Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • January 20, 2010 blue-gray), and had a full set of teeth. Dillinger was missing an upper incisor in his last known photographs. The height was also wrong, but only by an inch or so. The dead guy on the slab also had a rheumatic heart and Dillinger was, as they say, a legendary athlete. Robert Jay Nash, a crime writer, theorized in 1970 that a small-time gunman named Jimmy Lawrence was set up, with or without his knowledge, to take the fall for Dillinger, who lived until about 1979, mostly in California. New facts flurried in from both sides. The U.S. Navy physical examination Dillinger took in 1923 had missed Dillinger’s rheumatic heart, but a prison doctor noticed it a few years before Dillinger was supposedly killed. A physician said that blue-grey eyes can turn brown in extreme heat. I hadn’t heard that one before. The height was no big deal, but the dead man in the photo really did look like Lawrence, not Dillinger. Lawrence was pointedly photographed hugging Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s favorite girlfriend, who just happened to have the photograph on her person when she was arrested for a minor offense. Later, the same man was seen cavorting with Polly Hamilton, another of Dillinger’s girlfriends. Dillinger’s sister identified his body, and the family then buried the body in a huge pit full of concrete, substantially barring any future autopsies. Nash writes about lurid subjects, but tends to be fair and accurate. Nobody can be sure, but to me it still looks like a setup. The last word may, however, be in on Anna Anderson, who was born, depending on whom you believe, as the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova of Russia or as Franziska Schanzowska, a German-Polish girl who was fished out of the Landwehr Canal in Berlin in 1920 after a suicide attempt. The girl had scars on her body and had given birth to a child, according the medical examination. Shortly, Anderson began to tell people she had escaped the massacre of the Tsar’s family and servants, rescued by a loyal soldier who protected her and whom she later married. The husband was killed in street fighting and the child vanished into foster care. The alternate story is that Schanzowska’s lover had been killed in World War I. She had been wounded by an explosion in the hand grenade factory where she worked and had lost the child by miscarriage. Schanzowka’s story was pretty thin: She could not speak Russian or English (Anastasia’s two languages through childhood), and the soldier who saved her was named “Tchaikowsky,” the sort of Russian name a hasty impostor might pick out of thin air. No record of him was ever found. A majority of people who knew the real Anastasia by sight, including her tutor, Pierre Gilliard, denounced Anderson as a fraud. However, some courtiers and members of the imperial family thought she was for real. She knew some odd facts and details of court ritual that seemed esoteric for a factory girl from Berlin. Gleb Boktin, son of the physician murdered along with the Tsar and his family, became a strong advocate. Anderson married a rich American eccentric 20 years her junior, and the two of them lived happily ever after until she died in 1984. Some years later still, repentant post-communist Russians dug up the mass grave of the Romanovs and found that the body of one of the girls, probably Anastasia, was missing, not buried with her parents and sisters. Anderson’s case was revitalized. Anderson had survived an operation that left several inches of her small intestine in a medical lab. As DNA testing became available, scientists obtained tissue samples from deceased Romanovs in their tombs and their cousins in the British royal family. They found that Anderson’s DNA did not collate with the Romanov-Windsor DNA, but it collated closely with that of a modern German named Karl Maucher, Franziska Schanzkowsksa’s great-nephew. Partisans said the lab tested the wrong intestines, but samples of Anderson’s hair found in an envelope produced the same results. Meanwhile, the frail skeleton of a teenaged girl turned up in Siberia and proved a DNA match for the Romanovs. Case closed. Martin Bormann was as elusive a fugitive as Anastasia, though he was appalling rather than appealing. A Nazi murderer who wielded great power as Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Bormann dropped off the radar during the fall of Berlin in April 1945. Fellow fugitives said he was killed during his attempt to run out on Hitler. Not so, said various experts in suspense and intrigue. Bormann had escaped and was still alive with the connivance of underground Nazi groups and South American dictators. In 1974, author Ladislas Farago wrote a book where he produced photographs of Bormann at a party in Argentina. He staked his reputation on the fact that Bormann was still alive. Simon Wiesenthal and British Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper also believed it. Even before the Farago book came out, rubble clearance in Berlin produced a body whose dental records identified the corpse as Bormann. Glass fragments in the teeth suggested he had bitten a cyanide capsule to avoid capture. He had not been a photo op since 1945. Other advocates argued that the dentist had fibbed. In 1998, a DNA test with a sample supplied by Bormann’s son showed a strong match between Martin Bormann Jr. and the corpse. Martin Bormann Sr., celebrity at Argentine cocktail parties in the 1950s and 1960s, had been a skeleton in Berlin since 1945. I don’t expect to encounter any such comeuppance in my own book, but you have to give these other authors credit. It is tough getting published nowadays, and the temptation to stretch some facts and ignore others is always there. Hopefully, I have avoided doing so. Responses so far have been 90 percent favorable and 10 percent indignant. We shall see. Apperceptions more durable than death I think it was Max Planck who said that the problem with people in the learning industry was that they could not get rid of their apperceptions. Planck meant that people tended to learn what they thought were facts and then refuse to look at contradictory evidence. Forensic and documentary evidence has swept away a lot of the things we used to believe, and some of these beliefs were very important to groups of people who refuse to adapt to new information. On the home front, many people still believe you catch a cold from getting wet. Actually, you catch a cold from germs. Being wet in cold weather is uncomfortable, but it won’t give you a cold unless your immune system is weak and you come into contact with other people’s germs. My experience revolves around the discovery that there is a documented survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand. Most people who read the review copies of “Custer Survivor” almost universally acclaimed the survival of one sergeant as a proven fact. One or two others sounded like they wanted to kill me. The documents are printed right in the book. A handful of people who have “married” themselves to the idea that there could not have been a survivor and that many fake claimants have proved that there could not be a real survivor have flown into a rage. It’s a fascinating example of how well-meaning and often intelligent people cannot triumph over their apperceptions. I have been there myself. When I was a kid, I learned that Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron,” had been shot down by A. Roy Brown, a Canadian pilot flying a Sopwith Camel. A few years ago, the last piece of that puzzle slipped into place and most serious students now know there is no way that Brown killed the Red Baron. What happened is this: Possibly impacted by a head wound suffered some months before, Richthofen in April of 1918 gave chase to Wilfred May, a young pilot in a Sopwith Camel. Brown swung after Richthofen, fired one burst at him, and swung away. Richthofen kept chasing May and flew over some Australian machine gunners who let fly at him. Richthofen’s plane came down in a controlled crash and an Australian sergeant who ran up to Richthofen heard him say something that sounded like kaput, and then slump over and die. The autopsy revealed that Richthofen had been hit by a single rifle-caliber bullet from the front traveling upward and passing through his body front to rear. Brown’s bullet, fired from above and behind, had it struck Richthofen, would have passed through at a downward angle, back to front. The bullet wound near the heart also would have caused Richthofen to lose consciousness within 30 seconds. Richthofen spoke – and then died – several minutes after Brown fired and swung away. The actual killer of the Red Baron was almost certainly Sergeant Cedric Bassett Popkin, an Australian infantryman. John Dillinger was killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago in July of 1934. Wait a minute. Some people who saw Dillinger’s autopsy said that the dead man did not look like Dillinger, had brown eyes (Dillinger’s eyes were Ramsey UNICO helps Scouts Recently the Greater Ramsey Chapter of UNICO donated $250 to Ramsey Cub Scout Pack 306. The money will be used for the Blue and Gold Banquet held in February. The banquet is an event where all the scouts of Pack 306 earn awards for their achievements up to that point. It is the biggest event of the year for the scouts. Pictured is Joe Tredici from the Greater Ramsey Chapter of UNICO handing the check to Vince Mazzola, Cubmaster for the Pack, along with Deepak Mohan from the Tiger Cubs, Christopher DiGiacomo from the Webelo cubs, Michael Ghiorsi from the Bear cubs and Wayne Cheung from the Wolf cubs.