Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist

by Maples, William R.

  “Yurovsky had a Nagant repeater. Vaganof and I had Mausers. We each carried twenty extra rounds of ammunition…. There were to be just we three executioners.

  “That afternoon, we looked all over the house for a good place to do the shooting, and decided on the basement guard room. Being below ground, the shots wouldn’t sound so loud. It was the right size too—about 18 feet long and 12 wide.

  “If there were more than three of us, we’d be in each other’s way.”

  At about midnight Yurovsky knocked on the Tsar’s door and told him he and his family were to be evacuated because fighting had broken out on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg. The Tsar and his family took about an hour to prepare themselves.

  “The door opened and the Tsar came out carrying Alexei. They both had on military caps and jackets. The family followed behind. The Tsarina and the girls were all dressed in white and carrying pillows…. Yurovsky must have told them to carry pillows to sit on in the automobile. Anna, the Tsarina’s maid, came out with two pillows.

  “Behind her came Dr. Botkin, the cook, the valet,” Ermakov recalled. “Nobody seemed excited. I’m sure they didn’t suspect.”

  Orders were given to the driver to start his engine.

  Yurovsky then read the death sentence, practically shouting so as to be heard over the roar of the truck engine just outside the door.

  “You think the Whites are going to rescue you—but they aren’t,” Ermakov recalled Yurovsky saying. “You think you’re going away to England and be a Tsar again—well, you’re not. The Soviet of the Urals sentences you and your family to death for your crimes against the Russian people.”

  The Tsar seemed not to understand. “What? What?” he shouted back over the roar of the engine. “Aren’t we going to get out of here after all?”

  “Yurovsky’s reply was to fire his pistol straight into the Tsar’s face,” Ermakov recounted.

  “The bullet went right through his brain.

  “The Tsar spun to the floor and never moved.

  “I fired my Mauser at the Tsarina—only six feet away—couldn’t miss. Got her in the mouth. In two seconds she was dead.

  “I fired next at Dr. Botkin. He’d thrown up his hands and turned his face half away. The bullet went through his neck. He fell over backwards.

  “Yurovsky had shot the Tsarevich out of his chair, and he lay on the floor groaning.

  “The cook was crouching in the corner. I got him in the body and then in the head. The valet went down. I don’t know who shot him.

  “Vaganof made a clean sweep of the girls. They were in a heap on the floor, moaning and dying. He kept pouring bullets into Olga and Tatiana.

  “The two younger girls—Maria and Anastasia—had fallen beside Dr. Botkin.

  “I don’t think any of us hit Anna, the maid. She had slid down in her corner and hidden behind her two pillows. We found afterward that the pillows were crammed with jewels—maybe the jewel cases turned the bullets away. But one of the guards got her through the throat with his bayonet…. We had called in our Cheka [secret police] executioners from the corridor to help finish off the job and they were clubbing and bayoneting everybody.

  “The Tsarevich wasn’t dead … still groaning and twisting on the floor. Yurovsky shot him twice more in the head. That finished him.

  “Anastasia was still alive too. A guard pushed her over on her back. She shrieked—he beat her to death with his rifle butt.”

  Ermakov said the dead bodies were then gathered up and put on the truck outside. The room was a shambles: “There was blood everywhere and slippers and pillows and handbags and odds and ends swimming around in a red lake.” Ermakov told Halliburton that a total of thirty-eight shots were fired.

  It took two hours to cover the twelve miles to the mine. Dawn was breaking by the time the truck arrived. It was too light to burn the bodies by the time they arrived, so Ermakov posted guards around the remains.

  During the day of the seventeenth, the Tsar’s personal effects were gathered up to be shipped to Moscow.

  At 10 P.M. that evening Ermakov was back at the mine. “By the light of the lamps, we stripped the corpses of their clothes. Found a lot of diamonds sewn in the Tsarina’s bodice—and more necklaces, gold crosses and a lot of other such things on the girls. These were sent to Moscow along with everything else.” The clothes were burned separately. The bodies were taken to the entrance of a mine two kilometers off the highroad.

  “Here in the mouth of this mine we built a funeral pyre of cut logs big enough to hold the bodies, two layers deep. We poured five tins of gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulphuric acid and set the logs afire. The gasoline made everything burn rapidly. But I stood by to see that not one fingernail or fragment of bone remained unconsumed. Anything of that sort the Whites found I knew they would use as a holy relic. I kept pushing back into the flames whatever pieces were left, and building more fire and pouring on more gasoline. We had to keep the fire burning a long time to burn up the skulls. But I wasn’t satisfied till our pyre and everything upon it was reduced to powder.”

  Ermakov said he collected the ashes, put them in tins and pitched the powdery, imperial remains into the air.

  “The wind caught them like dust and carried them out over the woods and fields … and it rained the next day … so if anybody says he has seen a Romanoff or a piece of a dead one—tell him about the ashes—and the wind—and the rain.”

  So perished the last Tsar and his family, Ermakov declared: shot by three executioners, their bodies corroded by acid, then burned to powder and scattered over Siberia. I ask the reader’s pardon for having quoted this testimony at such length, but it contains several nuggets of truth. Unfortunately these nuggets are buried deep in the rubbish heap of a braggart’s lies.

  Immediately, one runs up against a contradiction in Ermakov’s account. Why bring along both sulfuric acid and gasoline to destroy the corpses? That is, if the bodies were to be cremated, why bother to disfigure their features with acid first? Clearly the acid would be useful only if the bodies were to be buried, not burned. In itself, this contradiction is not decisive. As I have said earlier in this book, people often do funny, irrational things with bodies. But this contradiction is enough to make us suspicious of Ermakov’s reliability as a witness.

  Eight days after the murders, White Russian armies under Admiral Alexander Kolchak reconquered Ekaterinburg. The first troops to reach the Ipatiev house found a chaos of broken furniture, empty rooms and debris. The semibasement room where the executions had taken place looked freshly scrubbed, but there were bullet holes and bayonet gouges in the walls.

  Rumors led the White Army investigators to an abandoned mine, twelve feet deep, about twelve miles outside the city at a place called Koptyaki, near four lonely pine trees named “The Four Brothers.”

  In and around the mine shaft a total of sixty-five half-combusted relics were found amid the ashes of two bonfires. Among them were what army investigators concluded were the Tsar’s belt buckle, the Tsarevich’s belt buckle, an emerald cross, topaz beads, a pearl earring, an Ulm Cross (a tsarist military decoration), an eyeglass lens, three small icons, the Empress’s spectacles case, buttons and hooks that seemed to belong to women’s corsets, fragments of military caps worn by Nicholas and Alexei, shoe buckles belonging to the Grand Duchesses, and Dr. Botkin’s upper denture plate.

  A single, severed human finger belonging to a middle-aged woman was also found. It was the sole human fragment unearthed. The remains of a small dog were also found.

  The White Army was driven back from Ekaterinburg, but eventually the results of the investigations were assembled and published. The investigators were not able to solve the riddle of the missing corpses.

  Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, the member of the Bolshevik Central Committee who ordered the executions from Moscow, almost certainly with Lenin’s approval. Sverdlovsk itself became a munitions manufacturing city, off limits to all
foreigners and to most Russian citizens. Soviet T-31 tanks were built there during World War II. American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1962 while attempting to photograph its military secrets.

  Subsequent political crosscurrents in Russia further obscure the story. Some of the participants in the slaughter were supporters of Josef Stalin’s rival, Leon Trotsky. After Trotsky’s purge and assassination, these protagonists in the Tsar’s murder officially ceased to exist. Everything they did, including their role in killing the Tsar, was blotted out from Soviet history books.

  By 1935 the Ipatiev house, where the shootings had taken place, was a museum celebrating the death of the “crowned hangman,” as Nicholas was called by the Bolsheviks. Halliburton toured it and saw excerpts from the Tsar’s diaries on display there. By 1959, however, the house had become a state archive, off limits to the public. In 1977 it was bulldozed, because local Communist authorities were alarmed that the house was gradually becoming a goal of pilgrims from all over Russia, who were coming here to pay homage to the memory of the Tsar. Our hosts told us that the local Communist Party boss who ordered its destruction was none other than Boris Yeltsin, who has since risen to the very pinnacle of power in the Russian government. Today he is President of Russia.

  In the decades that passed, a cloak of silence descended over the murders. Initially extolled as an act of revolutionary justice, the wholesale massacre of the Tsar and his family horrified the rest of the world and gradually became an embarrassment to the new Soviet regime. As the newspaper headline quoted earlier attests, the Bolsheviks never spoke of the fate of the Tsar’s family and entourage, only of the Tsar’s execution. People began to wonder if, by some miracle or mischance, some or even all of the Tsar’s family might have survived the bloodbath at the Ipatiev house. This official silence, complicated by subsequent contradictions, has given rise to a host of claimants to the crown of the Romanovs. There have been multiple Anastasias, nearly as many Alexeis, no shortage of Alexandras, Olgas, Tatianas and Maries. Some even insist the Tsar himself escaped his firing squad and left the country to live quietly in Poland. I myself receive letters from time to time, from a woman who lives in a trailer park in Hialeah, near Miami, who believes herself to be Anastasia. She illustrates the letters with weird ideograms: weeping eyes, shining crucifixes, mysterious question marks. The Romanovs cast a long shadow, even today.

  The most famous of these claimants was a woman who surfaced in 1920 in Berlin after a suicide attempt. The woman had total amnesia but bore a striking resemblance to Anastasia, the Tsar’s youngest daughter. She could not speak Russian but seemed to recall remarkable details of court protocol and Romanov family history, enough to convince some people that she was truly Anastasia. Known as Anna Anderson, this woman spent her whole life trying to prove her identity. She died in 1984 in Virginia, aged eighty-two, and her remains were cremated. Locks of her cut hair survive but, as we shall see, these may be of doubtful value in weighing her claim to royal blood.

  In the 1980s the Soviet Union embarked on a new period of “openness” and “restructuring” advocated by the new President and Communist Party chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev. Suddenly thousands of secret documents were declassified.

  A Soviet playwright, Edvard Radzinsky, had been quietly researching the death of the Tsar for nearly twenty-five years. When the archives of Moscow’s Museum of the October Revolution were finally opened to scholars in the late 1980s, Radzinsky found a treasure trove of old receipts, diaries and dossiers, including the fifty-volume diary of Tsar Nicholas II himself, and signed eyewitness reports written by his assassins, Yurovsky and Ermakov. There was even a 1964 tape recording by Grigori Nikulin, Yurovsky’s lieutenant, who participated in the killings.

  The most important of these documents was the so-called “Yurovsky Note,” an after-action report written by the chief assassin, in which he refers to himself as “the commandant.” Gradually a fairly complete picture of the murders emerged. It was a brutal tale of blood, deceit, boasting, drunkenness and ghoulish bungling. A synopsis is contained in Radzinsky’s 1992 book, The Last Tsar.

  According to the Yurovsky Note, twelve men were in the firing squad: six unidentified Latvian guards, Yurovsky, Ermakov, Yurovsky’s right-hand man Grigori Nikulin and a deserter from the Tsar’s Life Guards named Alexei Kabanov, as well as two secret policemen named Pavel Medvedev and Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin.

  The royal family had gone to bed at 10:30 P.M. Shortly before midnight they were awakened and told to go downstairs. Ostensibly they were being transferred to a jail nearer the center of the city, which was besieged by White Russian armies.

  Once assembled in the semibasement room at the rear of the house, the Tsar and his entourage were arranged in two rows. They were persuaded to group themselves quietly by means of a simple ruse: Yurovsky told them they were going to have their pictures taken in order to disprove rumors that they were dead. Obediently, Nicholas and the others took their places. To lend credence to this cruel hoax, two chairs were brought in: one for the invalid heir Alexei, the other for the Tsarina.

  Outside the Fiat truck engine roared to life, creating an unholy din. Yurovsky read out a decree from the Ural Soviet condemning the Tsar and his family to death. The noise from the truck was so loud that Nicholas could not hear what Yurovsky was saying. “What? What?” the Tsar asked. Yurovsky read the decree again, but before he was finished the shooting began. The Tsar’s last words may have been: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Yurovsky, Ermakov and Medvedev would later dispute who shot the Tsar first. Years later all three men sent their pistols to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, each claiming his was the weapon that had slain the Tsar.

  A double door leading to an adjacent room crashed open and the six Latvian guards poured their gunfire into the room. The assassins stood so close together that they gave each other powder burns as they jostled and fired into the screaming royal family. But a macabre situation developed. Though Nicholas had died instantly, certain others of the victims proved harder to kill. Bullets were actually ricocheting off their bodies, spanging into the walls of the room.

  “Alexei, three of his sisters, the lady-in-waiting and Botkin were still alive. They had to be finished off,” Yurovsky wrote in his after-action report. “This amazed the commandant since we had aimed straight for the heart. It was also surprising that the bullets from the revolvers bounced off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping around the room like hail.”

  Yurovsky was puzzled by the “strange vitality” of Alexei and gave him the coup de grâce by firing two revolver shots into his head at close range. But the women proved even harder to kill. After exhausting their magazines, the Latvian guards rushed forward and used their bayonets to finish the grisly job. But even these rough-and-ready weapons seemed to turn aside against the chests and torsos of the women.

  Only later was it discovered that the corsets the women were wearing were stuffed with diamonds and precious stones. These acted as bulletproof vests and prolonged their owners’ agony. Yurovsky wrote that, when the corpses were stripped later, eighteen pounds of diamonds were recovered from the corsets.

  The bodies were then loaded onto the truck and driven to the Four Brothers Mine, twelve miles away, near the village of Koptyaki. There they were stripped naked and their clothing was rummaged through and burned. Nikulin was later given the errand of taking the jewels to Moscow. The corpses were dumped into the mine shaft, which was only about eight feet deep, and hand grenades were flung in and exploded after them to seal the hole.

  (This would explain the sixty-five charred, scattered relics found by the White Russian investigators when they later searched the area near the Four Brothers Mine. The single human finger had apparently been blown off a hand of one of the women by the hand grenade explosions and was overlooked by the assassins later.)

  But the story did not end here. To his disgust and chagrin, Yurovsky found that the whereabouts of the “
secret” burial site were the talk of the town. The flamboyant Ermakov, who had apparently been drunk throughout the assassinations, had enlisted a band of equally drunken assistants to help with the disposal of the bodies, and these had later boasted of their deeds.

  Now, with the White Russian armies closing in, Yurovsky and his followers had to bury the Tsar and his family all over again. The next night, with torches, ropes, kerosene and sulfuric acid, Yurovsky returned to the death pit at the Four Brothers Mine, determined to dispose of the telltale corpses for good. A Bolshevik sailor named Vaganov, the “Vaganof” of Ermakov’s account, was sent into the muddy hole to knot ropes around the bodies, which were then hauled up.

  The muddy, mutilated bodies were loaded aboard carts, but these proved too rickety to be serviceable. Yurovsky then sent back to town for a truck. Daylight came and went. At nightfall on the nineteenth, nearly three days after the murders, Yurovsky and his band set out with the hideous, bloated, flyblown remains of “The Autocrat of All the Russias,” as Nicholas II was known in life, his wife, his children and his servants.

  It had been a rainy summer and the truck kept getting stuck in the mud. Yurovsky and his helpers put planks under the wheels over and over again, but by 4:30 A.M. the truck slipped into a bog so deep it could not be moved.

  There was no more time. The bodies would have to be disposed of on the spot. Yurovsky burned two of them: Alexei and a female who he at first thought was the Tsarina Alexandra but later decided must have been her maid, Anna Demidova. This confusion on Yurovsky’s part as to the identity of the female would lend hope to those who believed Anastasia had somehow escaped the slaughter. At any rate, Yurovsky seems to have badly underestimated the amount of time needed to combust fully a human corpse—it is an error many murderers make. He may also have run out of fuel.

  Exhausted, disgusted, all out of time, with dawn breaking, the commandant ordered a pit dug six feet deep and eight feet square. In it, in the midst of a random stretch of bog, near a railroad crossing, the Tsar and the rest of his entourage were flung and hastily buried. The hole was so shallow that Yurovsky worried that the corpse stench would rise through the earth. He decided to kill the smell with sulfuric acid.