franziska.
43:57If Anna Anderson's DNA is shown to match the Shanskowska family's DNA, I will be so completely flabbergasted they'll have to take me away on a stretcher.
44:08If the DNA tests were to prove that Anna Anderson were Anastasia, I suppose my reactions would be twofold.
44:20One of sorrow, that she died without her identity or with her identity being questioned.
44:31Um, and I think that would be sad.
44:36I suppose the second one would be a bit of chagrin that the family would have a wonderful American expression, egg on its face.
44:47But, you know, it would be a sad mistake, but it would be an honest mistake.
44:55I think Anna Anderson and Karl Maucher are through that region.
45:16Hello?
45:17Hello? Is Mr Schweitzer there, please?
45:19This is Mrs Schweitzer.
45:20Hello, this is Peter Gill.
45:22I'm phoning up with the results of our tests.
45:25Right.
45:26Now, um, shall I give it to you straight?
45:30Yes.
45:31Okay.
45:32The, um, the sample that we got from the tissue did not match, um, the DNA profile which we would expect to have found from the...
45:43... Grand Duchess Anastasia.
45:45Um, we then, uh, compared the, um, the, the tissue sample with, uh, a blood sample from Karl Maucher, and we actually got a, a positive match.
46:01Oh, that's not possible.
46:02... with Karl Maucher.
46:03That is just unbelievable.
46:05Unbelievable.
46:06But that, that's all right, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Doctor.
46:08Yeah.
46:09Okay.
46:10So, that does support the view that...
46:14... Anna Anderson, uh, was, um, Kaczynska.
46:20Oh, that's not possible.
46:22It's just impossible.
46:23It's just impossible.
46:24It's just out of this world.
46:27That's on, unbelievable.
46:30Shown here are some of the differences that we've observed.
46:33So, this, this upper sequence is out of the Duke of Edinburgh.
46:36Then we have Anna Anderson's sequence, and thirdly, Karl Maucher.
46:40And you can see that there are, there are differences between the sequences of the Duke of Edinburgh and Anna Anderson.
46:46For instance, in this region, the sequence of the Duke of Edinburgh reads GGGT,
46:52whereas within Anna Anderson, it reads GGAT.
46:57And in fact, this is the same as that of Karl Maucher in this region, who also reads GGAT.
47:04And we can keep on looking at these other differences, um, to, to demonstrate the point that Anna Anderson does not have the same sequence as the Duke of Edinburgh,
47:14and is therefore not the missing princess.
47:17She's not Anastasia.
47:19It's not possible.
47:21That's right.
47:22Something happened.
47:23Something happened.
47:24Something's wrong.
47:25I don't know how.
47:26And Ginnett would never be taken in by a Polish peasant.
47:27And what about Princess Zinni?
47:29And, uh, Princess Zinni?
47:31And what about, um, uh, uh, Saxa Alterberg, you know?
47:35That's right.
47:36All those people.
47:37The Leuchtenbergs.
47:38They, they just wouldn't do it.
47:40No, it's something's wrong.
47:42Now, they might say that she's, they might say that, okay, she's not whom she claims to be, but they would never have been taken in by somebody of less than really aristocratic origins.
47:54The scientists also did more conventional DNA tests, comparing Anna Anderson's chromosomal DNA to the profile found in the Tsar and Tsarina's remains in Ekaterinburg.
48:05This test also showed Anna Anderson could not be Anastasia.
48:09I just feel very, very fortunate that that great lab was, was willing to put forth the effort and was willing to take this private commission because it is perhaps the very, very best that you could ever hope for in terms of scientific integrity.
48:28If Anna Anderson is confirmed as Franziska Shanskowska by further DNA tests planned by the Schweitzers, many things will remain unexplained.
48:43The extraordinary coincidence of the similarity in the ears.
48:47Her ability to fool people who remembered the real Anastasia.
48:51Her success in playing the role of a Russian princess when her own origins were those of a factory worker.
48:58And above all, her remarkable ability to acquire information nobody thought she should have.
49:04As a great human being.
49:05What is your name?
49:06How is your name?
49:07What has your name been?
49:08From the unisirly people who have been looking for certain people's love?
49:09I always respect some of the unisirly respect.
49:14If someone meets someone who had such a strong desire for years,
49:24for years, for years, having too severe disease he had such a strong desire for many,
49:30who also has overcome severe diseases.
49:34This is absolutely a life experience
49:40in which you can only have a certain respect.
49:46With the advent of DNA testing,
49:48perhaps Anna Anderson's one and only fatal mistake
49:52was to leave those small pieces of body tissue behind
49:55in that American hospital.
49:56By this opportunity, I thank all my friends everywhere
50:01who have been assisting me in all my troubles
50:06all these many years.
50:14Anastasia, smile away the past
50:22Anastasia, spring is here at last
50:31Beautiful stranger, step down from your star
50:39This resolution of Anna Anderson's identity
50:43has not solved the mystery of Anastasia.
50:46Her whereabouts remain unknown.
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