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Skeleton keys

From the secrets of the czar's death to the origin of a finger in chili, a small lab in Gainesville helps provide the answers.

By DAVID BALLINGRUD
Published June 12, 2005

Near midnight on July 17, 1918, 11 people - Czar Nicholas II of imperial Russia, his wife Empress Alexandra, their five children, their doctor and three attendants - were herded into a dismal cellar in a home in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg.

What happened in the next few minutes changed history and produced an enduring mystery. Only in recent years - thanks in large part to medical detectives from the University of Florida - have most of the facts and circumstances of that massacre come to light.

With the family huddled in a corner, Commander Jacob Yurovsky made a brief announcement: "Your relatives have tried to save you," he said. "They have continued their attacks on Soviet Russia. They have failed, and now we are obliged to shoot you all."

A wail rose from the family as a dozen armed men filed into the room and, with Yurovsky, began firing into the group. The room was small, 16 by 18 feet, making the work noisy, messy and difficult.

The czar fell first, shot point-blank in the head by Yurovsky. The son clung to his father's body, but was kicked away and shot several times. The women proved hardest to kill; they had concealed jewels in their corsets, and the stones deflected bullets.

When the firing stopped, the killers stepped through the carnage and bayoneted anyone still moving or making a sound. According to Yurovsky's own account, 30 bloody minutes elapsed from the first shot until the 11 victims were finally still.

In addition to Czar Nicholas, 50, and Alexandra, 46, the dead were their four daughters, Anastasia, 17, Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, and Marie, 19; their son Alexei, 13; Alouzy Tropp, 61, the czar's valet; Eugene Botkin, 54, the royal physician; Ivan Kharitonov, 48, a cook; and Anna Demidova, 40, lady-in-waiting.

The bodies were stripped of the clothing that might identify them, and their faces were smashed with rifle butts to make recognition impossible. They were burned and tossed into a remote mine shaft north of the city. A few hand grenades were tossed in for good measure. In the next few days, too many people learned of this spot, however, and so the bodies were removed, doused with acid and buried in a shallow pit nearby.

While most historians agree the order for the murders came from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party and the first premier of the Soviet Union, the rationale was summed up by Leon Trotsky, the Red Commissar for War.

"The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing," he wrote. "The execution of the czar's family was needed ... to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy."

The czar and the 300-year rule of the Romanov family were gone forever. Or so it seemed.

In Dr. Anthony Falsetti's Gainesville lab, four human skeletons lie supine on four tables.

The bones are intact for the most part, and those that are not are carefully placed just as they once were in the body. A lot of care has been taken, and the skeletons appear orderly and almost peaceful.

Until one takes a closer look.

The first, that of a woman, was removed from the ashes of an apartment fire, and the legs are burned away below the knee. At first it was assumed the woman died in the fire, but Falsetti points out where a plunging knife blade left small cuts in rib bone. The fire probably was set to hide a homicide.

Another skeleton is that of a homeless man. Falsetti indicates where broken ribs and a broken jaw have knitted together without treatment, and where a severe arm fracture healed without a doctor's care, leaving the limb forever twisted outward.

These remains and others came to Falsetti without names, and sometimes without a known cause of death. It's his job to determine both.

Falsetti is a professor of anthropology and director of the University of Florida's C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory. Falsetti and the lab are well-known for their forensic work. A member of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, Falsetti was called in to assist with identifying remains at the World Trade Center after Sept. 11, due to his similar work following the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800.

He and the lab's small staff of grad students receive between 140 to 200 partially decomposed bodies or skeletal remains each year to identify, to "establish the mechanism of injury," or both. Most come from the state's Medical Examiners or law enforcement agencies.

Some mysteries are solved easily. Last month the lab got a call from the Jacksonville Police Department. A partial skeleton and a skull had been found behind a Jacksonville strip mall.

Blacks, Caucasians and Asians have different facial bone measurements, and so some quick generalizations were made. The body appeared to be that of a young, small, black woman in her 20s. No identification was found with the body, but there was a clue: a small metal plate in one of the skeletal arms. A check of missing-person reports turned up four possible matches - young, black women gone missing about the time the mystery woman died. A check of the four medical records produced a probable ID: a woman who had a surgically repaired arm and a metal implant.

Confirmation came when Falsetti's team walked a large area where the skeleton was found. About 100 yards from where the victim was found, they turned up shorts, a wallet and a driver's license.

"If only all the cases were so easy," Falsetti said.

They're not, of course, and the Pound Lab is stacked high with cardboard boxes containing unidentified remains. "We will keep them forever," said Falsetti. "You never know" when information might be developed.

From time to time, the work takes an unexpected turn. Journalists recently turned to Falsetti for help understanding how police might identify a human finger a diner said she found in a bowl of chili at a Wendy's restaurant in California. (The diner was jailed on grand larceny charges.)

In January, the lab will move to a new facility, twice as large as the 2,400-square-foot green metal building it now occupies. Its new digs will be conveniently near the university's genetic analysis facilities. But even without DNA, bones - young or old - can reveal much.

"They can tell us race, height, sex and age," Falsetti said. "They can tell us about disease, they can record trauma. All these things help us build the individual's story."

Falsetti, who studied political science as an undergrad, is today one of only 74 certified forensic anthropologists in the world. Demand for his expertise has taken him all over the world.

In 1997, he flew to Nicaragua and helped locate a B-6 Marauder that had been lost in the mountains decades earlier while taking part in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. ("I'll never get on a mule again," he said.)

His predecessor at the C.A. Pound lab had an even more extensive resume. The late William Maples worked on more than 1,000 cases at the lab and authored the well-received Dead Men Do Tell Tales. Maples participated in the 1991 exhumation and examination of President Zachary Taylor, helped identify the remains of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in Peru in 1984 and analyzed the remains of Joseph Merrick - "The Elephant Man" - in 1990.

Falsetti and Maples also helped solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the last century.

The Romanov family and their four attendants lay in their shallow forest grave for 73 years.

In 1989, the Moscow News published an interview with a filmmaker who said he knew where the bodies were buried. He said he and another man - working from photographs and the written report of Jacob Yurovsky, the leader of the execution team - had located the grave 10 years earlier. They had retrieved three skulls, the filmmaker said, but became apprehensive about what they had done and put them back in the ground.

There they stayed until July 1991, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in the new Russian spirit of glasnost, authorized their exhumation. Under the supervision of Maples, almost 1,000 bone fragments were assembled into five female and four male skeletons. Two were missing, which squares with Yurovsky's statement that two of the bodies - Alexei and a young female - were hurriedly burned on the way to the mine shaft burial site.

Subsequent DNA testing by an English team has confirmed that the nine bodies found are those of the czar, most of his family and attendants. The missing two, they concluded, are the son, Alexei, and Anastasia.

Many Russians - still suspicious of their government - simply don't accept that the czar and any part of his family have been found at all. For most, though, the great mystery has been laid to rest.

Over the years, the family has been the source of rumored sightings and numerous claims of family ties - not to mention many books and three movies. From the very first day, Anastasia was rumored to have survived the execution, and within weeks a number of women came forward claiming to be her. Alexei, too, has had claimants to his name.

One woman in particular, Anna Anderson, made an apparently compelling case. Anderson claimed until her death in 1984 to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and bits and pieces of her past and her memory were unnervingly similar that of the czar's daughter. However, DNA testing finally destroyed her claim in 1994.

On July 17, 1998, the 80th anniversary of the death of the royal family, there was a funeral in the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Here's how the New York Times described the end of a long journey from a forgotten hole in the forest floor to a famous cathedral: "The Russians buried Czar Nicholas II on Friday in true imperial fashion, beneath a ceiling of cherubim peeking from clouds, in a cathedral of mountainous oak and linden carvings sheathed in gold, and among the white marble tombs of the czars who bestrode his empire for three centuries."

The Russian "fascination with the Czar and his family owes less to devotion than to curiosity and a nostalgic longing for the luxury ot imperial times," wrote Peter Kurth, author of Tsar - The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra (Little, Brown; 1995). Kurth quotes contemporary Russian writer Tatiana Tolstoya, who argues the Romanovs are popular because they were "glamorous," because they "had such nice clothes," and because the Russians "enjoy a good mystery as much as anyone else."

But the story still is not quite over.

Peter Sarandinaki is the master of the Horizon Crusader, an American-flag container vessel operating between Houston, San Juan, New Orleans and Jacksonville. He is also the driving force behind continuing efforts to find the czar's two missing children.

Last August, Sarandinaki spent three weeks in the area of the Four Brothers Mine where the czar and his family were first buried. He and a small team searched with ground-penetrating radar and global positioning systems, without success. He would like to go back this summer, he said, but doesn't have the money.

"My great grandfather was Lt. Gen. Sergey N. Rozanoff," he said. "He was in charge of the (czarist) troops that liberated Ekaterinburg from the Reds six days after the royal family and their faithful servants were murdered. My grandfather was his adjutant. ... Together they were among the first to enter the house.

"I'd like to find the missing remains and bring this thing to closure," he said.

[Last modified June 12, 2005, 00:39:15]