The Romanovs: The Final Chapter by Robert K. Massie

Abramov and asked the Russian scientist, “What happens if you have landmarks that are missing?” Abramov’s answer was “We estimate.” This was unacceptable to Maples. “The Russians had labored manfullyover Body No. 6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of glue stretched over wide gaps,” he said. “They were forced to estimate over and over again while assembling these fragments, almost none of which was touching another. It was a remarkable and ingenious exercise, but it was too fanciful for me to buy. Seeing what they had done reinforced my conviction that Anastasia was not in that room.”
    Nor did Dr. Maples accept Dr. Abramov’s technique of computerized superimposition. “I do video superimposition,” he said, “but in my video superimposition setup we put the photograph under one video camera, we put the skull under another video camera, and we superimpose the images on a single monitor. I can change the position of the skull, I can change the size of the skull, I can move a skull, I can change its overall size in relation to the photograph, I can change its position relative to the face, but I can’t change proportion. It’s not within the system for me to be able to manipulate data. I do this using only cameras. If you use cameras and add a computer into the system, the computer can manipulate data and make things fit. And, in fact, Abramov’s whole system is designed to start with the skull that he digitalizes in three dimensions by only a few points. Then he manipulates that skull by the computer until it fits the photograph.”
    Actually, before coming to Ekaterinburg, Maples had planned to return bringing his own superimposition photographs and equipment. But “because of the damage to the faces, I decided during my first visit that there wasn’t any use doing superimposition even to establish that it was the Imperial family, let alone discriminating between the three sisters,” he continued. “And then I learned that Abramov was basing his identification of which of the four sisters was missing upon the reconstructed faces. When that disagreed totally with the age findings that I had made with the skeletons and Lowell had made with the teeth, I simply could not accept the presence of Anastasia.”
    On the larger issue, Maples agreed absolutely with Abramov that these are the Romanovs. The nine skeletons fit the requirements of age, sex, height, and weight of nine of the prisoners in the Ipatiev House. “If you were to go out at random and try to assemble anothergroup of people to fit exactly these historical and physical descriptions, you would have to do remarkable research and then go out and find and kill nine identical people,” said Maples. He regards this as so unlikely as to be impossible.
    What happened to the two missing bodies? Maples’ long experience with violent death tells him that all eleven prisoners were killed. Given the ferocity of the attack on the family, he cannot believe that anyone was allowed to escape alive from the Ipatiev cellar. For further explanation, he looks to the Yurovsky account, which he accepts as truthful. Yurovsky described the burning of two bodies. One was the tsarevich, the other a female body which Yurovsky at first thought belonged to Alexandra, then decided must be that of Demidova. This female body, Maples believes, belonged to Anastasia. But how could Yurovsky have mistaken the body of a seventeen-year-old girl for that of a mature woman, whether forty-six like the empress, or forty like the chambermaid?
    The answer, Maples believes, lies in the changes wrought in the appearance of human bodies by decomposition. The Imperial family was killed in mid-July, when the daily temperature averaged seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Their faces had been crushed by repeated blows from rifle butts. Their hair, soaked with blood, would have dried into a black, caked, impenetrable mass. As the corpses, stripped of clothing, lay on