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

by Maples, William R.

  The only jarring note was struck by the extraordinary, rotten condition of this skeleton’s teeth, and the complete absence of dental work. There was not a single filling in any of the remaining teeth. All these were worn to gray nubbins. The lower jaw showed clear inroads of periodontal disease. The owner of these teeth was long overdue for dentures. Why didn’t he get them? As Tsar, he could surely afford a good dentist!

  I believe Nicholas must have had a horror of dentists and, because he was Tsar, no one could force him to visit one. Rank has its privileges, and among them is the liberty to let your teeth go to rack and ruin if you desire. Was the Tsar a coward before the dentist’s drill? Did he have a horror of physical pain? His jaws seemed to say so. Is it speculating too far, to glimpse in these rotten, neglected teeth a vivid, concrete symbol of the Russian royal family in those final years, falling to pieces, but nevertheless unwilling to take the necessary, painful steps needed to repair the damage and save themselves? Perhaps, perhaps not.

  I picked up the skull and held it in my hands, staring at it intently. It was a gray thing with a crushed face. A dark void yawned in the middle of its features, below the eye sockets and above the jaw. Blows of terrific force had shattered its features. I was haunted by the line in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a nightmarish view of the future based partly on the already famous brutality of the Soviet state: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever….” The Tsar’s skull was grievously mutilated, the remains perfectly consistent with his fate. He was among the first, and certainly the foremost, victims of Bolshevik savagery.

  Yet he had endured. Even his bad teeth had outlasted the outlaw state that had slain him, then tried to hide him away forever in the nameless darkness of an unmarked pit. Now Nicholas II, onetime Tsar of All the Russias, had risen back up into the light of day, accompanied by most of his family and a handful of his servants.

  As I mused on these ironies, an eerie thing happened. We were passing the skull around among ourselves, when we heard something dully rattling inside the braincase. Training a flashlight on the base of the skull, peering in through the aperture where the spinal cord would have been anchored, we descried a small, dried, shrunken object about the size of a small pear, rolling to and fro. It was the desiccated brain of Tsar Nicholas II.

  For I am quite convinced this was the Tsar’s skull. None of the other three male skeletons came so close to the profile of Nicholas II in life as did this set of remains. No. 2, Dr. Botkin, had a very distinct, flat, sloping forehead and wore dentures, as we know Botkin did in life. No. 9 was far too tall and too old to be the Tsar. It was almost certainly Trupp, the sixty-one-year-old footman. No. 8, the most fragmentary of the male skeletons, had been heavily doused with acid and it was initially thought that these remains had been singled out for special disfigurement, perhaps as a sign of rank. But the features of the skull in no way agree with the countenance of the Tsar in life, especially in the unpronounced brow line. These are the remains of Kharitonov, the cook. They were more damaged by acid, not because of any especial spite, but because they lay deepest in the pit, at the very bottom.

  Indeed, the more we studied the demography of the group, the more we were struck by the congruence of the skeletons with the stories of the execution of the Tsar and his family. All the skeletons propped each other up. Each contributed to the authenticity of the other. In the end, the ensemble formed a powerful web of circumstantial evidence, reinforced from within by skeletal remains of extraordinary singularity. Consider these points:

  There is one skeleton to fit everyone known to be in the party, with the exception of the Tsarevich Alexei and Anastasia, who are missing. If you were to go out at random and try to assemble such a group, to fit such historical descriptions, you would have to be remarkably lucky or do incredible physical examinations to make sure everything fits. At the time of the shootings, the Tsar was fifty, the Tsarina Alexandra forty-six. Olga was twenty-two years and nine months old; Tatiana had just turned twenty-one; Marie’s nineteenth birthday had just come five weeks before; and Anastasia was seventeen years and one month old. Alexei was just two weeks short of his fourteenth birthday. The maid Demidova was forty. The footman, Trupp, was sixty-one and the cook, Kharitonov, was forty-eight.

  When we compare these ages, and the other things we know of the royal family and their entourage, with the evidence of the skeletons, everything aligns nicely. Demidova’s skeleton is of the right age and sex. Botkin’s skeleton has the right forehead, the right age, the right sex, the right dental information. The three young women’s skeletons, as well as that of the oldest woman, have features in common that are often seen in families, suggesting they were related. The three young women all have the same type of dental work in their mouths, suggesting they all were treated by the same dentist. The remaining older woman’s skeleton shares these same features, so she is related to them. The oldest woman has the exceptional rich dental work which is confirmed from numerous mentions in Alexandra’s diaries. The Tsar’s skeleton is the right age, the right height, with the right facial features. The skeleton of the footman, Trupp, shows the worn teeth and age and sex and height we would expect. That of the cook, Kharitonov, also displays the right age and sex.

  Everything about the burial suggests urgent haste and the need for secrecy, which agrees very well with the historical circumstances. Remember, White Russian armies were closing in on Ekaterinburg in those days. The faces are bludgeoned to render them unrecognizable, just in case they are found. Sulfuric acid is flung over them, to complete the disfigurement. The corpses are buried in an unmarked grave, together with the ropes used to haul them and the jar of acid used to disfigure them. We know from Ermakov that .32-caliber weapons were used, and sure enough, .32-caliber bullets are later recovered from the grave. The receipt for the sulfuric acid is a matter of record. Everything fits.

  Or almost everything. None of the nine skeletons could be attributed to the fourteen-year-old Tsarevich Alexei, and none of them, despite the Russians’ initial hopes, could be identified with a girl seventeen years and one month old: Anastasia.

  In his confidential after-action report, Yurovsky described burning two bodies beside the pit. One was that of the Tsarevich. The other belonged to a female, who he at first thought was the Tsarina Alexandra, but later decided must have been the maid, Demidova.

  This confusion has given one last straw to grasp at to the resurrectionists who believe Anastasia escaped the hecatomb that engulfed her family. How, these stubborn optimists ask, would it be possible for Yurovsky to confuse the corpse of a seventeen-year-old girl with that of two other women, one of them forty years old, the other fifty? Was “Anna Anderson,” who died an old woman in 1984, telling the truth? Was she the last of the Romanovs?

  I very much doubt it. I believe I can explain why Yurovsky mixed up the female corpses. My long experience with decayed human remains has given me a weary familiarity with the quirks of dissolution.

  Remember, the Tsar and his party were killed in summertime, in July 1918, in warm weather. Blood would have soaked the disheveled hair of the victims, which would have then dried into a dark hard mass. The bodies had decomposed for three days in daytime temperatures averaging roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Bloating would be pronounced, and bloating makes it very difficult to guess the original weight or girth of a set of remains.

  Furthermore you must remember that all of the bodies, except perhaps for that of Alexei, the son, were reportedly stripped of all clothing. Clothing would have been an easy means of telling the bodies apart, and now that indicator was gone. All in all, the nude and bloated torsos of the females would have taken on a remarkable, balloonish anonymity.

  Next, flies must be considered. Flies lay their eggs during the first daylight hours in which they can reach a dead body. Those eggs begin to hatch a couple of days later in a sudden burst of activity. There were plenty of flies in that area—I observed them myself, du
ring my visit. These bodies had many wounds. Their faces had been smashed to bloody pulp. They were left in the open near the shaft of the Four Brothers Mine all day long after the executions, then thrown into a mine shaft and hand grenades were flung down on them, further mangling the remains. Flies would have had ample opportunity to lay eggs on the eyes, nostrils and other apertures, along with the open wounds. These eggs and the resulting maggots, deposited in a thick, foamy froth over the mutilated faces, would have further masked the bodies’ identities.

  Then, when word got out that the bodies were at the Four Brothers Mine, Yurovsky and his henchmen had to exhume the bodies and rebury them somewhere else. In all, three days passed between the time of the shootings and the final burial in the unmarked pit.

  The bloating, the hard, blood-soaked hair of the women, the absence of clothing and the encrustation of fly eggs and maggots on their faces, the enveloping darkness—all these factors would have rendered the remains very hard to identify. It would be quite possible to mistake one female for another.

  At any rate this is what I believe happened. Yurovsky burned two bodies, as he reported. One belonged to the young Tsarevich Alexei; the other was Anastasia. This explains why the skeletons of the two youngest children were not among those on the tables at the forensic bureau.

  Is it even remotely possible that Anastasia and Alexei survived? Is it conceivable that some kindhearted Bolshevik spirited them away? Is it thinkable that, despite their wounds, wounds that would have been doubly injurious to a hemophiliac like Alexei, the missing royal children lived, recovered their health and escaped to the West? Of course it is. I merely say it is highly unlikely. My experience with murder, ancient and modern, makes it hard for me to believe in these far-fetched mercies.

  In 1964, Grigori Nikulin, Yurovsky’s assistant during the killings, was persuaded to make a tape of his reminiscences of the event. By this time most of the original assassins were dead. Yurovsky himself died a painful death from an ulcer in 1938. The flamboyant Ermakov, who gave his “deathbed” interview to Halliburton in 1935, outlived the young journalist by years, dying only in 1952 after recounting his exploits over and over again to young Soviet Pioneers gathered around campfires.

  Nikulin was a sober, cold-blooded young killer at the time of the assassinations. Yurovsky had recruited him personally and was extremely fond of him, even calling him his “son.” Nikulin moreover was a teetotaler. His account of the evening therefore carried far more weight than the lurid account of the drunken, lying Ermakov.

  Persuaded with great difficulty to come to the radio studio in 1964, Nikulin nonetheless stubbornly refused to discuss details of the murders.

  “There’s no need to savor it. Let it remain with us. Let it depart with us,” he said tersely.

  Asked about the tale of the “Anastasia” who had somehow dodged the bullets and escaped to the West, Nikulin replied briefly, in the flat, simple diction of one who knew.

  “They all perished,” he said.

  In 1993 there was a dramatic new development in the story of the royal bones. DNA tests carried out in Great Britain have matched a blood sample from the British royal family with the DNA recovered from the Russian skeletons, with a 98.5 percent degree of certainty. Dr. Mary-Claire King at the University of California, Berkeley, has worked on samples we brought back and has confirmed what the British had reported.

  DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the substance that contains the genetic code that makes each human being unique. There are two types of DNA present in each living cell, nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA. The first type, called nuclear or genomic DNA, is quickly lost during heating or decomposition in human remains. It will linger longer in a dried sample of blood, or semen on clothing; but by the time human remains have begun to decompose, it is virtually impossible to isolate nuclear DNA anymore. Bacteria swarm in the remains, flies move in and pollute the body with their DNA, and what is left is a messy hodgepodge that is useless for nuclear DNA sampling.

  Fortunately, the second type of DNA, mitochondrial DNA, lies not in the nucleus but outside, in the cell itself. This substance is present in the female ovum and in the tail of the male sperm, but when the sperm fertilizes the egg at the moment of conception, the tail of the sperm breaks off. Thus the mitochondrial DNA of the male is lost, and only that of the female is passed on to each of the offspring. And it is passed on without variation, from one generation to the next. Every single child has the mitochondrial DNA of its mother, who has the mitochondrial DNA of her mother, and so on. Changes in mitochondrial DNA are extremely rare, and happen on the order of once every three to four thousand years. That is the wonderful thing about mitochondrial DNA. It stays the same in a family for generation after generation and is passed on through the female line. It can endure in our bones for hundreds of years, if they are not cremated.

  In the case of the Romanovs, we can easily go back to Queen Victoria, who has been described as the grandmother of Europe’s royal families. Queen Victoria, like any mother, passed her mitochondrial DNA on to her offspring. And one of her daughters passed that same mitochondrial DNA on to her offspring, one of whom was Alexandra, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II. And Alexandra passed her mitochondrial DNA on to all her children. Similarly Alexandra’s sister, Princess Victoria of Hesse, passed it on to her children, one of whom was the mother of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and his sisters. Therefore the mitochondrial DNA found in the blood of Prince Philip would be identical to that of Queen Victoria and the Tsarina Alexandra. It only remained to carry out the necessary tests.

  These were performed in July 1993 near London. Prince Philip submitted a sample of his blood and its DNA was extracted. At the same time, Pavel Ivanov, head of the DNA unit at the Russian Academy of Sciences, brought a sample of the Romanov bones to Great Britain. There, using a technique called PCR or polymerase chain reaction, a small sample of DNA was extracted from the bones and grown in a culture.

  There are only four nucleotides that make up all mitochondrial DNA: cytosine, adenine, thymine and guanine, known as CATG for short. In mitochondrial DNA there are 16,569 base pairs of nucleotides, arranged in a ring. A computer printout of a DNA sequence looks like a diabolically complex code, based on just four letters in neat columns, repeated again and again in slightly varying order for page after page. Luckily we do not have to scrutinize all 16,569 pairs. We can focus on certain “hyper-variable regions,” made up of a total of just 608 base pairs. Computers are of great help in matching up the hyper-variable regions. When the results for the hyper-variable regions in two DNA samples match up at these crucial checkpoints, you can be virtually certain they are the same.

  This is what happened when Prince Philip’s blood DNA was matched up with the Romanovs’ bone DNA. Dr. Peter Gill of the Forensic Science Service of the Home Office said the probability that both samples contained the same DNA was “almost 99 percent.” Taken in conjunction with the compelling physical skeletal evidence, the results are clear and unequivocal. Short of the Last Judgment, when the dead shall rise up and be cloaked anew with flesh, and all our doubts are scheduled to be resolved in the twinkling of an eye, we may say that the mystery of the Romanovs is solved as nearly as it is likely to be. Nevertheless we recommended in our report that the site around the pit be carefully excavated and searched for the remains of the two bodies Yurovsky said he burned. I believe such a dig might well turn up the calcined remains of Anastasia and Alexei.

  “Anna Anderson” went to her grave in 1984, claiming she was Anastasia. Her body was cremated and this removed the last possibility of establishing the truth or falsity of her royal pretensions. Cremation destroys utterly all organic components of bone. No known technique can recover any DNA from cremated remains. There are supposed to be hair samples taken from Anna Anderson but these are cut hair, not rooted hair. The shafts of human hair are largely composed of dead material, devoid of significant amounts of DNA. Only hair plucked by the roots from the scalp can be tested
for DNA with any real hope of success. There are some tissue samples from Anna Anderson’s body, in a hospital where she underwent surgery in life. To date, legal difficulties have prevented testing these samples for their DNA.

  A commission in Russia will hear our team’s conclusions, and I believe the British DNA work to be the final word in resolving this old mystery. It is my understanding that the Romanov remains will be interred in St. Petersburg, which was once, briefly, known as Leningrad.

  But there is one last footnote to this long, remarkable history. There is a very good possibility that the bones of the Tsar will be buried without their proper breastbone or arms! My examination of the remains convinced me that the arms and the bayonet-stabbed breastbone of Body No. 9, which has been identified as belonging to Trupp, the footman, are really those of Body No. 4, the Tsar. Body 4 was flung on top of Body 9 in the burial pit, and over the years the bones commingled closely with one another. The Russians labored valiantly to separate them, but I believe the arms and breastbone have been mixed up. I mentioned this to the Russians, and they appeared to accept my conclusion. Some of the other skeletons showed signs of mismatching and commingling as well. Unfortunately no one seems to have the authority to take the skeletons apart again and transpose the arms and breastbones to their proper owners.

  It therefore seems likely that, when the last Tsar is finally entombed in St. Petersburg, he will be served in death, as he was in life, by the arms of his faithful footman.

  16

  “These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies …”

  “Empty vessel, garment cast,

  We that wore you long shall last.

  —Another night, another day.”

  So my bones within me say.

  Therefore they shall do my will

  Today while I am master still,

  And flesh and soul, now both are strong,