The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Hooper was instructed by Eric Abel to say nothing to the press about what he did that day or how Ted’s body was disposed of. And the death certificate would be deliberately vague on that point—the place of disposition, it said, was “undetermined.”

  Bobby-Jo, meanwhile, was desperately trying to find out where her father’s body was. But John-Henry wasn’t taking her calls, so she and Mark called John Heer, a lawyer in Cleveland whose wife was a friend of Bobby-Jo’s from the time both families had lived in Nashville.* Six months earlier, Bobby-Jo had confided in Heer about John-Henry’s plans for cryonics and about the fact that he had barred her from visiting her father. Hearing that the cryonics plan was on, Heer told Mark to contact law enforcement to see if there was any way they could help. He then advised Bobby-Jo to send an e-mail to Alcor warning the company not to proceed with plans to freeze Ted. Heer, a specialist in environmental law, was not familiar with the specifics of the relevant laws, but he decided there was no harm in putting an adversary on written notice.6 Bobby-Jo went online to the Alcor website, took down the name and contact information of the first official she saw, and then, at 1:25 p.m., more than four hours before Ted’s body left Florida, sent the following e-mail to Jennifer Chapman, then Alcor’s member services administrator:

  My name is Barbara Joyce Williams Ferrell, the daughter of Ted Williams. It has come to my attention that you and your organization may be in route to Citrus County Florida, to pick up my Father’s body. I am letting you know now, “DO NOT go any further—I am opposed to this procedure and you are ‘On Notice’ at this time.” John-Henry Williams is not taking care of my Father’s last wishes. This was never my Father’s wishes, ever!

  Getting off the plane in Boston late that morning, Claudia Williams noticed large clusters of people grouped around TV sets, the telltale sign of a big breaking news story. She walked over to see what it was, only to learn her father had died.

  “I landed, saw it on the TV, turned right around at the gate, got back on the plane, and came home,” Claudia recalled. “John-Henry had been trying to get ahold of me, but my cell phone wasn’t working. I called him, and he said he’d meet me at the airport in Tampa.”7

  Claudia had sensed Ted was close to death, and she would speculate later that he had not wanted her or John-Henry to be with him when he died. Ted had called her early on the morning of July 3—to say good-bye, she felt in retrospect. “He called up, and he was having trouble breathing. It was five thirty or six in the morning. He said, ‘Claudia? Claudia? I love you! I love you! Don’t you ever forget it!’ ”

  When John-Henry met her in Tampa, Claudia was struck by how apologetic he was for not having been able to reach her. “I was afraid to ask him questions,” she recalled, “because he was driving, and I didn’t want him to cry. But he just went on, we were driving home, and on his own, he just told me everything that went down—the phone call that he got from the nurses from the house before the ambulance came and how Dad was struggling. And John-Henry was just telling me all this and crying, and I asked him, I said, ‘Did you talk to Dad at all?’ And he said he did, on the phone, in the ambulance on the way over there.” He had, he explained, called John Butcher, the attendant who was riding with Ted in the ambulance. Then Butcher had placed the phone to Ted’s ear, and she said John-Henry “yelled to him that he loved him.”

  It warmed Claudia to hear this dramatic story, and she cried as she told it years later. But according to Butcher, the story wasn’t true. There was no call from John-Henry then. “I cannot substantiate that” was the way Butcher put it—diplomatically—reaffirming that he did not speak with John-Henry until they had already arrived at the hospital and Ted was in the emergency room. The paramedic in the ambulance at the time, Teresa Fletcher, confirmed Butcher’s account.8 It was a puzzling piece of hyperbole, since while he’d been away playing baseball, John-Henry had dutifully called in daily to check on Ted, including once on July 4.

  John Heer finally reached Eric Abel in the early evening, but Abel refused to tell him what was going on or where Ted’s body was. “I remember saying, ‘Eric, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is the daughter, and she’s entitled to know what happened to her father.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s what John-Henry and Claudia want me to tell you.’ ”

  Heer appealed to the local sheriff’s office for help, as Mark Ferrell had that morning, but Heer was again told this was a family matter and that John-Henry, holding Ted’s power of attorney, had broad authority.

  At that point, Heer, Bobby-Jo, and Mark felt they had no other option but to go to the press. “We agreed if anyone can get to the bottom of this it’s going to be the press,” Heer said. “We knew time was of the essence. Alcor had a certain window of time to do what they were going to do. We didn’t know they’d already done it by Friday night.”

  Heer had grown up a Red Sox fan and knew the Boston newspapers: the Globe and the Herald. He called the Globe first. “I just called in to the news desk. They were saying, ‘Yeah, right!’ They didn’t believe me for a second. They thought I was completely nuts. I said, ‘I know you’re going to think we’re nuts, but we’re not, and we need help.’ ”

  Eventually, his call was routed to Joe Sullivan, then the assistant sports editor. An amazed Sullivan consulted with other editors, and it was decided that because the tip involved cryonics, a science reporter, Beth Daley, should pursue it. “We were really suspicious,” said Daley, a tall, thin blonde with high energy who speaks in staccato bursts. She was assigned the story between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. “It sounded so insane. I didn’t believe the editors when they told me Ted Williams’s daughter was accusing her brother of freezing Williams’s head. That’s how it was presented to me. I thought the whole thing was ludicrous and a crank.”9

  As reporters do, Daley tried to make herself an expert on the subject immediately. Wanting to get some background before interviewing Bobby-Jo, she surfed the Internet and checked past news stories about cryonics and Alcor. She called Harvard and MIT to try to round up an expert who could speak about cryonics generally, but it was after hours on a Friday night, and she got nowhere. Another reporter, Raja Mishra, gave her a quote from a cloning expert who said that while it was possible to freeze tissues and organs, they could not be thawed out without causing severe damage.

  Then Daley called Alcor. “The woman on the other line was excited and implied she couldn’t talk because she was waiting for an important phone call. She refused to say from whom. I asked her if it was about Williams, and she said, ‘I gotta go.’ ”

  After interviewing Bobby-Jo, Daley thought she sounded scared, furious, and legitimately aggrieved, but the whole story still seemed so wild. “Bobby-Jo was upset with John-Henry, alternating between tears, disbelief, anger, and assuring me her father loved her. She sounded credible, but I had never heard of this woman before, and when someone starts saying their half brother was trying to cash in on their dead father by freezing his head and selling his DNA, well, who wouldn’t be skeptical?”

  Given the lack of secondary confirmation, the Globe decided to be cautious, write a short story, and place it inside the paper, with a tease off page 1. For one thing, the front page would have to be dominated by the overarching news that Ted had died: the main obituary, reaction stories, and a piece on his legacy. And while Bobby-Jo was named and on the record as making the charge that Ted had been frozen, John-Henry, whom she was accusing of doing the deed, could not be reached for comment. In addition, Alcor wouldn’t confirm it had Ted.

  Still, Daley’s story made for gripping reading: “Ted Williams’s estranged daughter said the baseball great’s son is freezing the hitter’s body in hopes of reviving him in the future—a decision that goes against Williams’s wishes to be cremated,” the first paragraph said.

  Back at Ted’s house, John-Henry ignored all calls from reporters requesting comment on his father’s death. Instead, Eric Abel issued a statement to the Associated Press saying that the Williams family was grate
ful for the “overwhelming display of love and support” from Ted’s fans and friends. It said Ted was a private person in life and wanted to remain so in death, so there would be no funeral, and in lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be made to the Jimmy Fund or to the Ted Williams museum in Hernando.

  At the time the statement was drafted, John-Henry and Abel didn’t know that Bobby-Jo had already given interviews to the Globe and the Herald. They assumed they were still in control of the cryonics story and that Ted’s presence at Alcor remained a closely guarded secret. “Our goal was not to have this in the public arena,” said Abel. “It was for no one else’s consideration. Probably the world would have concluded we had a private ceremony, be it cremation or burial. They could have reached whatever conclusion they wanted to, in a vacuum.”10 But late that night they learned via the Internet and local television that Bobby-Jo had gone public. Abel recalled that “there was a collective ‘Oh, shit!’ ” from him and John-Henry as well as from the others present: Claudia; Al Cassidy, Ted’s executor; and Cassidy’s wife, Gloria.

  When reporters started calling Ted’s house for comment on the cryonics angle, Claudia shouted, “It’s none of their fuckin’ business! If that’s what we wanted and that’s what Dad wanted, then why don’t they leave us alone?” But they decided not to respond right away. They would wait and offer a considered reply the next day. “We didn’t want to be hasty,” Abel said. “We wanted to make a statement that addressed it all.” So for the moment, they tried to find consolation in watching the wondrous archival footage of the Kid in his prime that was being broadcast on television.11

  There was an undercurrent of tension between Claudia and John-Henry that flared occasionally. Three months earlier, John-Henry had taken the extraordinary step of suing his sister in a Florida court and winning a temporary injunction that prevented her from selling the two thousand bats that Ted had autographed and left to her as a nest egg. John-Henry, who had two thousand signed bats of his own from Ted, claimed the deal violated an agreement he had with Claudia whereby she would give him the right to buy her bats before she sold them. Claudia countersued John-Henry, and the litigation was pending. Ted had not been told about this unseemly bit of sibling rivalry.

  Now Claudia couldn’t resist remarking on the absurdity of the situation, Abel said. “Claudia would take a poke: ‘I don’t know why we’re fighting. We’ve got enough on our hands without fighting about the bats.’ Then John-Henry would jab back. That was a distraction, and Al Cassidy worked hard to resolve it.” Cassidy put John-Henry and Claudia in separate rooms and started a round of shuttle diplomacy to try to bring them to their senses. “It was one of those shocking moments in life in which I said, ‘Did I just hear that?’ ” Cassidy recalled. “Claudia was on the floor and John-Henry on the couch and I about fell off the couch. I called them in one at a time.” John-Henry seemed to enjoy the process. He told Cassidy he actually admired Claudia for standing up to him and fighting to support her bats deal. And with an almost cultish devotion to cryonics, he remarked to Gloria Cassidy that Al, knowing Ted was at Alcor, must be regretting the fact that he had not had his own dead father frozen.

  Before Ted’s cryonics procedure began in the operating room at Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale, Dave Hayes, who had accompanied Ted’s body on the plane from Ocala, briefed about a dozen technicians, support staff, and two surgeons on what had happened to that point. According to the operating room notes, the “team leader” that day was Mike Darwin. A former Alcor president, Darwin was an influential cryonicist who was presiding over Williams’s procedure as the lead surgeon. But Darwin was a dialysis technician by training, not a surgeon. Jose Kanshepolsky, a retired local surgeon under contract to Alcor who normally officiated at the group’s suspensions, as they were called, was relegated to a secondary role, assisting Darwin.

  After the procedure began and Darwin announced that they were ready to cut Ted’s head off, Hayes called a halt to the proceedings. He told the group that when he had flown to Ocala to pick up Ted’s body, John-Henry had told him he was still trying to decide which kind of procedure his father should have: the whole-body or the neuro. There were pros and cons associated with both options. One of the last things he asked of Hayes was to promise him that he would not let Alcor sever his father’s head until he was called first to give his final approval. Hayes promised.

  So Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, picked up his cell phone and called John-Henry. Lemler put his cell phone on speaker. “Four or five of us were talking to John-Henry,” said Hayes. “Jerry said, ‘This is what we want to do. I want everyone to hear.’ Most science surrounding cryonics thought a neuro was better, and so we discussed with [John-Henry] the benefits of it, and he agreed the neuro would be the way to go.”

  When Lemler’s call came in, it was after 11:00 p.m. in Citrus Hills, and John-Henry walked out on the patio to speak privately, motioning for Eric Abel to come with him. The young Williams didn’t want Claudia to hear the details of this gruesome discussion. He put his Nextel phone on speaker so Abel could be a witness and participate if he wished.

  “John-Henry thought neuro was best, but there were social considerations, too,” Abel said. “I said, ‘Whole-body sounds better. If this gets out, it’s bad enough that it’s cryonics, but neuro only is even worse. Doesn’t it sound better to say whole-body? That at least brings up an image of the whole body being together.’ So we decided to preserve the body as well. Otherwise they would have cremated it. But he did authorize the neuro. And he wanted to make sure they did as good a job as possible. In John-Henry’s mind that was most important—to get the head right.”

  But Alcor quickly picked up on the PR value of preserving Ted’s body as well. “It was initially planned to be a cephalic isolation, as they call it,” said Bill Haworth, Alcor’s strategist, referring to only the head being cut off. “But then John-Henry said to Lemler, ‘Jerry, do you really think the public would ever stand for my father, the Splendid Splinter, to have his arms not being preserved?’ So a decision was reached: not only would they separate the head, but they’d preserve the body as well.”

  With these fundamental issues resolved, Darwin picked up a carving knife and began to slice off Williams’s head. Two of the Alcorians, Charles Platt and Bobby June, had been taking pictures of all this. In addition to June and Platt, there were a gaggle of other people around and about, taking pictures of the dead Ted Williams going under the knife in a chaotic scene that was a gross breach of traditional operating room protocol.

  “Many people photographed the subsequent surgical procedure,” Platt would write of the scene in a July 30, 2003, memo to the Alcor board that criticized Lemler’s performance as CEO. “None of them signed any non-disclosure form. None of them agreed that Alcor would own the pictures. We do not know what happened to all these people with their cameras and photographs.… Security in the operating room during this case was grossly negligent.”

  Added Haworth: “From talking to people that were there and directly involved, like Lemler and others, at one point in that OR there were as many as thirty people in scrubs—cameras clicking, video cameras, and house cameras videotaping it as well. It was controlled pandemonium. I mean, everyone was there. They drove in. They flew in. Anyone with credentials, any heavy-duty cryonicist who wanted to be there was there. The plane was met at the airport by a small motorcade. I’ve seen pictures of that scene. You had sixty to seventy percent of the board, all the staff, all the big contributors. It was a who’s who list of Alcorians. I think it came as a surprise that there were so many people there taking pictures, and there was a lot of concern about the supermarket tabloids. Any tabloid would have paid six figures for one of those pictures. They had to have been skulking around, yet nothing ever appeared.”

  Also present were Alcor members in the Scottsdale area who wouldn’t have missed Ted Williams’s procedure for the world. Many of these members naturally gravitated to Alcor whenever a new patient arr
ived anyway. After all, there were only two or three procedures a year, on average, so each took on the trappings of a social event as well as what some critics thought was an overly festive atmosphere.

  “The problem I had was that when you had a suspension, it was like a circus,” said Tom Brown, an Arizona mortician who worked at Alcor for most of 2002 but did not attend the Williams procedure. “People were getting food and drink. You had about twenty or thirty people in there when you only needed about eight. It was always like a circus atmosphere. ‘We got somebody! We got somebody!’ I was disappointed to see this atmosphere of a carnival. The party was on.”12

  Back in Citrus Hills, it was time to call it a night. John-Henry walked back to Ted’s room and lay down on the king-size bed, which had a remote control that could lift the head and feet. He decided to spend the night there. It seemed a good way to stay close to his father. After he got settled under the covers, he called Jenna Bernreuter.

  “He said, ‘I’m wrapped up in Dad’s sheets,’ ” Jenna recalled.

  34

  The Pact

  News of Ted’s fate stirred national outrage. John-Henry was vilified as the bad seed who had flouted his father’s well-documented wishes to be cremated and have his ashes sprinkled in the waters off Florida. There was widespread sympathy for Bobby-Jo, who quickly vowed to go to court to “rescue my father’s body.”1 John-Henry and Claudia promised to resist her there.

  Journalist after journalist went after John-Henry’s subzero plotting: “Make no mistake: The Kid’s kid is Very Bad News, and he has saved his best/worst move for last, managing to besmirch… his father’s truly remarkable life,” wrote Bob Ryan, the Boston Globe sports columnist.2 “Because of something Ted Williams could have absolutely no control over—the dispute in his family about his remains—he has been turned into a joke,” Bob Greene lamented in the Chicago Tribune.3 In the Sporting News, Dave Kindred picked up on the same theme: “No honor attends Ted Williams frozen.… The loss of dignity comes because Williams specifically and repeatedly made known his wishes to be cremated.”4