In their book, The File on the Tsar, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold have this to say in the opening paragraph of their preface:
In July 1918 the entire imperial family of Russia—Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children—disappeared while in Communist hands, and were never seen again. Officially, they were shot and bayoneted to death in the house at Ekaterinburg where they had been held prisoner by the Bolsheviks. But in the fifty-nine years since then, mystery and contradiction have grown around the case, blurring the truth, creating legends, compounding the confusion. The more serious devotees of Romanov mystery have spent years studying the woman, still alive today, who claims to be Anastasia, youngest daughter of the tsar, and sole survivor of her family’s murder. Others have fostered fantastic tales about the escape of the whole family. Even so, the story of massacre in the cellar was generally accepted, and with good reason—none of the Romanovs had been reliably reported alive after the date of their disappearance. Today, as for earlier generations, the end of the Romanovs stands as a symbol of bloody revolution, and perhaps the most outrageous act of regicide in history.i
Dissatisfied with the official account of the massacre, Summers and Mangold and their team reopened the investigation in an attempt to establish the truth once and for all. Their investigation found that, White Russian investigators, arriving just days after the family’s disappearance, and with a whole year to sift through the evidence found at the crime scene, found no corpus delecti, and only the evidence of bloodstains and a few bullet-holes at the base of one wall, along with some charred clothing of the royals and some jewelry. The detectives, the journalists maintain, produced only one witness who allegedly claimed to have seen the corpses of the dead royals.
When Summers and Mangold started reinvestigating the case beginning in 1971, they claim to have employed the most up-to-date investigative techniques, with forensic scientists analyzing the known material, cipher experts reexamining coded messages, and hand-writing specialists from Scotland Yard reexamining crucial signatures for signs of forgery. The two journalists assert that, slowly and painstakingly, when subjected to harsher and more rigorous analysis, several pieces of old evidence began to show significant flaws. The only recognizable remains, those of a pet dog of the Russian royal family named Jemmy, appeared to be planted in a mineshaft near a village outside Ekaterinburg. In addition, a crucial telegram sent at the time of the alleged massacre contained all the hallmark signs of forgery. However, even though evidence for the massacre had been seriously questioned, the BBC documentary team’s discoveries had brought its members no closer to establishing the actual fate of the Romanovs, at least in the beginning.ii
What is puzzling about this latter point is the fact that the Bolshevik assassins went to considerable trouble to destroy the corpus delecti by burning the remains and then subjecting them to a sulphuric acid bath to dissolve the corpses, yet the assassins apparently carelessly buried some remaining evidence in a well where they could be easily discovered and retrieved.
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