THE MISSING LINK  Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Playing princess is a rite of passage for many little girls. Anna Anderson made a pseudo career out of it from the early 1920's until her death in 1984, claiming she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, a daughter of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. The Czar, his wife and five children were all executed by the Bolsheviks almost a century ago but Anderson insisted she had escaped. In 1994, DNA testing on a piece of Anderson's preserved intestine from an operation she had in 1979, finally proved her claims to be false.

The real fate of one of the Czar's daughters was still in question. A mass grave uncovered in the 1970's only contained remains of two adults and three female children, leaving questions about what happened to his son and other daughter. That is until now. A Department of Defense Lab has worked meticulously to identify bone fragments of two bodies from a grave located 70 feet away as a DNA match to the original remains found, confirming there were indeed no survivors.