The imperial Romanov family (former Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei, and their loyal retainers Dr. Evgeny Botkin, Anna Demidova, Ivan Kharitonov and Alexei Trupp) were murdered en masse in a ground-floor room of their final place of imprisonment, Yekaterinburg’s Ipatiev House, by Bolshevik gunfire, bayonets, and blows in July 1918, and their bodies allegedly buried in the Siberian Koptyaki forest, a few miles from Yekaterinburg, near a spot historically known as the Four Brothers, that night.
This was the legend, known to many local residents, including the young Avdonin, who has vivid childhood memories of one of the assassins, Pyotr Ermakov, roaming the environs of his hometown and bragging of the deed.
Ermakov was famous both for his drinking and for his stirring addresses at schools and Pioneer gatherings about how he and his Bolshevik comrades had so bravely struck down the Tsar whom the revolutionaries had named "Nicholas the Bloody".
Various members (Yurovsky, Ermakov, Medvedev) of the squad of assassins—who by one account outnumbered the eleven victims—vied for years for the honor of having personally shot the Tsar; documents, filmed interviews, and some of the weapons used in the murder themselves, complete with signed statements, were proudly donated to state museums and archives.
[3] Prosecutors reopened the investigation into the deaths of the imperial family[4] and, in April 2008, DNA tests performed by an American laboratory proved that bone fragments exhumed in the Ural Mountains belonged to two children of Nicholas II, Alexei and a daughter.
Captain Peter Sarandinaki brought onboard forensic anthropologist Dr. Anthony Falsetty and the U.S. Army DNA Laboratory to examine and test the purported remains of the Tsarevich Alexei and those of his sister (either Grand Duchess Maria or Anastasia).