(Continued from page 22)

Alexei explained to his wife that on the night of the assassination everything went dark after he heard Yurovsky give the command to fire.  The next thing he was aware of was waking up in a farmhouse.  Sandra Romanov says that her husband had been told by his rescuers that when the truck carrying the bodies broke down in the mud a farmer named Johann Veermann was commanded by the Bolsheviks to put some of the bundles on his cart and take them to a mine shaft.  When one of the bundles started to move, Veermann claimed to have hidden it and discovered the wounded Tsarevich inside after he got it home.

This is where yet another new piece fills in the holes of the Romanov jigsaw puzzle.  Alexei's widow possesses documents that suggest his rescuer's wife may have been related to the Grand Marshal of the Tsar's Imperial court, Count Paul Benckendorff.  The maiden name of Johann Veermann's wife was Paula von Benckendorff-Känna.

Evidence discovered by Estonian journalist Helle Tamm suggests that the two Benckendorffs were cousins descendant from the same great-great grandfather.  The revelation that one of Alexei's rescuers was also a Benckendorff suggests that the Count may have engineered the escape of the Crown Prince and that he was heading to Estonia after setting up a very successful smoke screen.  While Alexei was playing the role of an Ekaterinburg farmboy, his former language tutors Charles Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard were accompanying Nikolai Sokolov on his official investigation of the Tsar's death.  Is it possible that they were leading Sokolov astray to prevent him from stumbling upon Count Benckendorff's scheme?

Paula von Benckendorff-Känna and her husband Johann Veermann had a son named Ernst who was born in 1905 but he died of typhoid the year before Lenin's Bolsheviks had moved the seven Romanovs to the Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg, the site of the execution.  Alexei was given Ernst's name and the Veermann's used their dead son's Estonian documents to hide the true identity of the Royal teenager who was living right under the Bolshevik nose... herding cattle in the Koptyaki Forest near his family's hidden grave.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                          (Continued on page 24)