Larissa Tudor
Upon her death at roughly the age of 28 in Lydd, Kent, England, due to pulmonary tuberculosis and spinal caries, she bequeathed to him an unusually large inheritance equivalent to a local resident's yearly earnings.
[2] This fact, combined with irregularities in the available information about her, such as the different ages given on her marriage certificate, her tombstone, and her death certificate, the differences in the names given for her, the conflicting stories about her background, Tudor's inexplicable income and return to the 3rd Hussars and promotion in rank following Larissa's death,[3] and certain physical details, led to speculation by author Michael Occleshaw that she was in reality the Grand Duchess and had escaped the assassination of the Romanovs after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
[9] Though Tudor's income had been reduced when he left the Hussars and he had no personal fortune, he had enough money to pay for a nurse for Larissa and to keep a horse stabled at a nearby farm.
Her gravestone bore the inscription "To My Very Beloved Larissa Feodorovna Who Died July 18th, 1926 Aged 28 Years The Wife of Owen Tudor, 3rd The King's Own Hussars".
[9] In his 1993 book The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor, Occleshaw speculates that Tatiana was flown out of Siberia by British agents in mid-July 1918 and, with assistance from the Japanese, transferred into the hands of Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was traveling from Japan to Canada aboard the Japanese battle cruiser Kirishima in July 1918.
[17] Meinertzhagen's wife, Amorel, traveled from Canada to the United Kingdom aboard the Canadian ship Corsican in August 1918, while the war was still taking place.
In the adjoining cabin was a 22-year-old masseuse named Marguerite Lindsay, for whom Occleshaw could find no birth or permanent address records.
[18] However, the Ellis Island Web site has two separate listings for travel to New York by passengers named Marguerite Lindsay in 1915 and again in 1923.
[23] Occleshaw also speculated that the conditions under which the Romanovs were held would have been "ideal" for a member of the imperial family to contract tuberculosis.
[23] Guards at the Ipatiev House, where the imperial family was held captive at Ekaterinburg, later commented on the sickly appearance of Grand Duchess Tatiana and her elder sister Olga.
[26] Occleshaw also noted that the patronymic on Larissa's gravestone was Feodorovna, which was also the patronymic adopted by Grand Duchess Tatiana's mother, Tsarina Alexandra, and that the surname Haouk bears close resemblance to the surname of Countess Julia von Hauke, an ancestress of the Mountbatten family and closely associated with Tatiana's Hessian relatives.
Those bodies were identified as Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia and one of the four grand duchesses, generally thought by Russians to be Maria and by Americans to be Anastasia.
[28] In July 2007, 46-year-old builder Sergei Pogorelov (part of a team from an amateur history group who spent free summer weekends looking for the lost Romanovs) said that after stumbling on a small burned area of ground covered with nettles near Yekaterinburg he had discovered bones that belonged to "a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of Nicholas’ 13-year-old hemophiliac son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also never have been found.
The test confirmed that the bodies belonged to members of the imperial family: Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and Grand Duchess Maria, according to Russian news agencies.
