“Yurovsky sent me out, saying, ‘Go into the street; see if there is anyone about and if the shots can be heard.’ I went out into the yard surrounded by the big fence” (he means the space between the outside wall and the hoardings), “and, before I had time to reach the street, heard the sound of the firing. I returned at once inside the house--only two or three minutes had passed--and, entering the room where the shooting had been carried out, I saw that all the members of the Tsar’s family--the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the four daughters, and the Naslednik (heir), were already lying on the floor with numerous wounds on their bodies, and the blood was flowing in torrents. The doctor, maid, and two men-servants had also been killed. When I appeared the Naslednik was still alive, groaning. Yurovsky went up to him and fired two or three times point-blank into him. The Naslednik was still. The picture of the murder, the smell and sight of the blood, caused me to feel sick....” Anatoly Yakimov, the second witness, is the man who had become “converted” after remaining a few weeks with the Tsar. He had been a sergeant of the Russian Guard, and remained so after the Russians had been relegated to the outer posts. It was his business to place the sentries and see that they remained at their posts. As the Russian sentries could see into the room where the murdering was to be done, it had not been possible to keep them in ignorance to the end, as explained above. Yakimov “sympathised” with the prisoners, but he did not dare to give effect to these feelings. There is good reason to believe that he was present at the murder. Possibly Yurovsky had insisted upon his being inside the house at the time, in order to implicate him in the deed. His _alibi_ bears a family likeness to Medvedev’s. Like him, he had a full, circumstantial knowledge of the killing that corroborates Medvedev in every essential point, and that could not have come to him unless he had been actually present. He explains that it was all told to him by the sentries--two men who stood outside the death-chamber window and two others who were in the courtyard when the bodies were removed.