There has probably not been another instance in the whole history of crime of precautions to escape detection half so elaborate as in the Romanov murder case. All sorts of subterfuges have been tried by lesser criminals with more or less success. Here every ruse was combined. The murderers carried out the following comprehensive programme:--(1) They gave out a false announcement of the “execution”; (2) they destroyed the bodies; (3) they invented a mock funeral; and (4) they staged a mock trial. The thoroughness of their methods reminds one of their masters, the Germans. It is a case of “_spurlos_.” However, in this, as in the other instance, detection followed. The criminal always gives himself away. The very complexity of the Soviet “precautions” proved their undoing. In vain they drew innumerable herrings of their own colour over the trail, suborning false witnesses to give misleading information about the whereabouts of the bodies, announcing officially that the family had been removed to a “safe place,” etc. Sokolov has run them into the open. The murder accomplished, all the bodies were carried into the courtyard and placed on the waiting lorry. The corpses were not subjected to a thorough search--as we shall see--because Yurovsky was anxious to get away from the city before daybreak. They were rolled up in old coats and covered with mats to conceal the “cargo” from prying eyes. Yankel Yurovsky, Ermakov, and Vaganov went with them. As soon as they had gone, Medvedev summoned the Russians to “wash up.” They had not been trusted to do the other work, and Yankel had even deprived them of their revolvers--the “Letts” had their own--perhaps because he did not feel quite sure how they might behave during the murder. Even now, Medvedev, his henchman, called up the Syssert workmen--his own particular friends--to remove the tell-tale traces of the crime. They washed and swabbed the floor and the walls in the death-chamber and in the other rooms through which the bodies had been borne. (So much blood had flowed that the marks of the red-stained swab were distinctly visible a year later when I visited Ipatiev’s house, and experts found unmistakable evidence of its being human blood.) The stones in the courtyard were also scoured. Meanwhile the lorry, with its tragic burden, was making its way to the appointed place in the woods, a remote corner of some disused iron mines, once the property of Countess Nadezhda Alexeievna Stenbok-Fermor and now of the Verkh-Isetsky Works. This place is situated northeast of the Perm and Ural railway lines, about 11 miles out of the city, near the forest road leading to the village of Koptiaki. Ermakov (military komisar for the district) placed a cordon of Red Guards all round the wood. During that and the two following days and nights all passage through it was stopped. As will be seen later, this “precaution” defeated its purpose.