As grandson of Tsarina Alexandra’s oldest sister, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford-Haven, the Duke of Edinburgh was one of the Romanov’s closest living relatives. He gave a sample of blood that was compared to DNA extracted from the skeletons. The tests were performed by Dr Peter Gill at the Forensic Science Services at the Biology Research Science Laboratory in Aldermaston. Further tests were performed by Dr Mary-Claire King of the University of California at Berkeley and at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland. These tests were completed in the autumn of 1995. They confirmed beyond any doubt that the bones were indeed the skeletal remains of the imperial family and those of their retainers. Further tests were performed in 1998 when the remains of Tsar Nicholas’s younger brother, Grand Duke Georgji, were exhumed, providing DNA that positively identified that the remains from the forest outside Yekaterinburg belonged to Nicholas II, with a certainty of a hundred million to one.
Meanwhile, Russian scientists used computer modelling to compare old photographs of the imperial family with the skeletons and demonstrated that the two missing bodies were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and his sister the Grand Duchess Maria, and not Grand Duchess Anastasia. After Anna Anderson died in 1984, her body was cremated. However, DNA was taken from part of Anderson’s intestine removed during an operation in 1979, and retained by Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was compared with that supplied by the Duke of Edinburgh and that removed from the bones of the Romanovs, and showed that she was not related. It is now thought that she was Polish factory worker Franziska Schanzkowska, who worked in a munitions factory during the First World War. Shortly after she heard that her fiancé had been killed at the front, a grenade fell from her hand and exploded. It injured her in the head and killed her foreman in front of her. In 1916, she was declared insane and was treated in two asylums. Then, in 1920, she was reported missing from her lodgings in Berlin.
The remains of the Romanovs were given a State funeral and Christian burial in 1998 in the St Catherine Chapel of Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, where Russian monarchs have lain since Peter the Great. Two years later, the Romanov family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church for their “meekness during imprisonment and poise and acceptance of their martyr’s death”.
In July 2007, Sergei Plotnikov, a forty-six-year-old builder who is part of an amateur group searching for the remains of the missing Romanovs, was investigating a clearing surrounded by silver birch trees 6 miles (9.7 km) north of Yekaterinburg when the instrument he was using to prod the earth hit something hard.
“There was a crunching sound,” he said. “This means you’ve hit coal or bone. My friend Leonid and I started to dig. We found several bone fragments. The first was a piece of pelvis. We then discovered a fragment of skull. It had clearly come from a child. We shouted over to the archaeologists. They began an expert search. My heart leaped with joy. I knew immediately that this was the kind of thing that happens only once in a lifetime. I also felt satisfied. I knew the Romanov children would finally be united with the rest of their family.”
These two bodies had suffered the same fate as the Romanovs.
“It was clear they didn’t die peacefully,” said Plotnikov. “Their remains were very damaged. You could see that they had been covered in acid and burned with flames. What we dug up was in a very bad state. We didn’t find any bullet holes. But it was clear from the bones that some kind of kerosene had been poured over them.”
Russian archaeologists soon confirmed that the remains belonged to a boy of between ten and thirteen and a woman between eighteen and twenty-three. This would correspond to the thirteen-year-old Alexei and nineteen-year-old Maria. It was thought they were cremated because the killers wanted to make sure they were dead. There were accounts that Alexei and one of his sisters showed signs of life when the assassins lifted their bodies on to the back of the truck. This was confirmed by a Soviet memorandum that came to light in 1989.
Along with the bone fragments, Sergei Pogorelov, deputy director of the Sverdlovsk region’s archaeological institute, and his team found pieces of Japanese ceramic bottles used to carry sulphuric acid poured on the Romanovs’ corpses, and a hinge and wire that secured the wooden boxes holding the jars. They also recovered seven teeth, three bullets of various calibres and a fragment of a dress. Fires had been lit near the site. There was little doubt that they were the missing Romanovs, Pogorelov said.
Archaeologists had excavated practically the whole site in the 1990s, but then ran out of money. When they had to stop, they left behind an 86 ft
2
(8 m
2
) patch of unexplored ground. This was exactly where the amateur team found the final remains. Tests carried out in Moscow and at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, on DNA extracted from the bones showed that they were, indeed, the Tsarevich Alexei and the Grand Duchess Maria. The following year, they too were laid to rest in the cathedral in St Petersburg.
In 2010, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the reopening of the criminal investigation in the deaths of the Romanovs after the prosecutor general’s main investigative unit had closed it down, claiming that too much time had passed and those responsible were dead. The Supreme Court ruled that the deaths of the actual gunmen were irrelevant. The investigators were duty bound to set the record straight. So Yekaterinburg, it seems, is an ongoing crime scene.
A
T
3.33
A.M. ON
17 February 1970, Carolyn Landen, a telephone operator in Fayetteville, North Carolina, got a call from a man with a faint voice who gasped: “My name is Captain MacDonald . . . stabbing . . . need a doctor . . . MPs and an ambulance at 544 Castle Drive . . . Hurry!”
“Is this on post or off post?” she asked.
“Damn it, lady . . . my family . . . it’s on post!” he said.
“In that case I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to call the military police yourself. You see . . .”
Landen heard a clatter as the caller dropped the phone. She kept the line open and dialled the military police at Fort Bragg, gave the desk sergeant the address, then waited about three minutes until she finally heard a noise in her receiver.
“Is this Captain MacDonald?” she asked.
“Yes. Don’t you understand, I need . . .”
“Just a minute, sir,” she said, putting the call through to the military police. Then she heard the desk sergeant ask: “Can I help you?”
“Thank God,” Jeffrey MacDonald said. “We’ve been stabbed . . . people are dying . . . I may be dying . . . we need a doctor and ambulance . . . 544 Castle Drive . . .”
“They’ll be right there!”
Military policemen (MPs) Kenneth Mica and Dennis Morris were out on patrol that night. The desk sergeant dispatched them to a “domestic disturbance” at 544 Castle Drive, a one-storey garden apartment within the perimeter of Fort Bragg. But the base hospital would not send an ambulance until the MPs confirmed one was really necessary.
On the way to the crime scene, Mica saw a young woman wearing a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and a dark raincoat, standing in the rain just three blocks from Captain MacDonald’s home. This struck him as peculiar. It was 3.55 in the morning. Had they not been on a call, Mica and his partner would have stopped to ask what she was doing there.
When they reached the address, half a dozen MPs were already outside the front door of the darkened house. Lieutenant Joseph Paulk, the duty officer, pounded on the door and got no response. The door was locked, so Sergeant Richard Tevere went around to the back where he found the rear screen closed, but the door itself open. Inside he found a charnel house. He rushed back to report and an ambulance was summoned from the base hospital.
The sight that greeted the MPs was gruesome. There was blood on the floor of the corridor that led to the bedrooms. In the master bedroom they found twenty-six-year-old Colette MacDonald. She was sprawled lifelessly on her back with her legs spreadeagled. She was clad only in a blood-soaked pink pyjama shirt, which was open. Her left breast was partially exposed. The rest of her chest was covered by the tattered blue pyjama top. There were stab wounds to her chest and neck, and a large pool of blood under her head. Both her arms were bloody and injured.
Lying next to her was her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor with the Green Berets who are based in Fort Bragg. His head lay on her shoulder and his arm was stretched out across her body. He was wearing only blue pyjama bottoms. Mica knelt down beside him to check whether he was alive and heard him whisper: “How are my kids? I heard them crying.”
Mica ran into the other bedroom where he found five-yearold Kimberley in bed under the covers. When he examined her with his flashlight, he found that her head had been battered so badly that a shattered piece of bone stuck out through the skin below her eye and there were stab wounds to her neck. Across the hall, two-year-old Kristen also lay dead on her bed. Soaked in blood, she had multiple stab wounds to her chest and back.
Mica went back into the master bedroom where MacDonald gasped: “I can’t breathe. I need a chest tube.” He passed out. Mica tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then MacDonald came round.
“I realized someone was breathing in my mouth,” said MacDonald. “And I opened my eyes, and I could see a ring of military police helmets circling me.”
He pushed Mica away, saying: “Fuck me, man, look to my wife! Check my wife. Check my kids.”
Mica asked him who did this. MacDonald replied: “Four of them. She kept saying, ‘Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.’”
On the headboard of the bed next to Colette’s dead body, written in blood, was the word “PIG”.
MacDonald went on: “Three men . . . a woman . . . one man was coloured, he wore a field jacket, sergeant’s stripes. The woman, blonde hair, floppy hat, short skirt, muddy boots . . . she carried a light, I think a candle.”
Mica told Lieutenant Paulk about the woman with the floppy hat he had seen close to the crime scene.
“Don’t you think we ought to send out a patrol?” he asked.
But the lieutenant was busy writing down everything MacDonald was saying.
The ambulance arrived and two medics put MacDonald on a stretcher. As they wheeled him down the hall, he tried to get off and had to be restrained.
“Goddamn MPs,” he shouted. “Let me see my kids!”
When MacDonald reached Womack Army Medical Center Hospital, he was treated for injuries that included a collapsed lung. Otherwise his wounds were superficial, except for a onecentimetre stab wound to the chest and “several small puncture wounds that may have been from an instrument, such as an ice pick”. He was given some mild sedatives before being questioned by members of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID).
MacDonald told the CID that on the previous night his wife had gone to bed, while he remained reading in the living room. It had been a busy day. After his regular shift at the base hospital, he took his daughters Kimberley and Kristen to feed a pony he had bought them that Christmas. Then they went home, where he showered and changed into a pair of blue pyjamas. After a quick family dinner, Colette had headed off to her child-psychology class, while he put Kristen to bed. Worn out by the twenty-fourhour shift he had worked the day before, moonlighting at a civilian hospital, he had fallen asleep on the living-room floor watching TV. An hour later, Kimberley woke him and asked if she could watch her favourite programme,
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
. When the show was over, she went to bed. Forty minutes later, Colette came home. They had a glass of orange liqueur in front of the television. Colette, who was four and a half months pregnant with their first son, went to bed, MacDonald said. He was not ready to turn in, so he watched the Johnny Carson show, then returned to a Mickey Spillane novel he had been reading.
After a while, he was interrupted by Kristen crying. He made her a bottle of chocolate milk to calm her. Around 2 a.m., he finished the book. Then, after washing the dinner dishes, he went into the master bedroom where he found Kristen sleeping next to her mother. When he went to get in, he found that Kristen had wet the bed. So he carried the little girl back to her room. Not wishing to wake his wife by changing the sheets, he grabbed a blanket and went back into the living room to go to sleep on the couch.
The next thing he remembered, he said, was screaming.
“Jeff, why are they doing this to me?” his wife yelled.
And he heard Kimberley screaming: “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
He sat up to find three people at the foot of the couch. One of them was a woman with long, stringy blonde hair and a big hat. She had a kind of light on her face.
“I don’t know if it was a flashlight or a candle,” he said. “I just remember that my instinctive thought was that, ‘She’s holding a candle. What the hell is she holding a candle for?’”
Then he remembered her saying: “Kill the pigs. Acid’s groovy.”
The black guy with the sergeant’s stripes raised some kind of a weapon and hit him on the head. He struggled to get up and the man hit him again. He noticed then that there were three men and the woman kept repeating: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.”
The two other men were hitting him. Then MacDonald said he felt a terrible pain in his chest.
“I grabbed this guy’s whatever-it-was – I thought it was a baseball bat at the time,” he said. “Meanwhile, both these guys were kind of hitting me, and all this time I was hearing screams. That’s what I can’t figure out . . . all I got a glimpse of was, was some stripes. I told you, I think, they were E6 stripes. There was one bottom rocker” – the lower patch on the back of a motorcycle club’s vest – “and it was an army jacket, and that man was a coloured man, and the two men, other men, were white.”
In the struggle he kept feeling pains in his stomach and chest. Eventually, he let go of the club. Then he saw something that looked like a blade. As he fell, he saw the woman’s knees and the top of her brown, muddy boots.