Given the inability of search parties to locate the remains, then a third pathway, so to speak, has to be considered in the absence of any credible evidence.
Our beliefs in this case seem to differ in two places, Rodger: I believe that there was a murder; you believe there may not have been (I don't want to overstate you here, but correct me if I'm wrong and you do, positively, believe that there was no murder). You believe they all may have left the Ipatiev House alive; I think that at least two and maybe as many as four could have left that basement room alive, though two obviously died later, probably as a result of their injuries.
I base this solely on the forensic evidence as it exists on the skeletons removed from the grave: Anyone shot through the head left that room dead. Marie's and Demidova's skulls did not have head-shots so far as we can tell, though both were badly beaten about the face, shot in other places, and probably stabbed a good number of times. They may not have been conscious on leaving the murder room, but they could well have still been alive.
Anastasia and Alexei are entirely unaccounted and therefore we cannot say either way if they left that basement room alive or dead. But they could well still have been alive too.
We do know from eyewitness testimony (that we have no real reason to disbelieve) that one "girl" sat up and screamed, and another "girl" turned out also to have been alive. They could have been any combination of Marie, Anastasia (because we don't know how serious her injuries may have been, absent a body) and Anna Demidova. I think that two of them -- Marie and Demidova -- died sometime later that night, and are represented in that grave.
Because we have no skeletal representation of either Anastasia or Alexei, I cannot say for sure that either of them was killed in that room.
Is it possible -- as has been advanced elsewhere on this board -- that Anastasia or Alexei's bodies bounced off the truck on the way to the Four Brothers? Yeah, sure, I guess so; but in my opinion, that's an almost indescribably remote possibility, and not only because the soldiers Soames, Rudolf Lacher and Andras Verhas were also riding in the bed of the truck.
Is it possible that either Alexei or Anastasia survived that night and were rescued from the truck? Yes, I think so. And this is a much less remote possibility for me, personally. There were two windows of opportunity for someone to have effected a rescue: When the truck was standing in the courtyard, loaded with some bodies, with other bodies scattered through the house and courtyard, where the guards had put them down when Yurovsky summoned them upstairs to discuss looting. Remember, also, the sympathetic guards of Avdeyev's time who were milling around, shouting things like "Butchers!" and "Murderers!"
The second window of opportunity exists in the woods, while Yurovsky, Lyukhanov and Ermakov were scouting locations and the truck was left in the hands of the three guards, one of whom, Verhas, had earlier refused to shoot the Imperial children.
So yes, it IS possible, in my considered opinion, that someone was rescued that night. Whether they actually were, or whether they ultimately survived their wounds, is something I don't know and don't want to speculate on. I want to cover only what we know, or can reasonably deduce from the evidence that we believe to be true.
I'd like to know, Rodger, if you have any theories concerning what may have happened that night, and why the Romanovs may have disappeared. And where to?
I have to admit that at one point in the research for FOTR, I considered that Anastasia and Alexei may simply have been removed from the house, a la Leonid Sednev, because Lenin HAD recently promulgated a law forbidding the enactment of capital punishment on a minor. But that's the only time I've ever seriously considered that members of the Romanov party had not gone into the crucible of that basement room. And I didn't consider it for long, as there is no evidence that I know of that supports such a theory. But it was an interesting little aside for me...
Penny
(It's late, I'm pretty tired, so that's it for me!)
