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

by Maples, William R.

  “The bodies were doused with sulfuric acid so they couldn’t be recognized and to prevent any stink from them rotting. We scattered it with dirt and lime, put boards on top, and rode over it several times—no trace of the hole remained. The secret was kept—the Whites did not find this burial site,” Yurovsky wrote in his report.

  Throughout the 1980s, Radzinsky published several articles in a Soviet periodical about his inquiries into the death of the Tsar. He received thousands of letters in response, many of them from people who remembered other details, or who knew the assassins personally.

  Then, in April 1989, the final breakthrough came: a Soviet mystery writer named Geli Ryabov described in the avant-garde weekly, Moscow News, how he and Dr. Alexander Avdonin, an Ekaterinburg geophysicist, had located the skeletons of the Tsar and his family in a shallow grave outside Sverdlovsk in 1979. Not daring to reveal his discovery, Ryabov had waited a decade to make it public.

  My colleagues and I first heard of the discovery in 1992, at a convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in New Orleans. We saw press reports about the discovery of the bodies, and in these it was said that the U. S. Secretary of State, James Baker, had been shown the remains on a visit to Ekaterinburg. The Russians had asked Baker if the United States might provide technical assistance in identifying them.

  The mystery of the Romanovs had fascinated me for more than four decades. This was a unique opportunity to shine the light of modern science into the dark recesses of one of the most baffling and enigmatic mass murders in this century. Few deaths had been so momentous and mysterious as that of the Tsar and his household. Seventy years of Soviet history had played out since that midnight in Ekaterinburg, yet the final fate of the Romanovs remained as great a riddle as ever. The corpse of Lenin had been preserved under glass in Red Square. Had the bones of the Tsar been preserved under peat and mud in a Northeast Asian bog? I immediately bent my thoughts toward Russia.

  While still in New Orleans, I asked the armed forces medical examiner if he had received any official request to help the Russians. I didn’t want to intrude on someone else’s investigation. He told me he had heard nothing of this case; therefore his department was not involved with the Romanovs at all. So the way was clear.

  I immediately organized an extremely impressive team of experts. Besides myself, there was Dr. Lowell Levine; Dr. Michael Baden; Cathryn Oakes, a hair and fiber microscopist with the New York State Police Department who has since become Mrs. Levine; my wife Margaret, a media specialist who would assist us in documenting and videotaping the investigation; and William Goza, a retired Gainesville attorney and historian, who is president of several foundations and possesses formidable diplomatic skills. On two later trips to Ekaterinburg we were fortunate to have the help of two outstanding Florida medical examiners, Dr. William Hamilton and Dr. Alexander Melamud. Dr. Melamud speaks Russian like a native—as well he should, for he was born and raised in the Ukraine.

  What finally opened the door for us was a fax from the president of the University of Florida, Dr. John Lombardi, to Dr. Alexander Avdonin, the Soviet geophysicist who had personally helped unearth the remains. Some weeks passed. Finally we received an official invitation jointly signed by Dr. Avdonin and Dr. Alexander Blokhin, vice-president for the public health district of Sverdlovsk. We packed our bags and flew to Russia.

  We were met at the airport at Ekaterinburg by Dr. Avdonin and Dr. Nikolai Nevolin, who heads the state forensic bureau for the district of Sverdlovsk. The remains were entrusted to his care and were kept at his institute. The very next morning we were permitted to see them.

  At last the final door swung open and we were let into the room containing the rediscovered bones. Immediately we faced a procedural obstacle. The Russians initially refused to let us photograph the remains. This was a bitter blow, and we objected strenuously. All our work would be in vain if we were not able to document our findings. On their side, the Russians were understandably worried that we would steal their thunder and make commercial capital out of some of the most extraordinary human skeletons ever found.

  We reached a temporary compromise. We would examine the remains for several hours, without cameras, that morning. Later we would renew our request to take photographs. I had the feeling that the Russians were sizing us up, trying to tell if we were true experts or just glib dilettantes.

  I was able to set them straight within the next few hours. By the end of the morning I managed, on the basis of the unlabeled skeletal remains before me, to decide the age and sex of all the skeletons and to assign them tentative identifications. The speed and accuracy of my initial analysis produced a gratifying response: suddenly, the Russians were looking at us with unfeigned respect. They had taken months to make their identifications, using numerous experts in various fields, working independently. We had arrived at roughly the same conclusions in a few hours. I told our hosts we could go no further unless we could document what we were doing. We went to lunch while discussions were held about our photographic access. When we got back from lunch, all barriers had been removed. Now we could begin our examination in earnest.

  The nine skeletons were identified only by number. Five were female, four male. Of the five females, three were young women, only recently grown to maturity. All the faces were badly fractured, every single one. This fact made reconstruction of facial features risky or impossible, but it also conformed to the accounts of the assassinations: that the faces of the victims were smashed in with rifle butts to render them unrecognizable.

  All of the female skeletons had dental work. None of the males did, though we knew from historical records that Dr. Botkin had a denture plate in his upper jaw, which was later extricated from the mud of the Four Brothers Mine by the White Army investigators. Sure enough, one of the males had a few teeth in his lower jaw, no teeth at all in his upper jaw, and probably wore false teeth in life.

  The enamel surfaces of the teeth showed the signs of acid etching. The outer tables of the cranial vaults were eroded away by acid also. A single broken jar that had once contained sulfuric acid was also found among the remains. This, too, agreed with accounts of the killings. A receipt for 400 pounds of sulfuric acid, requisitioned shortly before the murders, still exists in Russian archives. I have seen copies of this receipt with my own eyes.

  In all, fourteen bullets were recovered from the grave, along with the remains of one hand grenade detonator. All the bullets were 7.62, 7.63 or 7.65mm, about the equivalent of .32-caliber bullets. The Russians told us they believed nine of the bullets came from Nagants, four came possibly from a Browning and one from some other gun, possibly a Mauser. These bullets had almost certainly lodged in the bodies at the time of death, but twelve of them had gradually come loose as the remains decomposed. The Russians told us that loose teeth had also been found in the shallow grave, mixed in among the bones.

  Three bodies, Numbers 2, 3 and 6, had through-and-through gunshot wounds to the head. Another body, No. 9, had a stab wound in the breastbone that could have been made by a bayonet. It is important to remember that not every lethal wound, whether it be a bullet or a knife thrust, will leave a mark on the skeleton underneath, even when the ribs and vertebrae are recovered intact, which was certainly not the case here.

  • Body No. 1 was identified by its pelvis as a fully grown female. The skull was missing its facial bones. There was a gold bridge of poor workmanship on the mandible—not very expensive dental work. But the most revealing detail turned up in my examination of the ankle joints. These showed an extension of the joint surfaces, as if the woman had spent many hours crouching or kneeling, perhaps while she was scrubbing floors or doing other menial work. On the basis of these joints, together with the overall composition of the group, I believe this skeleton belonged to the Tsarina’s maid, Anna Demidova.

  • Body No. 2, alone among the remains, still had its torso intact, held together by adipocere, a grayish-white waxy substance that forms when fatty tissue
combine with water after death. It was first noticed and mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century essayist, whose description remains classically true today:

  Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an Hydropicall body ten years buried in a Churchyard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap.

  From the adipocere in this body the Russians had recovered one bullet in the pelvic area and one from a vertebra.

  The skeleton belonged to a mature man with a very flat, sloping forehead. I believe it is that of Dr. Sergei Botkin, the physician who watched over the young Tsarevich Alexei, who died with the family, and whose photograph in life closely matched the shape of this forehead. The skull had no upper teeth, and Botkin’s dental plate had been found by White Russian investigators over seventy years earlier at the mouth of the Four Brothers Mine. The skull had a gunshot wound from a bullet that entered the left frontal bone in the upper left corner of the forehead and exited through the right temporal area.

  In 1935, Ermakov told Halliburton that Dr. Botkin “had thrown up his hands and turned his face half away.” Though Ermakov erroneously reported that he believed Botkin was shot in the throat, the detail of the doctor partly turning his head away squared very well with the skull of Body No. 2.

  • Body No. 3’s skeleton belonged to a young adult female with a bulging forehead, in her early twenties when she died. It has been tentatively identified as belonging to the young Grand Duchess Olga. The shape of the head agrees extraordinarily closely with lifetime photographs of Olga. Half of her middle face, the facial bones between the tops of the eye orbits and the lower jaw, was missing. She clearly was completely grown, and the roots of her third molars, her “wisdom teeth,” were fully developed. Regrettably the bones of the legs were not intact; they had been cut into sections after being dug up but before we arrived on the scene. As a result, they could not be used for height estimates. Instead we used bones from the arms to estimate the female’s height. Though arm lengths are not as reliable as leg lengths, we arrived at a height estimate of 64.9 inches. Dr. Levine found extensive amalgam fillings in her teeth, a trait shared by the other two young females. It is very likely they were fond of sweets, in life.

  In Body No. 3, the bullet entered under the left jaw, broke the jaw, went through the palate behind the nose and exited through the frontal bone of the skull. Such a trajectory could come from a gun placed under the chin and fired up, or from firing at a body already lying on the floor. The exit wound was very neat, drilled in a near-perfect circle. The top of the skull showed signs of acid etching.

  I will pass over Body No. 4 for now, and return to it later, for reasons that will become apparent.

  • Body No. 5 belonged to a woman in her late teens or early twenties. Half of her middle face was missing, a pattern of damage already seen in Body No. 3. Dr. Levine and I agreed that she was the youngest of the five women whose skeletons lay before us. We concluded this from the fact that the root tips of her third molars were incomplete. 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 67.5 inches. The Russians told us that a bullet had been found in a lump of adipocere near this body. We believe this skeleton is that of Marie, who was nineteen years old at the time of the murders.

  • Body No. 6 belonged to a young woman who was nevertheless fully grown. Her dental and skeletal development fell neatly between that of Bodies 3 and 5. There was no evidence of recent growth in her limb bones. Her sacrum and pelvic rim were mature, which made her at least eighteen. On the basis of her limb bones, we put her height at 65.6 inches, right between the other two young females. More important, her collarbone was mature, making her at least twenty years old. The Grand Duchess Tatiana was twenty-one years and two months old at the time of the shootings, so this skeleton agreed very closely with the historical record.

  Body No. 6 had a gunshot entrance wound high on the back left side of the skull, and an associated exit wound just in front of the right temple. The minimum diameter of the entrance wound was 8.8mm, which would be consistent with the .32-caliber handguns used in the assassinations. A slug from a .32 is 7.6mm in diameter. This young woman had been shot in the back of the head.

  So: 3, 5 and 6 were Olga, Marie and Tatiana, in that order. Where was Anastasia? None of these three young female skeletons was young enough to be Anastasia, who was seventeen years and one month old the night of the shootings. Our Russian hosts believed that Body No. 6, the midmost of the three young females, was the long-lost Anastasia. Alas! We had to disagree, based on the growth patterns of the teeth, pelvises, sacra and long limbs of the three skeletons before us. The Russians had labored manfully over Body No. 6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of glue, stretched across wide gaps. They had been forced to estimate over and over again, while reassembling these fragments, almost none of which were touching each other in the reconstruction. It was a remarkable and ingenious exercise, but it was too fanciful for me to buy: Anastasia was not in this room.

  Another piece of evidence was the height of the skeletal remains. This young woman was roughly the same height as the other two young women whose remains were discovered in the mass grave. In photographs of Anastasia taken with her sisters a year before her death, she is shorter than Olga and noticeably shorter than Tatiana and Marie.

  There are no photographs of the royal family in the months immediately preceding the shootings. Could Anastasia have undergone a “growth spurt” in those months before the shootings? Could she have suddenly “caught up” with her sisters in stature? It is extremely unlikely.

  In September 1917, only ten months before the shootings, while she was under house arrest in Tobolsk, the Tsarina Alexandra wrote in her diary: “Anastasia is very fat, like Marie used to be—big, thick-waisted, then tiny feet—I hope she grows more.…” (My italics.) Though the quote is rather vague, it seems to indicate clearly that Anastasia was not yet as tall as her sisters, and might be expected to grow taller.

  I will pass over Body No. 7 for the moment, and return to it presently.

  • The skeleton of Body No. 8 was very fragmentary and was grievously damaged by acid. It belonged to an adult male in his forties or fifties. The maxilla (upper jaw) of Body No. 8 was not recovered. The mandible was recovered, but it had lost its remaining teeth at death. The area immediately above the eye orbits, where our eye brows are in life, was noticeably flat. The owner of this skull, when alive, had a flattened profile. From the hip and pelvic remains, this skeleton was clearly male. He does not appear to have been very big. One ulna was fractured and later healed. I believe this to have been the skeleton of the cook, Ivan Mikhailovich Kharitonov, mainly by a process of elimination that I will explain later.

  • The skeleton of Body No. 9 belonged to a big, heavy-boned man over six feet tall, who was beginning to show evidence of aging. The back of the skull was missing. The teeth were worn. There was a stab wound, probably by a bayonet, through the breastbone from front to back, but I am convinced this particular breastbone does not belong to this set of remains. For the rest, the robust size of the skeleton agrees well with descriptions we have of the footman, Alexei Igorevich Trupp, who was part of the Tsar’s entourage at Ekaterinburg.

  We have now discussed Bodies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9. Let us return to Bodies 4 and 7, in reverse order.

  • Body No. 7 was in some ways the most important of all that were found in the pit. It belonged to an older woman whose rib cage may have been damaged by bayonet thrusts—the bones were not well enough preserved to allow me to say this with certainty. But it was not these that commanded our attention. Rather, it was her amazing and exquisite dental work. My col
league, Dr. Levine, initially thought the two silvery crowns in the lower jaw were aluminum “temporaries.” They weren’t. To his astonishment, he found they were made of platinum. When we took flash pictures of this skull, the gleaming platinum crowns coruscated brilliantly in the sudden light. Dr. Levine also discovered beautiful porcelain crowns in this skull’s jaws, along with wonderfully wrought gold fillings. It was stunning dental work, extremely costly and cunningly contrived.

  It was this rich dental work, so precious-metaled it was far beyond the means of all but the richest Russians, that convinced the men who initially excavated the mass grave that here, at last, were the remains of the royal family. The Tsarina Alexandra mentions visiting the dentist several times in her diaries, and it is well that she did. The Bolshevik assassins despoiled the Tsarina of her jewels, but they could not take her teeth; and these beautiful tooth crowns spoke eloquently even in death. Taken together with the scattered bullets, the bits of rope and the smashed jar of sulfuric acid, these teeth were a powerful signal to the excavators that they were dealing with the grave of the Tsar and his family.

  • Body No. 4 I believe to be the skeleton of Tsar Nicholas II. It belonged to a middle-aged man of fairly short stature. The skeleton possessed a clearly male pelvis. The skull had a very broad, flat palate that is consistent with the mouth shape of the Tsar in photographs taken before he grew his beard. It had a jutting brow line, and so did the Tsar: the curving, protruding supraorbital bones are consistent with photographs of Nicholas taken during his life. The hipbones showed the characteristic wear and deformation produced by many hours on horseback, and we know the Tsar was an ardent horseman.