The Missing Bodies

[Alice]

From what I understand, the dog was so well preserved, that someone, I don't recall who at this moment,  identified it as Jemmy.

And it was because the dog was so well preserved,  Summers and Mangold became curious and did farther investigation....

As to the dog being someone else's dog and someone was in error,  I don't know.

Just like I don't know if there was an escape or an execution in the Impatiev House.  There were too many "players" who were trying to cover up what really happened that night.

AGRBear

Charles Sydney Gibbes positively identified Jemmy. It's in his book, "Tutor to the Tsarevich".

[AGRBear]

p.  86 in THE ROMANOVS & MR. GIBBES by Frances Welch:  "On 21 July 1919, he described to his Aunt Kate how he had identified Jimmy," [stet], "the King Charles spaniel given to Anastasia by Anna Vryubova."

Here is another interesting note given us by Gibbes.  He thought the severed finger was that of Dr. Botkin's but it was later said to have been the "third fingers of a lady no longer quite young".

Evidently,  he had visited the interior of the Impatiev House and had taken a great deal of photographs.  Can anyone tell us what happen to these photographs?

p. 78:  "Over the next few months, he returned again and again to the house.  He steeled himself to spend hours in the cellar, conducting his own painstaking investigation.  He found holes in the wall, created by bullets and bayonets.  He took photographs of the holes..."

AGRBear

[Elisabeth]

p.  86 in THE ROMANOVS 7 MR. GIBBES by Frances Welch:  "On 21 July 1919, he described to his Aunt Kate how he had identified Jimmy," [stet], "the King Charles spaniel given to Anastasia by Anna Vryubova."

Here is another interesting note given us by Gibbes.  He thought the severed finger was that of Dr. Botkin's but it was later said to have been the "third fingers of a lady no longer quite young".

Evidently,  he had visited the interior of the Impatiev House and had taken a great deal of photographs.  Can anyone tell us what happen to these photographs?

p. 78:  "Over the next few months, he returned again and again to the house.  He steeled himself to spend hours in the cellar, conducting his own painstaking investigation.  He found holes in the wall, creaed by bullets and bayonets.  He took photographs of the holes..."

AGRBear

Sokolov's original photographs of the murder room presumably vanished after his death along with his boxes of evidence. However, many of these photographs had already been published in his official account of the murders. If anyone has the complete, unabridged Sokolov Report, I believe it includes numerous photographs of the bullet holes and perhaps even the relative positions of them in the room. Unfortunately our university library only has the more common and much-abridged version of the Report, or I would check...

Summers and Mangold's consultations with the forensic experts made nonsense of Sokolov's claim that the severed finger found at the Four Brothers was Alexandra's. Ditto with his claim that certain bloodstains in the murder room were those of the grand duchesses and Empress. As Greg King and Penny Wilson note in "Fate of the Romanovs:" "Blood grouping as a science had not yet been developed, nor did Sokolov possess any blood samples from members of the imperial family with which the bloodstains could be compared and tested. In his determination to prove what had, in fact, taken place, Sokolov engaged in a deliberate distortion of evidence to suit his own ends." (p. 358) So King and Wilson agree with Summers and Mangold that Sokolov was not always honest in his presentation of the evidence.

According to FOTT, the Ganina pit at the Four Brothers was pumped out on August 19, 1918, almost an entire year before the corpse of Jemmy was supposedly found at its bottom. I think it's safe to conclude that Sokolov probably planted it there sometime in June, 1919.

[AGRBear]

Charles Sydney Gibbes positively identified Jemmy. It's in his book, "Tutor to the Tsarevich".

Are there photographs of Ekaterinburg in this book?

AGRBear

[Alice]

Are there photographs of Ekaterinburg in this book?

AGRBear

Yes, there are photos of Ipatiev House and the Four Brother's mine. Also of the "relics" collected from the mine, including the corset stays, etc.

[AGRBear]

Charles Sydney Gibbes positively identified Jemmy. It's in his book, "Tutor to the Tsarevich".

Another book I'll have to buy  .  Gonna need more book shevles....

Thanks.

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

More on the findings of Jemmy/Jimmy, the dog.

p. 164 of Summers and Mangold's book THE FILE ON THE TSAR:

"In June 1919, when the dog was found, General Domontovich, the White military governor of Ekaterinburg, was in charge of the mine operation during the temporary absence of General Diterikhs (see plate 40)."

They go on to say that it was possibly under Gen. Domontovich's orders that the dog was planted just before the Whites had to pull out....  They, also, state that the Reds had just as many reasons to plant the dog in the mine.  So, what it seems,  someone had planted the dog but no one is sure by whom.

"...it would have ben impossible for Jemmy's body to have survived so well in its watery grave for a year."  Then goes on to say forensic evidence implied that Jemmy was dead only a few days.

Anyone know more about Gen. Domontovich?

AGRBear

[Alice]

Another book I'll have to buy  .  Gonna need more book shevles....

Thanks.

AGRBear

I obtained mine on eBay. Paid through the nose for it too, and it's missing ten pages!  :-/

[moonlight_tsarina]

I feel torn apart as to mwhat happened to the two missing children! At first, i wondered if the bodies were even theirs, and whehter or not Yuorvsky's account was factual. When you think about it, if any of the sheltered children maybe except for olga and Tatiana had any chance to escape, they wouldnt't probly have the common sense on what to do, after all, they were sheletered their whole lives! And maybe even if they had the chance to escape, don't you think they wouuldn'y want to leave their family? hmm...  

[moonlight_tsarina]

i have a dumb question but i was wondering, is the whole brought into basemnt and shot etc. execution 100% factual? or was it just based on Yurovsky's account? The wall is pretty good evindece that it's true, but I was just wondering.

[moonlight_tsarina]

From what I've understood,  the first dog killed and thrown on the back of the truck was a "bulldog".

AGRBear

Didnt the soldiers kill Ortino by hanging him because he wouldnt stop barking at them? (That's so horrible! )
That's from something I read.

[moonlight_tsarina]

Just to play "devils advocate" for a sec, consider this. Its wartime, the front moves back and forth across the Ekaterinburg area,  armed men in the forest all the time...Dogs will, sadly, get killed...who is to say that someone later didn't just dump a dead dog's body into the mine after the fact? It is not a far stretch to imagine some peasant in the woods who finds a dead dog and disposes of the body, or maybe it was his dog killed...

Sokolov may simply have tried to explain finding the dog, knowing that the IF HAD dogs with them he simply assumed it was their dog, when it probably wasn't...not a major conspiracy, or a lie, just a mistake.

This makes your mind start playing tricks and thinking that maybe Jemmy wasnt Jemmy in the mine after all.

[moonlight_tsarina]

A KNOWN FACT?
We need sources/evidence/sitations-- but this 'statement' seems a great deal more like fantasy and heresay than proof.

DNA is a good source too.
Sorry friend, but AA was not AN.

rskkiya

I agree with rskkiya. How could the Royal family bosh ALL the test to prove AA wrong? Like the lock of hair inside a box of books that belonged to AA(As read in The Final Chapter by Massie)?
And compare Frnziska to Anna, they are dead on alike, and compare Anna(or should i say franszika? ) to Anastasia? You get nothing!!

[moonlight_tsarina]

Sorry! But another thing I remember, didn't it say in Massie's The Final Chapter that a nun held a box of pieces of fat and bone she obtained in the area in which the Reds supposeldy burned the two mssing bodies? If she had let Sokolov have it for us to test now, perhaps this mystery would be solved!!!  

[Abby]

Moonlight tsarina, there is more evidence besides just the wall with bullet holes that the IF was killed in the Ipatiev house basement. More executioners other than Yurovsky wrote accounts of that night, and while they are all not exactly alike in all details, they all give a pretty close story of the family being led to the basement and shot. There were testimonies of people in Ekaterinburg saying that they heard shots, and one man said he remembers seeing the truck hauling the bodies of the family.

As for Ortino being hung because he would not stop barking, I have never heard that before. I have only read that they shot or crushed one of the dogs somewhere in the mayhem of that night.

The box that you mentioned with the peices of bone and hair from the possible site of the two missing bodies was stored in the Church of St. Job in Brussels , Belgium and they wouldn't let anyone look in the box and it was rumored that it held the remains of two bodies. I asked Penny Wilson about this box a while ago and she responded to me somewhere on this board-- I will go look for her response. She said that there were vials of congeled fat and some peices of charred wood and stuff but nothing that could be tested for DNA. ..

more about it here: although I don't know how much of this site is not over-exaggeration!
http://www.monasterypress.com/Royal.html