If this was directed at me, I did read your post. Dr. Maples appears to have been wrong. Did he provide a professional opinion or was he speaking to an absolute certainty? The passage I quoted from FOTR stated unequivocally that Marie died and Anastasia's status remained unknown. Why? (asked rhetorically).
The reason Maples believed it was AN who was missing is that according to his examinations of the remains, none of the bodies still had the rings around the vertabrae that everyone has until they fuse with the bone at age 18- Anastasia was barely 17 and Marie was 19. This is why he believed the body was Marie and not Anastasia. In addition to that, the body buried as Anastasia is 5'7", Marie's height, and Anastasia was notoriously 5'2". The Russians who identified the remains as AN based their findings on computer imagery of the skull, however, the skull was severely damaged below the eye sockets and the center of the face was basically gone. This is why there still remains controversy over which girl was missing. Well, we'll just have to wait and see the final conclusions of all the scientists involved. I look forward to the day, hopefully soon, when all five kids are buried together, and there will finally be peace with no more rumors and myths.
Here is what Dr. Maples actually wrote p. 256:
Body No. 5 belonged to a woman in her late teens or early twenties. Half of her middle face was missing, a pattern of damage already seen in Body No. 3. Dr. Levine and I agree that she was the youngest of the five women whose skeltons lay before us. We concluded this from the fact that the root tips of her third molars were incomplete. Her sacrum, in the bak of her pelvis, was not completely developed. Her limb bones showed that growth had only recently ended. Her face showed evidence of immaturity, but it was nevertheless the back of a woman at least eighteen years old. We estimated her heigh at 67.5 inches. The Russians told us that a bullet had been found in a lump of adipocere near the body. We believe that skeleton is that of Marie, who was nineteen years old at the time of the murders.<<
67.5 = little more than 5 feet 6 inches
Lower down the page of 256 to 257:
>>Where was Anastasia? None of these three young female skeletons was young enough to be Anastasia, who was seventeen years and one month old the night of the shootings. Our Russian hosts believed that Body No. 6 the midmost of the three young females, was the long-lost Anastasia. Alas! We had to disagree, based on the growth patterns of the teeth, pelvises, sacra and long limbs of the three skeletons before us. The Russians had labored manfully over Body No. 6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of glue, stretched across wide gaps. They had been forced to estimate over and over again, while reassembling these fragments, also none of which were touching each other in the reconstructions. It was a remarkable and ingenious exercise. but it was too fanciful for me to buy. Anastasia was no in tis room.
Another piece of evidence was the height of the skeletal remains. The young woman was roughly the same height as the other two young women whose remains were discovered in the mass grave. In photographs of Anastasia taken with her sisters a year before her death, she is shorter than Olga and noticeably shorter than Tatiana and Marie. ...<<
If the bones were viewable today, the scientists can, now, tell by the fissures of the skull the approximate age of the remains.
AGRBear
