I think it was cold blooded murder. It is my understanding that an execution would have resulted from a trial, which never took place. The little bald man with the ridiculous beard decided this. If you read what he wrote, he was all for the "revolution" and everything he did was based around that imprecise concept, which he defined. In the name of the "revolution", it was justified to kill, maim, steal, rape, etc.
He had absolutely nothing to lose by having the IF killed, and everything to gain. With the I.F. killed in Yekaterinburg and G.D. Michael killed in Alapayevsk, the Whites had no "raison d'etre" and eventually lost. The Romanovs took several years to regroup, at which time it was too late to rebuild the Empire.
In the meantime, the bald man and his cronies seized power, consolidated their rogue regime and the rest is history.
The main characters of this drama, had terrible deaths all of them. The little bald man must have suffered a lot before he died; his buddy who fled to Mexico found his death in the hands of an assassin, who chopped his brains out of his skull. The bald man's successor, as bloody as the German dictator, spent most of his years in power in a paranoid state and I venture to say he didn't die peacefully, haunted by the ghosts of all those he killed.
All the above are not coincidences. The Emperor might not have been a good ruler, but he deserved a fair trial. The revolutionary state that replaced the Empire also failed miserably in this and many other aspects, and fortunately it is now part of history.
