Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (37 page)

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, spitting 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!

“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.