The whole thing was royally botched.

A. The Ipatiev house.
B. Lower Iset Pond.
C. Dam.
D. Approximate location of the Verkh-Isetsk smelter.

In so many respects, the entire regicide and disposal of the remains was botched and botched badly. In the first place, the massacre was carried out at the south end of the house. The Fiat truck was parked at the north end of same. Thus, the remains had to be dragged some thirty meters just to get them on the truck. Ekaterinburg at the time was a mining town and there were any number of smelters there, many of which were hot beds of Bolshevik activity. All the smelters had high temperature furnaces that operated at greater than 1700 degrees Farenheit. Most of the guards at the Ipatiev house (and there were some 94 of them in all) worked at those smelters. The Verkh-Isetkh operation was directly on the way to the Koptiaki area. All the Bolsheviks had to do was to leave the remains in those furnaces for 12 hours. I guarantee you that nothing except a mass of ground up bone, which could have been quite easily been disposed of so that nobody would ever know, would remain. Another thing that I do not understand... If the Bolsheviks wanted to make sure that the remains were never found, why did they bury them in two mass graves just 75 yards apart? Why not simply simply scatter them around, separately, throughout the entire swampy forest? I can assure you that the whole thing was botched beyond belief.

Below, Mikhail, the younger brother of Nicholas, who indeed did abdicate in his favor in March of 1917. He turned it down, fearing that he would not have the support of the Russian people. He was at least the de facto Emperor for a period of twenty four hours. The Imperial Family in Ekaterinburg never knew of his own murder by the Bolsheviks in Perm, which was some 300 miles to the northwest of them, in June of 1918. His remains have never been found.

Below, the five conspirators that were directly involved in the murder of Mikhail and his English-Russian secretary Nicholas Johnson. Left to right: Andrei Markov, the actual trigger man, Ivan Kolpashikov, Gavril Myasnikov, Vasily Ivanchenko, and Nickolai Zhuzhgov.