A DRASTIC PLAN B
The founding years of the cryonics movement are dominated by three key characters: Robert Ettinger, Evan Cooper, and Bob Nelson. This unlikely trio thrust cryonics into global consciousness, transforming the practice from a science-fiction fantasy to a hotly debated topic of the future. But none of them were able to unite the fractured cryonics community, as backstabbing, jealousy, and outright fraud ran rampant in the early years.
Cryonicists today describe Ettinger as the grandfather of the industry, and his work from the 1960s continues to inspire and motivate those practicing the art of freezing the dead. He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1918 and was, unsurprisingly, something of a nerd. He developed a love of The Jameson Satellite, a science fiction series which ran in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1931.[1] The stories were written by Neil Ronald Jones and followed a Professor Jameson, who managed to have his preserved corpse launched into space. He orbited the Earth for forty million years before passing aliens called Zoromes, who had achieved immortality by transferring their brains into machines, picked him up. These half-alien, half-machine hybrids resurrected Jameson and made him one of their own, and the stories followed his adventures as an immortal traveling around the universe and generally having a great time. It’s easy to see why a thirteen-year-old would find the tale appealing, but Ettinger took the possibilities to be much more practical than fiction. “It was instantly obvious to me that the author had missed the main point of his own idea!” he later wrote. “If immortality is achievable through the ministrations of advanced aliens through repairing a human corpse, then why should not everyone be frozen to await later rescue by our own people?”
Ettinger’s fascination with the concept of freezing the dead became the central theme of his life. He obtained a master’s degree in physics and mathematics before serving in the United States Army during World War II.[2] He reached the rank of second lieutenant but was wounded in combat. During his long recovery, he read up on some of the science emerging around the concept which had captured his imagination as a young boy. His research led him to French biologist Jean Rostand, who explored the possibility of using low temperatures to affect the properties of living things in the 1940s. What he read inspired him to write science fiction of his own. In 1948 he penned a sci-fi story called “The Penultimate Trump,” which thankfully was not a prophetic warning of what the world would endure decades later. The pulp science fiction magazine Startling Stories published the tale in its March issue, and it was notable for containing many of the concepts of cryonics which emerged later on. Still, cryogenic preservation remained a topic of fiction, while Ettinger grew frustrated at his own inability to lead the revolution he so desperately wanted to see. He became a physics teacher at Highland Park Community College, just outside Detroit, and waited for the spark that would ignite this next great medical age, but nobody stepped up. By the 1960s, he’d waited long enough. “As the years passed and no one better came forward, I finally had to write…” he later proclaimed.
The United States at this time was fertile ground for ideas that blurred the lines between science fiction and fact. The development of the atomic bomb during World War II, which was predicted by the major science fiction magazine of the day, Astounding, altered the way science fiction was viewed. The United States became the leading economic, industrial, and scientific power in the world, and rapid technological advancement created a feeling that anything was possible. This was particularly evident during the 1960s, as the Space Race between the United States and the USSR brought regular and astonishing feats, culminating in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s trip to the moon in 1969. In the same decade, science fiction classics like Frank Herbert’s Dune and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? were published. In cinemas, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey elevated the genre to a new level, prompting people around the world to ask major questions about the future of humanity. Against this backdrop, Ettinger attempted to launch cryonics into the world.
His early efforts to drum up support for the idea were a little odd. He wrote an article outlining the basic concept and explaining why it was so important for the future of the human race, and mailed it to a couple of hundred people he found on a Who’s Who in America list. One can only imagine their reaction at receiving such a document out of the blue and, unsurprisingly, Ettinger did not get much response. He realized he needed to present his ideas more comprehensively, so he published what would end up being a preliminary version of his book The Prospect of Immortality in 1962.[3] To Ettinger’s delight, like-minded people across the country responded to the self-published book with great excitement.[4] One of them was Evan Cooper. While Ettinger was a reluctant pioneer in the field, Cooper has since been credited as the first person to take practical steps toward making the idea a reality. There was undoubted enthusiasm around The Prospect of Immortality, but before Cooper, followers of cryonics were yet to form any kind of community.
Cooper published his own book about the future the same year as Ettinger. Immortality, Physically, Scientifically, Now perhaps suffered for its wordy title, as it never reached the heights of Ettinger’s work. But Cooper was ready to take action. On December 23, 1962, he held an informal meeting in Washington D.C. for those interested in the concept of cryonics.[5] Around twenty people attended to discuss both books, and Cooper and others agreed to form the Immortality Communication Exchange (ICE), a special interest group promoting the “freeze and wait” idea that would be at the heart of all future cryonics. But ICE did not last long as a name. The group morphed into the Life Extension Society (LES) at its first formal event in Washington D.C. And in early 1964, LES launched a newsletter to better communicate progress to the fledgling community.
Ettinger’s book, meanwhile, really took off. Doubleday Publishers released a hardcover version, buoyed by encouraging public interest. The publishers sent a copy of the book to the renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who apparently approved of the science.[6] The Prospect of Immortality became the cryonics equivalent to the Bible. The book has since appeared in nine languages and has had four editions. It’s an interesting read. The tome contains a lot of wishful thinking and minimal science to back anything up. Ettinger wrote about a golden age, when overwhelming positivity would reign, but didn’t go into any detail how a freezing process would be carried out, let alone the much trickier reanimation. At times Ettinger strayed into dark and dubious territory. For example, he suggested fetuses could be frozen and childbirth made a thing of the past but claimed those with cerebral palsy could just remain on ice without being reanimated. In a section called “Mercy Killings,” he wrote:
According to Jane Gould, “In all, roughly three newborn infants out of a hundred are seriously abnormal.” Most of these, of course, will not be considered for early freezing; they will either die early natural deaths, or will be cured, or can be helped to lead lives not too pitifully far from the norm. But consider, for example, the worst cases of cerebral palsy. According to Jessie S. West, in the United States in 1954 there were around a half million victims of this disease. Many had normal intelligence, although the affliction produced symptoms such as facial grimacing, drooling, and unintelligible speech which might make them seem subnormal to an uninformed observer. But many had serious mental deficiencies, and in fact 13 percent were considered uneducable. At present, we properly do not countenance euthanasia for this 23 percent, even though they may be suffering and even though there is a heavy emotional and financial burden on the other members of the family. But will not the situation be different when freezers are available?[7]
In a book about freezing people, it’s genuinely chilling to see how quickly the utopian fantasy takes a wild swing into eugenics and dystopian nightmare. Ettinger wrote of an extremely positive future for the species, providing he saw people fit enough to be born in the first place.
The future will reveal a wonderful world indeed, a vista to excite the mind and thrill the heart. It will be bigger and better than the present—but not only that. It will not be just the present, king-sized and chocolate-covered; it will be different. The key difference will be in people; we will remold, nearer to the heart’s desire not just the world, but ourselves as well. And “ourselves” refers to people, not just posterity. You and I, the frozen, the resucitees, will be not merely revived and cured, but enlarged and improved, made fit to work, play, and perhaps fight, on a grand scale and in a grand style. Specific reasons for such expectations will be presented.[8]
By the end of 1964, perhaps feeding off each other, both Ettinger’s book and Cooper’s LES gathered momentum. Ettinger became something of a celebrity: he was featured in magazine and newspaper articles and appeared on radio and television, including the Long John Nebel show, an all-night radio talk program.[9] Cryonics entered the national discourse, despite the fractures that had already begun to emerge in the community of enthusiasts. The LES newsletter, elaborately titled Freeze, Wait, Reanimate, became the conduit for the various squabbles that were roiling the immortalist communities. In the September 1964 issue, Leonard Gilley tore into Cooper for his perceived inaction. They saw a lot of talk and not enough practical steps being taken. “You are, to be very blunt, doing more waiting than freezing…have you personally planned specifically for freezing? What is that plan?…if you have not planned, then you are a hypocrite…intentions and speculations, hell! Let’s see action!” he wrote in an impressively impatient and stinging letter.
And here begins the soap opera years of cryonics.
In the same September 1964 issue, two groups announced they were breaking away from LES, again over a perceived lack of action. “Tom Tierney’s group, feeling the urgency of getting something done in the way of organization and freezing, considers that they will get there faster on an independent track. Tom informs us that his group voted to withdraw from LES,” Cooper wrote of the first group, which formed its own organization in Southern California.[10] (Tierney’s group rejoined the LES in 1965.)
Cooper further noted: “Bob Ettinger also feels that the physical freezing program has been too slow, and to remedy this he is considering beginning a commercial operation for the freezing and storage of bodies. He is more than willing to go full steam ahead, with any engine that can carry the freight, profit or nonprofit. Bob is becoming increasingly doubtful, however, that a nonprofit organization [like LES] can get the program in motion.”
The next year, even Cooper lamented the lack of action. “Are we shouting in the abyss?” he wrote. “How could 110 million go to their deaths without one, at least trying for a life in the future via freezing? Where is the individualism, scientific curiosity, and even eccentricity we hear so much about?”[11]
Thankfully, before things could get too stale, the eccentrics emerged. Pioneers, bold, brave, and mostly misguided, made the first attempts at cryopreservation. New cryonics societies had emerged across the country as more and more enthusiasts turned away from the LES. In August 1965, Saul Kent and Curtis Henderson, who would both make important contributions to the community, started their own organization in New York called the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY). The duo also coined the phrase cryonics in the process. Around the same time, more LES breakaways formed, including Cryo-Care Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, which advertised its services as cosmetic rather than preparation for eventual reanimation.[12] Kent and Henderson made a trip across the United States in 1966 and helped organize more cryonics societies in Michigan and California as further societies continued to emerge. They were quick to make progress where the LES had failed.
Wilma Jean McLaughlin of Springfield, Ohio, died of heart and circulatory problems on May 20, 1965. A plucky group of cryonicists attempted to freeze her, but the procedure failed. Cooper recounted what went wrong in the next issue of Freeze, Wait, Reanimate.[13] He recounted an alarmingly long list of explanations gathered from newspapers, newscasts, and long distance calls from people present, most of which blamed meddling third parties. Although McLaughlin’s husband favored freezing his dead wife, some of her relatives and her minister were deeply opposed to the idea. The minister, validly, noted that there were no laws or regulations in place to govern the procedure or keep the parties involved in check. Her physician agreed and refused to aid the freezing process, while hospital staffers where she passed away wanted no part in the experiment. Mistakes were made, apparently, by the cryonics practitioners themselves. Juno Inc., the company supposedly supplying the capsule to store the body, said the device was still being tested and only a prototype existed. Little is known of Juno, aside from it being one of the first commercial companies to attempt to profit from cryonics by building the equipment dreamed up by the enthusiasts. Cryonics capsules became a cottage industry over the years and, particularly in the early decades, almost always broke down at some point. Perhaps the McLaughlin attempt was always doomed to fail. The final reason Cooper listed for its foundering was the most damning: “The subject for freezing was unconscious and did not know anything about the plan according to most reports,” he wrote in the newsletter.[14]
The LES refused to be deterred by one magnificent failure. The next year Cooper’s organization offered to freeze someone for free. “The Life Extension Society now has primitive facilities for emergency short term freezing and storing our friend the large homeotherm (man). LES offers to freeze free of charge the first person desirous and in need of cryogenic suspension.” Cryonics, at the level it was being attempted in the 1960s, required surprisingly little in the way of equipment. The facilities thrown up by the various organizations were usually warehouses or spaces where they could store the capsules or containers used to preserve the bodies. Over time, it would become more and more difficult to set up these spaces, as insurance concerns, health regulations, and the increased complexity of the operations limited their setup.
Nobody took up Cooper’s generous offer, but the attempts kept coming elsewhere. Danbridge M. Cole, who wrote the book Beyond Tomorrow: The Next Fifty Years in Space, which, among its many lavish illustrations of moon colonies and rockets, included a section on suspended animation, died in October 1965 from a heart attack. Cole, an aerospace engineer, reportedly expressed a wish to be frozen after death to friends and colleagues, including Robert Prehoda, a curious individual with a large part to play in early cryonics. Prehoda was interested in cryobiology and later wrote a book called Suspended Animation, but he opposed cryonics because he felt the freezing process damaged the brain, making it unfeasible to reanimate anyone in the future. He convinced Cole to be buried, recalling in his book: “Rational counsel prevailed, and Dan was given a dignified burial.”
On April 22, 1966, Cooper finally had reason to celebrate. “Someone has been frozen at last!” he wrote in the newsletter.[15] Cryo-Care, the Arizona-based company established in 1965, announced it had cryopreserved an unidentified elderly woman, but the results were far from promising. “There is little or no thought that this first frozen pioneer will rise again in the 21st or 22nd century as considerable time elapsed between death and freezing. If the cooling and perfusion of the person with cryoprotective agents isn’t begun immediately at death the memory which is believed a matter of fine molecular placement would soon disintegrate. As this first person was frozen long after death there is no known hope for re-establishing the original memory and thus the personality. Yet this imperfect beginning may be a step forward toward bringing an extended life to others via cryogenics,” Cooper wrote.
Within a few months, Cryo-Care thawed the woman for unknown reasons, removing her from suspension. Despite this setback, momentum continued to build. Each partial success brought new eccentrics to the cause. One of those newcomers became a (temporary) hero in the cryonics world: Bob Nelson, a TV repairman.
Nelson endured a tough upbringing in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother was an alcoholic, and his father left before he was born. His stepfather, a mobster named John “Fats” Buccelli, was jailed for his part in Brink’s Robbery, dubbed “the largest heist in US history,”[16] in which nearly $3 million was stolen from a Boston office in 1950. Months after being released from prison, Buccelli was shot in the back of the head and killed, ending his complex relationship with his stepson. Nelson said his stepfather’s death left him “devastated but not surprised,” but he felt “strangely freed from his path” and knew his own journey was finally about to begin.[17] Nelson later moved to Los Angeles, where he read Ettinger’s book and became obsessed with cryonics. While sitting in traffic, he heard a radio advertisement for a group of enthusiasts in the city. Delighted to meet like-minded people, he attended his first official LES meeting in May 1966.
Nelson documented his experience in 2014 in his book Freezing People Is (Not) Easy: My Adventures In Cryonics. He expected to walk into a room full of scientists and medical professionals, but instead found elderly people with no more idea of how to freeze someone than himself. Nelson had no medical training, no scientific knowledge, no degree or even high school diploma, yet in the second meeting the group voted to leave the LES umbrella due to a perceived lack of action and elected him president of a newly formed group, The Cryonics Society of California (CSC). The appointment didn’t please everyone.
Dr. Renault Able—who Nelson said resembled Batman’s nemesis, the Joker—attended Nelson’s first meeting very briefly, claiming he wanted to be the group’s appointed medical professional.[18] Able showed up at subsequent meetings sparingly, but when he learned a TV repairman had been made president he was outraged, claiming they would never be taken seriously. Nelson responded by offering Able the position of president, but the doctor, presumably worried about the potential damage to his reputation, turned him down.
As president, Nelson was tasked with raising awareness of cryonics, and he took up his duties with relish, making appearances on radio and television shows in California. Nelson also got in touch with his hero, Ettinger, with whom he struck up a correspondence. At one point he arranged a five-day visit to the CSC for Ettinger and gushed over his appearance, claiming it changed his life. He also described the pioneer as a father figure.
Nelson didn’t want to just talk about the prospect of freezing people, he wanted to go ahead and try it himself. He began to learn more about cryobiology, the sister science of studying things at extremely low temperatures, and was introduced to Prehoda, an expert in the field and the same man who had opposed freezing one of the earlier candidates. When Nelson called Ettinger and told him he was meeting Prehoda, Ettinger bristled, saying he approved of the expert’s knowledge of cryonics but didn’t like his character, presumably because he had persuaded his friend to opt out of cryopreservation in favor of burial.[19] Nelson welcomed Prehoda into the CSC regardless, and they slowly patched together a team of experts and enthusiasts who would try to take cryonics to the next level. Nelson and Prehoda also assembled a scientific advisory council to conduct research into human suspended animation. The council was made up of respected scientists of the time, long since scrubbed from the history of the society, who agreed to join on one condition: if the CSC did eventually freeze someone, they would immediately end their affiliation with the group. The scientific council saw the field as an interesting subject worthy of further examination but feared any attempt to actually freeze a dead body would do irreversible damage to their own careers. They believed progress should be made through lab work and experimentation on animals.
It wasn’t long until that agreement was tested.
In early 1967, Nelson received a call from a frantic funeral director at a mortuary in Glendale. He was trying to calm an irate gentleman demanding he arrange for his father, who was very close to death, to be frozen. The funeral director had no idea how to facilitate such a request, so he called the local cryonics society. Nelson took the number of the mortuary, promised to call back, then hung up. Here was just the opportunity Nelson and the nascent cryonics industry had been waiting for. He persuaded Prehoda to help, even if it meant losing the scientific advisory board, and the pair arranged a meeting with the interested party.
The irate customer was Norman Bedford. His father was dying of cancer, and he wanted to carry out his final wish—to be frozen.[20] James Bedford, who taught psychology at Glendale College, had put aside a sizable sum of money to fund cryonics research when he died. As he approached death, he decided he wanted to go a step further and volunteer for the procedure himself. Prehoda was concerned no freezing protocol had been perfected, and still held doubts that freezing humans was beneficial at all. Nelson cast these worries aside and sought Ettinger’s advice. The founding father of cryonics, who hadn’t frozen anyone himself, said it was an exciting opportunity for the CSC and shipped a cardiac compression machine from Detroit to help the freezing process. Prehoda then got over his concerns, and a hastily assembled team got to work with the preparations.
The group’s main goal was to preserve James Bedford’s brain. At a normal temperature when someone dies, their brain is damaged within five minutes of their breathing stopping. When the body temperature is lowered, the brain is less dependent on oxygen. Therefore, the group theorized, the body must be cooled as quickly as possible. You can’t just plunge a human body into freezing temperatures without causing major damage, however. The human body is made up of more than 75 percent water, which expands when frozen. To prevent cells in the body from bursting, the team proposed injecting special chemicals into the bloodstream which would absorb the vast majority of water. This would ensure freezing took place outside the cells and not inside.
Nelson, a biophysicist named Dr. Dante Brunol, and Prehoda carried out the procedure. The trio began gathering the necessary tools and implements as Bedford’s health deteriorated. His regular physician was replaced by the Joker-like Dr. Able. Nelson visited Bedford on his deathbed, and, to his surprise, the man about to be frozen was awake. According to Nelson, he said in a whisper: “I have little hope of ever being reanimated, Mr. Nelson, but I believe in the future of cryonics. I hope my children or grandchildren will benefit from the inevitable medicine of the future.”[21] Nelson would much later be found to be economical with the truth in his recollections of the past, so it’s hard to imagine Bedford offered up such a tantalizing soundbite as he lay dying, but perhaps it reflected his general sentiment.
On January 12, 1967, Nelson had just collected the last of the chemicals when Dr. Able called to say Bedford was dead, way ahead of schedule. Able managed to keep Bedford’s body cold with whatever ice he could get his hands on, while Nelson rushed to reach the nursing home where Bedford had died. When he got there, he was joined by Prehoda and Dr. Brunol, and they set about packing the body with more ice before injecting the chemicals (essentially, biological antifreeze). They used the heart compressor device sent by Ettinger to pump the solution around Bedford’s body, and after two hours of work, the primitive procedure was completed. The team moved the body into a container packed with dry ice and stored it at Prehoda’s house.
The cryonics community rejoiced. Cooper responded in the hastily written and distributed January issue of Freeze-Wait-Reanimate with enthusiasm and a positive report on the procedure.[22] He believed there was hope of reanimating Bedford in the future and suggested nursing homes would be the best place to carry out subsequent preservations. Cooper also expressed surprise that cryonics skeptic Prehoda had participated in what they saw as a landmark case. Ettinger opined:
Readers of the LES newsletter will probably be surprised to know that Mr. Prehoda provided such important help, in view of his expressed pessimism. He remains more pessimistic than most of us, and in fact says that at this date he still would not choose freezing for his own family, but it is greatly to his credit that he recognizes the possible validity of other viewpoints and is willing to help the optimists in practice. His chief concern remains to stimulate greater support for research, and we all agree on the importance of this.
However, it seems the extent of Prehoda’s involvement surprised nobody more than his own wife. The CSC team stored Bedford’s frozen corpse in Prehoda’s garage. Next morning, his wife Claudette learned there was a dead body being stored on her property. She freaked out, telling him he had six hours to remove the body or she would call the police.
Nelson somehow managed to convince his “first-class hippie” secretary and her husband to keep the body in their home in Topanga Canyon. He hauled the container holding the body into his pickup truck and sped over to the new temporary lodgings. Bedford’s corpse stayed there for a week before his son transferred the body to the Cryo-Care Equipment company in Phoenix, Arizona, where he could be placed in a cryogenic capsule. The maker of the capsule was Ed Hope, described by UPI as a “former night club owner and oilman” who was currently working as a wigmaker. Bedford’s family paid him $4,000 for his services.
As if the previous week’s events hadn’t been entertaining enough, they were amplified by leading figures in the cryonics world descending on Los Angeles in pilgrimage. Ettinger himself flew into California from Detroit and appeared on The Johnny Carson Show (Zsa Zsa Gabor was apparently the other guest), as well as other celebrity talk shows. Meanwhile, the scientific advisory council of the CSC dissolved immediately and told Prehoda not to mention any of their names, as they didn’t want to be associated with any part of the whole operation.
That same year, easily the most monumental in the industry’s history up to that point, the cryonics community again went to war with one another. In 1967, Nelson froze another person through his California-based organization, a woman named Marie Phelps-Sweet who had been a prominent member of the early cryonics community. Three weeks after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality, she wrote to Ettinger expressing her support for the concept of cryonics. “Zestful living has been a long-time hobby of mine, so zestful departure from this vale, via freezeration, is a welcome release from the degrading and wasteful concepts of the past…What bothers me now is how any thoughtful people can fail to realize the scope of the program…[is] more immediate and necessary,” the letter read. She threw herself into the cryonics cause and joined LES. Cooper said in his December 1964 newsletter: “We are fortunate in having the marvelous support and inestimable services of Marie Phelps-Sweet, our Western Coordinator in Santa Barbara. She is the spark-plug of LES.”[23]
Two years later she became involved with Nelson’s CSC, and both she and her husband Russ Van Norden agreed to be frozen when they died. Van Norden’s time appeared to have arrived first when he had a heart attack in April 1967. Nelson and his team coordinated with the hospital in anticipation of freezing the body, but he recovered. Just four months later, Sweet was found dead in a Santa Monica hotel room. The events that followed caused another severe rupture in the cryonics community.
Sweet was taken to a mortuary, and the undertaker, having found a card she kept on her stating she was to be frozen, rang Cooper on a collect call to ask for advice on what to do with the body. Cooper refused to pay for the charges, believing it was a crank call, and hung up on the undertaker. “All I can say,” a mortuary employee told the Glendale News-Press at the time, “is that it must be a pretty secret society. I called all up and down the West Coast trying to locate a representative.”[24]
As a result, Sweet’s body spent three days in a mortuary freezer before anyone could cryopreserve her.
Eventually, Nelson and his team froze Sweet’s body, but Dr. Able was quoted in the Glendale News-Press saying the procedure was nothing more than a publicity stunt given the amount of time between Sweet’s death and when she was frozen. To add to the drama, there were no mortuary facilities available, so the team had to take the body to the CSC offices, where it was technically illegal to work on it. Sweet was an incredibly popular member of the cryonics community, and yet she was let down. Accusations quickly began to fly. Another CSC member, Russ Stanley, attempted to find out where Sweet was being stored, and when he couldn’t reach Nelson, he wrote to Cooper expressing his frustration. “I’m not picking at him, but if this is a downright hoax, then I’d rather have no one [at all] than [someone like] Nelson. He has alienated himself from those who wanted to help, but demanded to know where the money was going.”
When Ettinger got wind of the situation, he sprung to the defense of his protégé Nelson. “I must comment on what I consider the shameful attitude you and Russ Stanley are displaying toward Bob Nelson,” he wrote in a letter to Cooper which was also sent to other cryonics organizations. “There is nothing to justify your suspecting him of a ‘hoax’ in Marie’s freezing; quite the contrary.” He then chewed Cooper out over the refused collect call, describing it as “one of the most stupid and irresponsible things I’ve ever heard of.”
The October issue of Freeze-Wait-Reanimate made it clear how much Ettinger’s letter had hurt Cooper. Two weeks after the newsletter was distributed, the LES was to host its fifth conference for the cryonics community. Cooper canceled it, blaming the fallout from Sweet’s death. “First, an unexpected increase of mail came, much of which remains unanswered and a corresponding backlog of office work has accumulated. Second, a very nasty letter was received from a usually respected authority in the freezing movement accusing the President of LES of poor judgment, bad motives, stupidity, irresponsibility, etc., etc. a letter that a paranoid would consider a veiled threat,” Cooper wrote.[25]
Although the event did go ahead the following year, the LES effectively ceased to function by 1970. Cooper became marginalized in cryonics. He attempted to build his own cryobiology laboratory, which would also serve as a storage center for cryopreserved people. He was not wealthy but in 1968 managed to borrow enough money to purchase land in Maryland, where he built a small facility. However, his hopes were ruined when the basement flooded and he couldn’t fix the damage.[26]
Cooper, who had done so much to organize the movement, walked away from cryonics. His former wife Mildred attributed his abrupt exit to “overload, burn-out, and a general sense that it was not going to be a viable option in his lifetime.” He focused his attention on his other passion, sailing. In 1982, he left Martha’s Vineyard in his boat The Pelican, heading for his home in Beaufort, South Carolina, but never reached his destination. Cooper’s body was never found, and he was lost at sea forever.[27] He never returned to cryonics, despite having his hunch over Nelson’s conduct proved accurate. After Bedford’s freezing, the story of the most successful man in cryonics quickly turned both gruesome and tragic.
In the aftermath of the Bedford preservation, Nelson was slightly underwhelmed. The media attention was impressive, but somehow it didn’t translate into genuine inquiries from people who wanted to be frozen. He also battled new competition. Organizations around the country, buoyed by his success, started accepting patients. One such company was Cryo-Care, where Bedford’s relatives had taken him to be fitted for a capsule. The Arizona firm was run by the wigmaker Ed Hope, whose interest in cryonics was purely financial.[28] He built his own capsules, which were easily transported around as they had wheels. Hope advertised his services as purely cosmetic rather than a means to be reanimated in the future, but it didn’t deter the cryonics enthusiasts knocking on his door. He froze a man named Louis Nisco in September 1967 following a sizable delay after the time of death. Eva Schilman followed the next year, along with a third patient, a man who had committed suicide. All three were stored at the company. But after just two years Hope realized he wasn’t going to make a profit from freezing the dead and told relatives they must find alternative means of storage for their frozen loved ones. Schilman was driven around in a truck packed with dry ice for a period by her son before being handed over to a mortuary and buried. The man who committed suicide was also buried by his son a year later. Nisco ended up at CSC with Nelson.
In the eighteen months after he froze Bedford, Nelson attempted three more cryopreservations.
The first was Sweet, the case that provoked skepticism from Cooper. Nelson realized neither she nor her husband had enough money to cover the upkeep of her body. Cryo capsules, like those built by Hope, could keep bodies preserved effectively but needed topping up with liquid nitrogen every now and then and were expensive to procure. The only other option was to keep the body stored in a container and pack it with dry ice, a much more labor-intensive process. Nelson attempted to raise the thousands of dollars needed to buy a capsule for Sweet but fell short, so he resorted to Plan B, paying $90 a week for the dry ice. He stored the body at the mortuary of Joseph Klockgether, a new CSC recruit whose skills as a mortician were very much welcomed.
Helen Kline, another CSC member, whose house was used for Nelson’s first-ever LES meeting, was frozen next. Again, she lacked the riches required to pay for her body’s long-term upkeep, but Nelson went ahead and placed her in the same dry ice container as Sweet. Stanley, another paid-up member who accused Nelson of being a fraud after Sweet’s preservation, soon joined them. Nelson was certain Stanley had settled his affairs to ensure his suspension was fully funded but was again left disappointed: he’d left just $10,000 in his will to CSC. The funding provided some relief to the society’s stretched finances, but Nelson still found himself in an awkward and draining situation with three bodies stored in one container. And the bodies couldn’t stay at the mortuary for long. A state rule forbade holding corpses at mortuaries for more than six months, and Klockgether began putting pressure on Nelson to move the container.
Nelson came up with an unorthodox but surprisingly impressive plan. He found a plot with an underground crypt at the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, a suburb of L.A.[29] The team would need to make changes to the crypt, but legally the bodies would be interred in a cemetery with no limit to how long they could be kept there. But until he could afford a capsule, even a crypt couldn’t save him from financial difficulties. Luckily, Hope’s exit from the cryonics game meant a capsule landed in Nelson’s lap. The only problem was it was occupied.
In late 1968, Marie Brown called the CSC and explained her predicament: Hope was shutting shop, and her father Louis Nisco needed a new home.[30] Nelson smelled an opportunity. He agreed to take Nisco’s body—capsule and all—and store it in the cemetery for $150 a month. He even paid the remaining balance she owed for the capsule. Nelson hatched another plan, this time a little less ingenious.[31]
The way Nelson saw it, Nisco’s capsule was a little roomy. He planned to open it up and give him some company—the three bodies he was storing in the cemetery. He didn’t tell Brown her father was about to get three new roommates, let alone any relatives of the other three deceased. The plan worked perfectly: Nelson now had four frozen people in a single-person capsule, but nowhere to store them. The crypt worked well for the low-maintenance container packed with dry ice, but a capsule would need electricity, ventilation, and access to refill it with liquid nitrogen. He stored the capsule in a nearby heavy equipment yard while he searched for a solution, but new problems continued to arise. The capsule was leaking and needed a vacuum pump to make sure there was a sufficient seal between the inner wall and the outer chamber. The leak meant the liquid nitrogen needed to be replaced every week instead of every month, while the vault itself was filling with water and needed to be pumped out regularly.
The pressure was getting to Nelson. Money was running out. In the run-up to a 1970 cryonics conference held in L.A., he managed to get the crypt in decent enough shape to accept visitors and showed some enthusiasts around. He hoped that display would encourage donations, the bigger the better. But the event came and went, and the CSC left empty-handed.[32] The money ran out, and Nelson could no longer afford the liquid nitrogen. Now he faced the unthinkable. With no liquid nitrogen and a leaky capsule, the temperature of the preserved bodies would quickly climb. The people stored in the cylinder were not just pioneers of cryonics, they were also Nelson’s friends. At some point in 1970, Nelson drove out into the desert, emotional and disconsolate, and said a ceremonial goodbye to his frozen comrades.[33] Then he let them decompose.
For many, that horrendous experience would have turned them off cryonics for life. Nelson had given a large part of his third decade to the endeavor, to receive only scant acknowledgement. But a few months after he abandoned the capsule, he received a call from two brothers in Iowa and jumped right back in, hoping for a fresh start. Dennis and Terry Harrington offered a $10,000 donation for Nelson to freeze their mother Mildred’s body, ship it to California, and keep it in temporary storage.[34] They would pay $150 a month to keep it in a container with dry ice until CSC finished building a thirty-person cylinder, a long-term plan that never reached fruition.
Nelson was back in the body-freezing game, and in July 1971 was contacted by the father of a seven-year-old girl who was terminally ill. Genevieve de la Poterie had a Wilms tumor, which was fatal at that time. Her father, Guy de la Poterie, wanted her body to be preserved but seemed to lack the resources for the eternal upkeep.[35] Again, Nelson couldn’t find it in himself to turn the desperate family down. Genevieve was transferred from her native Montreal to a hospital in California, and Nelson grew close with the family and the girl, even taking her to Disneyland before she died.[36] After she passed, Nelson oversaw the freezing procedure and placed her in temporary suspension with Mildred Harrington.
Later, he welcomed another guest at the Chatsworth cemetery plot, Steven Mandell, whose mother was having issues keeping him stored in a similar facility on the East Coast. He also helped a man named Nick de Blasio set up a chamber in a New Jersey cemetery for his frozen wife and agreed to store Pedro Ledesma in a paid-for capsule.[37] Now Nelson had four bodies to care for. Mandell and Ledesma were in a cryonics capsule, meaning they just needed the liquid nitrogen topped up monthly, but the other two, Harrington and young Genevieve, were being stored in a temporary container and needed their dry ice replaced each week. Facing a similar workload to before, he revived an old plan. He cut off the top of Mandell’s capsule and placed the bodies of Genevieve and Harrington inside with him.
Nelson enlisted the help of a welder to work on the job, which took a full day. The welder later said that as he was fixing the top back on, he could smell burning hair, such was the proximity of the three crammed bodies to his equipment.[38] Another person who worked on the procedure said the bodies initially wouldn’t fit into the capsule because they were too rigid and frozen. Nelson reportedly took a hairdryer and began thawing out parts of their bodies so they could all be slid into the container.[39] The resurrected plan ran into familiar problems—the capsule was not well made. And when Nelson was away on vacation in Boston in 1974, the pump failed. He returned to the cemetery and found that far from being freezing cold, the capsule was incredibly hot.[40] He instantly knew all three bodies were already irretrievably decomposed.
Nelson claimed he contacted the relatives of Genevieve and Harrington to tell them the capsule had failed and their loved ones had been without cooling for several days. The way Nelson tells it, they replied nonchalantly, simply telling him to start it back up again despite knowing any hope of resurrection was almost certainly gone. Both Genevieve’s father and Harrington’s son later told a journalist from This American Life that Nelson never spoke to them.[41] Either way, he had the pump fixed, replaced the liquid nitrogen, and continued to maintain a capsule full of dead bodies which had absolutely no chance of being resurrected. He even continued to add people to the vault at Chatsworth.
In October 1974, Nelson agreed to place six-year-old Sam Porter in storage in the cemetery.[42] Porter’s father paid for a cryonics capsule and for the upkeep. But Nelson’s other charges were not paying for themselves. According to the beleaguered CSC president, he received no money from Mandell’s mother, or the sons of Harrington. Guy de la Poterie sent the occasional $50 or $100, but that was all the money coming in, and the liquid nitrogen expenses were crippling Nelson financially.[43]
Three years after the second capsule failed, Nelson admitted defeat. His wife had divorced him, and he was neglecting his children. He told the families of the dead he was financially and emotionally exhausted and would no longer be taking care of the vault. Around March 1979, Nelson cut open the capsules and took out the bodies.[44] Genevieve and Sam Porter were taken to a mortuary and buried conventionally in Orange County. Harrington, Mandell, and Ledesma were placed in metal boxes, while the original frozen members, Nisco, Sweet, Stanley, and Kline, were left sealed in the capsule. It was a sorry end to Nelson’s great experiment, but his life in cryonics still had one painful and expensive twist.
Unhappy relatives of those left to rot in the Chatsworth vault sued Nelson. In the court case, he was portrayed as a cult leader trying to scam mourning people at their most vulnerable. In 1981, Nelson and the mortician Klockgether were both told to pay $400,000 in damages to relatives.[45] Klockgether paid the fee using his malpractice insurance. Nelson had no such insurance and was left financially decimated. The affair was labeled the Chatsworth disaster, a low point for the young cryonics industry.
Thus, the three pioneers of cryonics met vastly different fates. Cooper died first and died permanently, his body never found. Opinion on Nelson varied within the community. Some felt he did the best he could with the resources he had, while others labeled him a con artist and a fraudster. He wrote two books about his experience in cryonics and died in 2018. He was cryopreserved and stored at the Cryonics Institute, where he was reunited with his old mentor and inspiration Ettinger. His former collaborator and codefendant Klockgether oversaw the procedure.[46] Ettinger, the grandfather of cryonics, enjoyed the happiest ending. He was well respected in the cryonics community throughout his life. Stanley Kubrick, in the wake of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, spoke admiringly of Ettinger and his work, saying, “I believe that freezing of the dead will be a major industry in the United States and throughout the world; I would recommend it as a field of investment for imaginative speculators.”[47]
Ettinger died in 2012. He was also cryopreserved at the organization he formed in 1976.
After the Chatsworth disaster, cryonics needed new faces to advance the practice and restore its reputation. Happily, there was already a new generation of eccentrics ready to take up the challenge.