The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  “My field is the human skeleton, its changes through life, its changes across many lifetimes, and its variations around the world,” Dr. Maples said. By examining the different bones of a skeleton, Maples usually can quickly tell the sex, the age, the height, and the weight of the owner of the skeleton in life. This special knowledge has made him enormously valuable as an expert consultant to local and state police trying determine the identity of a victim, what happened to the victim at the scene of a crime, and who was responsible. From 1972, when he began with a single case, his caseload has grown to two to three hundred a year. Among them was serial killer Ted Bundy, who murdered at least thirty-six young women before he was caught, tried, and executed—in Florida. Twice a year, Maples visits the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu to assist with difficult cases of military remains brought back from Vietnam.

  For most of this consulting work, Dr. Maples’ fee is two hundred dollars an hour. He also receives a partial salary from the University of Florida. Together, this income still does not fully support the work of his laboratory, and he has turned for help to outside donors. The C. A. Pound Laboratory was paid for by Gainesville native Cicero Addison Pound, Jr., a man now in his seventies, who, as an early naval aviator, participated in the search for Amelia Earhart. Pound became wealthy in real estate and contributed money to build Maples’ laboratory. Maples also has a generous benefactor in retired Gainesville lawyer William Goza, whose Wentworth Foundation gives to the university and specifically to projects involving William Maples.

  Goza’s financial support has made possible a number of Maples’ forensic investigations. These are historical cases, in which there is no client other than history and the primary motive is the sheer satisfaction of discovering truth and solving a mystery. (It is also true, of course, that success in these high-profile cases confers valuable prestige. It is extremely useful to a prosecutor when he can stand up before a jury and say to his expert witness, “Are you the same Dr. Maples who …?”) Maples has been involved in four of these historical cases. In 1984, he proved that mummified remains thought to be those of Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador assassinated in Lima in 1541, and thereafter venerated for over four centuries in a magnificent marble and bronze sarcophagus in Lima Cathedral, actually belonged to someone else. Further, he proved that another set of ancient bones, buried beneath two layers of wooden planking in the cathedral crypt, were those of Pizarro. In 1988, Maples examined the skeleton of John Merrick, the nineteenth-century Elephant Man, restored to fame in our time by Broadway and Hollywood. (Just before Maples appeared, pop star Michael Jackson reportedly had offered to buy Merrick’s skeleton from the Royal London College of Medicine Museum for one million dollars.) Maples’ effort was to establish how much of the grotesquely abnormal growth that disfigured Merrick was the result of soft tissue tumors and how much was attributable to changes in the structure of his bones. He found that Merrick was afflicted by both. In 1991, he exhumed the skeleton of Zachary Taylor and proved that this former president of the United States had not been poisoned, as was often alleged, but had probably died of an intestinal infection. And, in 1992, Dr. Maples became involved with the Romanov bones.

  William Maples first encountered the Russian Imperial family years ago by reading two books. As a boy in Dallas in the 1940s, he read Richard Halliburton’s Seven League Boots, which contained Halliburton’s “deathbed” interview with the executioner Ermakov. Much later, he read Nicholas and Alexandra. In February 1992, he was in New Orleans attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences when he read in a newspaper that Secretary of State Baker had been asked for American assistance in identifying a group of skeletal remains exhumed from a grave in Siberia. Maples walked over to Dr. Richard Froede, the armed forces medical examiner, and asked whether Baker had been in touch with Froede about providing help. Dr. Froede said no, he hadn’t heard anything. “I decided right then that we would make an attempt,” Maples said. “While the meeting was still going on, I organized what I think was an extremely powerful team. It consisted of Dr. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist, Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic dentist, Dr. William Hamilton, our local Gainesville medical examiner, and Cathryn Oakes, a hair and fiber specialist with the New York State Police. I was to serve as the forensic anthropologist and team leader.”

  Returning to Gainesville, Maples drafted a letter for the president of the University of Florida, John Lombardi, to sign and send to Alexander Avdonin in Ekaterinburg. The letter presented the credentials of Maples’ team and said that the members would be willing to travel at their own expense; in fact, the funds would come from Bill Goza’s foundation. Further, Lombardi declared that he intended to organize a scientific conference in America to discuss the findings. “It would be necessary for several members of your team to come to this conference,” he told Avdonin. “Funds raised by Dr. Maples would … provide the required transportation costs for your representatives.” April arrived, and Maples still had received no reply. Then, indirectly, he learned that Avdonin was waiting for him to telephone. Maples did so immediately, and the following day a faxed invitation arrived in Gainesville, signed jointly by Alexander Blokhin, deputy vice governor of the Sverdlovsk Region, and Avdonin. The Florida team was asked to come in mid-July, to spend several days examining the remains, and then to participate in an international conference on the subject of the bones.

  Told that Dr. Froede and Dr. Rodriguez of the AFIP-FBI team continue to be upset about their sudden dismissal from the project, Maples said, “We learned only later that Secretary Baker had asked Dick Froede. I’m certain that when I spoke to Dick in New Orleans, he had not been contacted. After all, Baker was still in Russia. Anyway, when I asked Dick, he said no.” Maples admitted that, in America as in Russia, there is fierce competition among scientists. “I’m not a particularly competitive individual,” he said, “but if no one else was going to do something like this—something I was interested in for years—then I was eager to do it.” In Maples’ opinion the AFIP-FBI project was hampered by lack of funds and by the fact that a highly respected forensic anthropologist, Douglas Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution, dropped off the government team. The Russians, he felt, weighed the caliber of the two teams and chose his.

  Dr. Maples did, indeed, have a powerful team. Dr. Michael Baden, the forensic pathologist, was a former chief medical examiner of New York City. He had been the chairman of the forensic panel established by the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations to review the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was then codirector of the New York State Police Forensic Sciences Unit. Dr. Lowell Levine, his codirector with the New York State Police unit, had had an equally celebrated career. He too had worked with the congressional select committee on the Kennedy and King assassinations. At the request of the State Department, he had gone to Argentina and identified the remains of many of “the disappeared”—men and women who mysteriously vanished under the Argentine military dictatorship. A few years later in Brazil, Levine was instrumental in identifying the teeth and skull of Josef Mengele, the doctor from Auschwitz. Cathryn Oakes, one of the nation’s leading hair and fiber specialists, was also with the New York State Police Crime Laboratory.

  On July 25, 1992, Maples and his team arrived in Ekaterinburg and checked into the Hotel October, formerly used only by high Communist officials. They paid a full rate in Western dollars; the local authorities provided them only with a car and a driver. Early the following morning, they arrived at the branch of the Ekaterinburg morgue where the Romanov bones were kept. They met Nikolai Nevolin, director of the morgue, Alexander Avdonin, Galina Avdonina, who speaks good English, and others. Nevolin told them, “Go down and do what you want.” The morgue, according to Maples, was similar in design to an American morgue in a city of comparable size: the autopsy rooms and body storage area on the first floor, offices on the second. And something else was familiar. “It was the odor
,” Maples said, “a typical morgue odor.” On the second floor, at the end of a long hall, there was an iron gate. The gate opened into a small anteroom, and from there, opening another locked door, they walked into the room with the bones.

  The room is eighteen by sixteen feet, about the size of an average American living room. It is a corner room and has two windows, both covered by drawn shades which permit light to enter. The walls are painted a glossy medium green. In the center of the room is a large table, which holds a computer and a microscope. Against the walls on all four sides of the room are metal tables. The bones are laid on these tables in skeletal form, that is, not connected but with the skull at the top, then the vertebrae forming the spinal column, the ribs on either side of the vertebrae, the arm bones outside the ribs, and the pelvic, leg, ankle, and foot bones at the bottom. Maples was horrified to see that some of the long bones of the thigh and arm had been cut in half; this could only make it more difficult for him to estimate height. When he arrived, the tables were not covered, so that anyone in the room could pick up a bone, as Secretary of State Baker had done five months before. Nor is there any temperature control in the room; when Maples and his team were there in midsummer, the room was warm, and they quickly removed their jackets.

  Maples opened his camera bag and took out one of his cameras. “Nyet,” said one of the Russians with them in the room. “You cannot take any photographs.” Stolidly, Maples put his camera away and, with Baden, Levine, and Oakes, spent three hours examining the bones. To Maples, the identities of the skeletons were quickly obvious. “That is Demidova,” he said. “That is Botkin. That is one of the daughters, probably Olga. That is another daughter, probably Tatiana. That’s the third daughter, probably Marie. That is Nicholas. That is Alexandra. And these two are the male servants.”

  At midday, Maples and his team packed their bags and walked down the hall to Nevolin’s office. “We’re finished and we’re leaving now,” Maples said. “You’re going to lunch?” Nevolin asked. “No,” said Maples, “we’re finished. We’ve done as much as we can, and we’re going home.” Nevolin was shocked. “But you can’t go,” he protested. Maples explained, “We have to document what we do, and unless we are allowed to do this, we cannot do any more. I’ve never done a forensic case where I’ve been unable to document what needed to be done. And unless you give permission for us to photo-document this case, we’re finished. I’ve reached my conclusions.” Maples’ voice was flat, but he was clearly angry. “You were so angry you were shaking,” Galina Avdonina told him later.

  Nevolin needed time. “Go to lunch, and when you return, we’ll discuss this and have some answers for you,” he said. The American team went back to the hotel, had a long Russian lunch, then returned to the morgue. Nevolin greeted them by saying, “Take all the pictures you want.” (“Obviously,” Maples said later, “he called Blokhin and Blokhin said, ‘Let them do what they want.’ So we stayed for the rest of the week and documented everything. But in the first two or three hours we had the findings. We knew that we were dealing with the remains of the Imperial family, and we knew which one was which.”)

  The nine skeletons lying on the morgue tables were labeled only by number. Maples—who at this point had no knowledge of Dr. Abramov’s previous findings—continued to use this labeling system. Five of the skeletons were female, four male. All of the males were mature; there was no adolescent boy. Of the five females, three were young women, only recently grown to maturity. All of the faces had been badly fractured. All of the female skeletons had dental work. One of the males apparently had used an upper plate.

  The easiest body to identify—labeled by the Russians as Body No. 7—was that of a middle-aged woman whose ribs showed possible signs of damage from bayonet thrusts. What immediately caught the eye and the attention of Dr. Levine was the elaborate and beautiful dental work in this skull. Two crowns in the lower jaw were made of platinum. Elsewhere in this mouth, there were elegant porcelain crowns and finely wrought gold fillings. On display was a kind of dentistry developed in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently practiced in Germany, Alexandra’s homeland. Seeing this work, Levine and Maples pronounced this skull and these remains as belonging to the Empress Alexandra.

  Identifying Nicholas II also was not difficult. The remains labeled Body No. 4 belonged to a fairly short, middle-aged man. The hip bones showed the signs of wear and deformation produced by years riding on horseback, a characteristic activity of Russian tsars. The skull had the wide, sloping forehead, jutting brow, and broad, flat palate possessed by Nicholas. The teeth were extraordinarily bad. The lower jaw showed the devastating inroads of periodontal disease, and there were no fillings in any of the remaining teeth. In the skull, there was no middle to the face; everything below the eye sockets and above the jaw had been obliterated.

  Holding Nicholas II’s skull in his hands, Maples had an eerie experience: “We were passing the skull around among ourselves, when we heard something rattling dully inside the braincase. Training a flashlight on the base of the skull, peering in through the aperture where the spinal column would have been anchored, we descried a small, shrunken object about the size of a small pear, rolling to and fro. It was the desiccated brain of Tsar Nicholas II.”

  The American team had little difficulty with the other four adults. Body No. 1 was identified by its pelvis as a fully mature female. The skull held a basically prefabricated gold bridge of poor workmanship on the lower left jaw; this was identified as belonging to the maid, Demidova.

  Body No. 2 was the skeleton of a large, mature man with a distinctive flat, sloping forehead. Unique among the remains, this body still had a portion of the torso intact, held together by adipocere, a grayish white, waxy substance that forms when fatty tissue combines with water after death. From this mass, the Russians had recovered one bullet from the pelvic area and one from a vertebra. The skull had a gunshot wound from a bullet that had entered the left forehead. There were a few teeth in the lower jaw, no teeth at all in the upper jaw. Knowing that Dr. Botkin’s dental plate had been found over seventy years before by Sokolov at the Four Brothers helped Maples and Levine to identify these remains as his.

  Body No. 8 and Body No. 9 were identified as the remains of, respectively, Kharitonov, the forty-eight-year-old cook, and Trupp, the sixty-one-year-old valet. The skeleton of Kharitonov was the most fragmentary of all the nine; having been the first to be flung to the bottom of the pit, his body had lain deepest in the pool of acid. The body of Trupp had rested directly beneath that of the tsar. As decomposition proceeded, some of the bones became commingled. Today, Maples believes, short of performing a DNA test on each fragment, it will be impossible to determine whether certain of these bones belonged to the tsar or to his valet.

  The remaining three skeletons, Bodies No. 3, No. 5, and No. 6, were those of three young adult or near-adult females, all of whom shared with one another and with Body No. 7 (Empress Alexandra) an uncommon protruding bone structure in the back of the head. This feature, called wormian bones and found in only 5 or 6 percent of the population, strongly suggested a sibling relationship between the three younger women, and a mother-daughter relationship between the three of them and Body No. 7. The three young women also all had numerous fillings and similar dental work, suggesting that they were treated by the same dentist.

  The oldest of these young women, Body No. 3, was in her early twenties when she died. Although half of her middle face and her lower jaw were missing, the shape of the head, with its unusually prominent forehead, was similar to that of Grand Duchess Olga. This woman was fully grown; Olga had been twenty-two years and eight months old when she was killed. The leg bones had been cut, but by extrapolating from the lengths of her arm bones, Maples estimated her height at just under five feet, five inches. Dr. Levine found fully developed roots to the third molars or wisdom teeth, further supporting Maples’ opinion that she was a mature adult. Gunshot wounds showed that a bullet ha
d entered under her left jaw and exited through the front of her skull. “Such a trajectory,” Maples observed, “could come from a gun placed under the chin and fired up, or from firing at a body already on the floor.”

  The next of the daughters—-the remains labeled Body No. 5—had been a woman “in her late teens or early twenties,” Maples decided. “Dr. Levine and I agreed that she was the youngest of the five women whose skeletons lay before us.” They concluded this from the fact that the root tips of her third molars were not completely developed. “Her sacrum, in the back of her pelvis, was not completely developed. Her limb bones showed that growth had only recently ended. Her back showed evidence of immaturity, but it was nevertheless the back of a woman at least eighteen years old. We estimated her height at five feet, seven and a half inches.” Although half of the middle face was missing, Maples concluded that this skeleton belonged to Grand Duchess Marie, whose nineteenth birthday had occurred five weeks before she died.

  The third of these young females, whose remains were labeled Body No. 6, had been shot in the back of the head, the bullet entering her skull from the left rear and exiting from her right temple. She had been fully grown, and her dental and skeletal development placed her in age between Bodies No. 3 and No. 5. The root tips of her molars were still incomplete, which was consistent with a woman of age nineteen to twenty-one, but not a woman of seventeen. Maples put her height at just over five feet, five and a half inches; he found no evidence of recent continuing growth. Her sacrum and pelvic rim were mature, which made her at least eighteen. Her collarbone was mature, making her at least twenty. Grand Duchess Tatiana had been twenty-one years and two months old at the time of the executions. Maples therefore assigned Body No. 3 to Olga, Body No. 5 to Marie, and Body No. 6 to Tatiana.