After Anderson’s death in 1984 and her cremation — she had requested cremation, and it was carried out — the tissue sample at the Charlottesville hospital became the primary and essentially only intact biological material from her body. Her ashes contained no usable DNA. The paraffin-preserved intestinal tissue did.
This was not the only biological material that investigators eventually used. Hair strands found in a book that had belonged to John Manahan were also identified as potentially Anderson’s and were used in parallel testing. The convergence of results from independent samples — hair and intestinal tissue — would be important in establishing the reliability of the findings.
The tissue was not tested until 1994. In the decade between Anderson’s death and the DNA testing, two things changed that made the testing possible: the scientific development of techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA from preserved tissue, and the discovery of the Romanov remains near Ekaterinburg in 1991, which provided the reference material against which Anderson’s DNA could be compared.
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## The Romanov Grave: 1991
In 1979, a Soviet geologist named Alexander Avdonin, working from a historical document that described the location where the Romanov bodies had been disposed of, located what he believed was the burial site — a wooded area near a dirt road outside Ekaterinburg. He excavated briefly, confirmed the presence of human remains, and reburied the site. The discovery was kept quiet during the Soviet era.
After the Soviet Union’s collapse made such an investigation politically and practically possible, the site was formally excavated in 1991. Russian authorities and international scientists, including British forensic scientists and American forensic scientists working through the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, were involved in examining and testing the remains.