Yet at the back of everyone’s mind was the dark and fascinating prospect of the next day. We were about to resurrect a dead man, yet the mood was lively, convivial, even festive. There was an indefinable air of keen anticipation: tomorrow morning the President whose likeness hung upon the walls of this dining room, Zachary Taylor himself, would reenter the world of the living. He would step back onto the stage of American history he had suddenly vacated a hundred and forty-one years earlier.
The next morning, whatever hopes we had that the investigation in the cemetery would be conducted quietly and decorously were dashed. When we arrived at the entrance to the cemetery at 9 A.M. we found the fire department at the front gate, directing traffic. Police were everywhere. The main avenue of the cemetery was lined with hundreds of people. Media camera units were positioned in cherry-picker cranes overhead. We were let through a police barrier and parked on the curved drive just in front of the Taylor tomb. Watched by thousands of inquisitive eyes, we unloaded our equipment and proceeded to document the area.
The local funeral director had secured services of some volunteers from a memorial vault company to assist in the delicate task of moving the massive slab of Tennessee marble that sealed the vault containing the coffins of President and Mrs. Taylor. This enormous vault was inside the tomb, with only a couple of feet of clearance on three sides.
When the slab was lifted, a badly rotted wooden casket was seen to be lying within the vault. Inside this casket was a lead liner, all the seams of which had been soldered shut. Under closer examination, we saw a rectangular soldered plate near the head of the liner. Beneath this plate was a cracked glass window. The apparent purpose of this glass window was to allow the dead President to be viewed while lying in state in his coffin at the White House.
We had not expected to find this sealed box of lead and had no tools with which to open it. In any case the mausoleum was so small that there was no room to work or maneuver, and the milling crowds outside were oppressive. We decided to take the lead liner and the enclosed remains to the office of the state medical examiner and to open it there.
Now we were alone at last, and now the true investigation could begin. At the office of the medical examiner, we changed to scrub suits and discussed how the lead liner could best be opened. It looked solid, but we now saw it was pocked with several perforations. Historical records said Taylor had not been embalmed—his wife had forbidden it. Instead, his body had been packed in ice for the lying in state. As his body decomposed within the lead box, the resultant butyric acids had eaten through the metal in several places. So these holes were an important piece of evidence. Because they showed Taylor had not been embalmed, and because arsenic was part of the nineteenth-century embalming process, we could be sure the remains had not been contaminated by an undertaker.
But how to open the box? Initially it was decided to use a small blowtorch. A worker from the maintenance department of the county coroner’s office was summoned to the room and, using a small torch attached to a miniature propane tank, he began carefully to melt the solder joints of the casket. Suddenly I had a horrifying thought. Peering through the opened portion of the seam, I could see that the box was lined with cloth! If this cloth liner should catch fire from the flame of the blowtorch, our proposed examination of Zachary Taylor might end with his unexpected cremation! The blowtorch was extinguished instantly and sent back to the basement.
We considered awhile and then fell back on a trusty Stryker saw, the oscillating bladed tool that is used to cut bone in autopsies. This saw went through the lead liner like cheese, and the top popped off as neatly as if we had used a can opener.
The lid was moved out of the way and all of us peered down into the depths of the container. There lay all that remained of President Zachary Taylor.
The former President had been totally skeletonized. Abundant hair could be seen adhering to the skull. The deceased President’s bushy eyebrows were still visible, clinging to the supraorbital ridges above his skull’s eye sockets. The hair was dark, flecked with gray. For the rest, he presented an austere picture of simple mortality: a skeleton, clad in his funeral attire, his skull pillowed on a bunch of straw stuffed beneath the casket liner. He had one missing tooth and one collapsed crown, but otherwise his teeth were still magnificent. Taylor must have had a brilliant, winning smile in life.
The deceased President was dressed in an unusual one-piece suit that consisted of a pleated shirtlike top with buttoned sleeves, and plain trousers below. I suppose it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a jumpsuit, all of one piece and probably chosen for convenience’s sake. He wore no shoes or stockings, but his bony hands were sheathed in fine cloth gloves. Under his fallen lower jaw there was a very large cloth bow tie knotted butterfly fashion around his neck, a beautiful and curiously soft-looking thing, almost the sort of adornment a girl might wear.
All of the clothing and gloves must have been white originally, but now they were yellowed with age and stained by the decomposition process to a tobacco-like brown. As I have already mentioned, the lead liner itself had a cloth lining which was a faint beige color, falling down in several places. The darkness of the hair may have been due to decomposition. Apart from a few lumps of adipocere, a waxy substance that forms when body fats combine with moisture, the remains were entirely skeletal.
Then we went to work. Photographs were taken. A forensic dentist examined the teeth. With a pair of scissors I carefully cut the back of the gloves down each finger and removed all ten fingernails. I gently collected sufficient samples of hair from the President’s head and his body. In the area of the feet I found several fallen toenails, including both of the nails from the great toes. We also sampled a small portion of bone from the breastbone or sternum, took a small piece of the adipocere and collected samples of the textiles from under the body that had soaked up fluids from the decomposing remains. If arsenic had been used to kill Taylor, arsenic would be present in all these things.
All the samples were placed in envelopes. Everything was divided—fingernails, hair, adipocere, bone, fabrics—so that we had two identical sets of samples. One set of specimens went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for analysis and the other to the Kentucky laboratory that routinely performs toxicology work for the state medical examiner.
By now it was around 4 P.M. The examination was nearly complete. The coroner’s office was telephoning around Louisville to find a specialist in soldering lead. At length a man who worked with lead roofs was located and agreed to come to the office and solder the lead box shut again.
Before he arrived, Taylor’s two great-great-great-great-granddaughters asked to see their ancestor. This was a delicate situation. I have already described the skeletal state of the remains. Gently we described the contents of the lead box to them, and asked again: were they quite sure they wanted to look? They insisted they did, they assured us they could stand the sight. So at length the two young women were allowed to come into the room and peer into the casket containing their renowned forebear. They were enthralled, not in the least upset. I still have a photograph of them in the room, gesturing with animation and smiling excitedly.
Clare Rising, who had devoted so much time to explicating the Taylor riddle, was also permitted to come in and have a brief glimpse of the deceased President. She approached the casket with considerable hesitation and no little awe. I fixed my eyes on her and I could sense that, at that moment, she wasn’t looking at a mere mass of dead bones. She was gazing on the legendary figure of history: Zachary Taylor.
The container was closed, returned to the cemetery with an American flag draped around it. It was replaced in the vault and the heavy marble lid was replaced. This time the marble was sealed with epoxy that would guarantee the Taylors’ privacy and repose. After this, we all went home to await the results of the laboratory analysis.
Shortly after I returned to Gainesville, the results were released by Dr. Nichols’s office. They were clear and unequ
ivocal. The amounts of arsenic found in all samples were consistent throughout. They showed that President Taylor had in his remains only the levels of arsenic consistent with any person who lived in the nineteenth century. The levels were in every case minuscule. They could never have produced death, or even illness.
Arsenic is a remarkable and powerful poison that can kill quickly or slowly, depending on the dosage. A sudden, massive dose of arsenic could kill within hours and, if this occurs, no trace of the poison will be deposited in the hair or nails or bones of the deceased. But if the victim lives for twenty-eight to thirty hours after ingesting the arsenic, minute traces of the poison will be deposited in the hair and bones. As we all know, Zachary Taylor lived for five days after the onset of his symptoms. There was ample time for arsenic to be deposited in his system, if he had been poisoned. Our investigation demonstrated, once and for all, that he hadn’t.
It is remotely possible that another poison might have been used to kill Taylor, but only arsenic would have produced the symptoms he showed before dying, and arsenic was by now conclusively out of the question. The verdict of history must be that Zachary Taylor died of natural causes. Indeed, he may have been unwittingly killed by his doctors.
In those days, cathartics and laxatives were prescribed for diarrhea, and fluids were often deliberately withheld, on the advice of doctors. A strong case might be made that the President had a fairly routine case of intestinal infection. Perhaps the vegetables and cherries he devoured had not been washed, or had been washed in contaminated water. The heat of July would have afforded a fertile breeding ground for E. coli germs and these, massed in millions in his gut, may have formed an army the old general could not defeat.
One minor note: we also found in the coffin several pupa cases of flies that were attracted to the dead President in that hot summer so long ago. These bold insects had paid a price for their temerity: their offspring had been buried alive with the illustrious man their parents had presumed to light upon.
The aftermath was all very anticlimactic. I learned, if I did not already know, how fickle was the fancy of the American media. Zachary Taylor the Murder Victim was news. Zachary Taylor the President who died a natural death was history, and ancient history at that. The satellite dishes were stowed, the camera lenses were capped, the generators were unplugged, the notebooks snapped shut. No more did the networks jangle my phone, wooing me with their blandishments. “Old Rough and Ready” resumed his interrupted sleep, and I returned to my modern murders unmolested. Like hoarfrost at noon, the media simply evanesced.
Clare Rising finished her book on Zachary Taylor, but as far as I know it remains unpublished, despite her past literary success. She clung to her poisoning theory and did extensive additional research in the medical literature, trying to explain why, even though Taylor might have been poisoned, no poison would show up in a chemical analysis. But to my mind the death of President Taylor has been settled now, and Clare Rising is entitled to some of the credit whether she agrees or not. Without her extraordinary efforts, the mystery might have lingered indefinitely. Now it is resolved.
Zachary Taylor can take his proper place in history, as a military commander who fought hard for his country and as a President who did not shrink from his duty. His last hours may have been uncomfortable, but they were not unnatural. He was not assassinated. And, like the big soft bow tie he wore in his coffin, the old President did have a gentler side.
It was Zachary Taylor who coined the term “First Lady.” He used these words to describe Dolly Madison at her funeral in 1849: “She will never be forgotten, because she was truly our first lady for a half century.” This sincere piece of gallantry is among his smaller monuments. It came from Zachary Taylor’s own heart—a heart that was gone, together with the storm and strife it struggled to master, long before the old President and I met.
15
The Tsar of All the Russias
“The world will never know what we did with them….”
—Peter Voikov, Soviet ambassador to Poland, 1935
It was a sunny day on the edge of Siberia when I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Forensic-Medical Examination Bureau, where the skeletons were kept. The bureau was located in Ekaterinburg, eight hundred miles from Moscow, deep in the Ural Mountains. A city of dreadful fame, Ekaterinburg is the Golgotha of Soviet Communism. Here, in the basement of a house that has since been destroyed, was carried out one of the most fateful mass executions in this century.
In Ekaterinburg, on the night of July 16–17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, was summoned downstairs with his whole family to a basement room in the so-called “House of Special Designation,” a mansion requisitioned from an engineer named Ipatiev. Waiting for him was a Bolshevik death squad led by Commander Jacob Yurovsky.
Near midnight a decree of execution was read out to the amazed royal family and their servants: Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra, their frail hemophiliac son Alexei, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, the family doctor, Sergei Botkin, a cook named Kharitonov, a footman named Trupp and a maid named Anna Demidova—eleven people in all.
Yurovsky had not finished speaking when the first shots exploded in the narrow room. Thrown backward by the force of bullets, the Tsar spun around and fell dead. His family and retainers fell with him, in a blizzard of lead. The roar of a Fiat truck engine, running loudly outside the back door, helped mask the homicidal racket. Twenty minutes later the corpses were carried out into the summer night, where they vanished, seemingly forever.
“The world will never know what we did with them,” boasted Peter Voikov, a Bolshevik official at Ekaterinburg who was ambassador to Poland when he uttered these words, seventeen years later.
On July 19 the local Ural Worker newspaper announced that the Tsar was dead:
EXECUTION OF NICHOLAS, THE BLOODY CROWNED
MURDERER
SHOT WITHOUT BOURGEOIS FORMALITIES
BUT IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR NEW DEMOCRATIC
PRINCIPLES.
But no mention was made of his family, and for nearly three quarters of a century the exact details of the massacre remained a Soviet secret. Despite the most zealous searches by pro-Tsarist investigators immediately after the shootings, the corpses of the Tsar and his family were not unearthed. Only a single finger, apparently belonging to a woman, together with scattered burned and molten personal effects, turned up in the recesses of an abandoned mine twelve miles outside of the city.
Now, unexpectedly, from a bog on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg nine more or less complete skeletons had come to light in a shallow grave, along with fourteen bullets, bits of rope and a shattered jar that once contained sulfuric acid. Could these be the remains of the Romanovs? I and my colleagues had been invited by the Russians to come halfway around the world to try to answer this question.
Up a flight of stairs, down a long corridor—there was the entrance to the makeshift morgue. I recall the layout clearly. At the end of a long hallway on the second floor there is a wrought-iron gate. Behind this lies a metal door with some very impressive locks and wax seals. The room is behind this door.
Then our Russian hosts opened the door and said to us cheerfully: “Go to it.”
We were let into a square room with two windows and a cluster of three desks at the center. Along all four walls at the edge of the room were long tables, about thirty inches wide, covered with white sheets.
On the sheets, lying head to toe around the room, were nine skeletons.
For me, these remains possessed a special fascination. I had first read of the Romanov murders forty-four years previously, as an eleven-year-old boy, in Seven League Boots, a 1935 book by the globetrotting journalist Richard Halliburton. Halliburton recounted how he had gone to Sverdlovsk, as Ekaterinburg was renamed by the Bolsheviks, and tracked down one of the Tsar’s assassins, Peter Zacharovitch Ermakov, a brutal man known as “Comrade Mauser.”
Coughing, sp
itting up blood, apparently dying of throat cancer, Ermakov told Halliburton a blood-freezing tale of wholesale murder:
“It was on July 12 that we had our final meeting and got our orders. We set the night of July 16th for the shooting—four days later,” Ermakov said. “I had to make all the plans myself for the destruction of the bodies. We wanted to do the thing as quietly as possible, to be sure the Romanoffs didn’t suspect in advance. And I wanted to make doubly sure that the bodies would be thoroughly destroyed. I didn’t want the Whites to find a single bone.” In July 1918 the White Russians were besieging Ekaterinburg and its fall was expected at any moment.
Ermakov said he spent the fourteenth reconnoitering the territory around Ekaterinburg for a suitable disposal site for the bodies. He settled on an abandoned mineshaft about twelve miles outside of town. His commander, Jacob Yurovsky, approved the site, Ermakov said.
“Next morning, we took an army truck and carried several big tins of gasoline out to one of the deepest mines. I also sent along two big buckets of sulphuric acid and a truckload of firewood. One of my soldiers stood guard over these supplies to frighten off any curious peasants who might be wandering around.”
A driver was ordered to park his truck in front of the back door of the Ipatiev house and leave the engine running at full throttle. The noise of the engine, it was hoped, would drown the crack of gunshots.
“Vaganof was always with me. He was a good Bolshevik who hated the Tsar as much as I did. We could count on him to shoot straight!
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 26