Caretakers George Carter and Frank Brothers, who had been alternating twelve-hour shifts and staying with Williams throughout the day, told the legal team that Claudia had not been there on November 2. Carter remembered easily, because he said Claudia called him on Sunday the fifth, furious he had not told her that Ted was in the hospital. Brothers was also present when Claudia called, and he talked with her as well that day: “I was right there when Claudia called George on the fifth, screaming and yelling, ‘I thought you were my friend,’ ” he recalled. “She’d just found out her father was in the hospital on the fifth. And George is trying to explain to her, ‘Look, John-Henry said he would call you.’ And I got on the phone and told Claudia that as well, and she said, ‘You guys should’ve known better. You should have just called me.’ Now, how could she have been in that room to sign that on the second when she didn’t even know her father was in the hospital on the second?”9 Furthermore, Brothers and Carter stressed that between them, they were with Ted twenty-four hours a day, and at no time during his Shands hospitalization were John-Henry and Claudia with him alone.
Rick Kerensky, Ted’s cardiologist, had introduced Claudia to his assistant, Carmichael, on the morning of November 6 before the pacemaker surgery. “When Kerensky introduced me to Claudia, she made excuses why she had not been there for the catheter because of her work,” Carmichael said. “Her work wouldn’t let her off or whatever. I remember that very well. She also told me about a car accident she got into the night before, on the fifth—she rear-ended someone at the bottom of the exit ramp near the hospital after driving up.”
Nevertheless, as the controversy over the authenticity of the pact raged in the press, John-Henry approached Kerensky and asked him to sign a statement attesting that Claudia was at Shands on the night of November 2. The doctor agreed. Several years later, Kerensky concluded in an interview that he no longer could be sure his letter was correct. “I felt signing the letter was the right thing to do at the time,” he said. “But I’ve got to admit, I was very naive. I wasn’t thinking, ‘This was why he was doing that.’ Can I absolutely recall that date? No. I did the best I could.”10
During the course of several taped interviews with me that began in 2004, Claudia spoke for the first time in detail about how the pact came to be signed, saying in the end that Ted did agree to the procedure and that it was easy to get him to do so simply by framing the issue as something that was vitally important to John-Henry and to her. She stressed that the crude note had never been intended for public consumption, and she vigorously defended her and her brother’s right to do whatever they wanted with their father’s remains—as is the general legal standard for next of kin. She also insisted that she was at Shands Hospital on November 2, 2000, and disputed the accounts of Carter, Brothers, and Carmichael, who each said she was not. But one key piece of evidence that she said would prove she was there on the second—her car accident—had the opposite effect when the accident report showed that the mishap occurred on November 5.
Claudia said she, Ted, and John-Henry had not discussed cryonics as a threesome before, nor had she and her brother planned to sign a pact with their father. It just happened spontaneously the night of November 2, though they were mindful of his failing health and his surgical procedure the next day. When she arrived, she said she did not see either Brothers or Carter and that they were not in Ted’s private room within the intensive care unit at the time.
According to Claudia, Ted was sitting up in his bed with a tube of oxygen attached to his nose when the following conversation ensued:
“Dad, remember all the conversations we’ve had about cryonics, and I would want you to do that?” John-Henry began.
“Yeah,” said Ted.
“You know, I’ve talked to Claudia about it. We’ve talked a lot about it, and we really want to do it, too.”
Williams turned to Claudia and said: “You’re in on this, too?” She smiled and nodded.
“We really want to do it,” John-Henry continued.
“I know, I know.”
“And you know we’re really worried about you, and you know we really love you.”
“I know you do, and I love you, too.”
“Will you please promise us that we can do this, that we will do this as a family?”
Ted paused before answering, closed his eyes, and seemed to get annoyed that he was being pressed on the subject. But Claudia was sure this was just a pose that he affected to assert his control, a drumroll before he replied.
“You can do whatever you want with me,” he finally said. “I’ve had a great life. Whatever you want to do with me is fine.”
John-Henry brightened. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s all sign it. Let’s all make a pact. Let’s all agree, among us, that we’ll do this. We’ll promise each other right now that we’ll do it.”
“And that’s exactly how it went down,” Claudia said. John-Henry “reached over, and he grabbed a piece of paper and ripped off the bottom because it had something written on it that was from the hospital. Then he wrote out the words right there, using that portable tray that hospitals use to serve food, you know?
“He grabbed it and wrote it, just like that. He read it out loud to Dad and me, and we signed it. This was for us. It was a moment. It was a very private moment that was for us. It was our Bible, okay? It was ours to have, to know it was okay, that we were all going to do it.”
John-Henry signed first, then gave the pen he used to his father. Then Ted signed. Claudia said she grabbed a different pen that was closer to her, and she signed. “I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Ted said with what Claudia interpreted as loving sarcasm.
She conceded that her father had said many times that he wanted to be cremated, but she said that he changed his mind as he grew closer to his younger children. “It’s true he said he wanted to be cremated often. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the last year and a half of his life, Dad changed a lot, and it was because he was with us, and because we were living with him, helping him, working with him, loving him, caring for him, you know? And he knew that. And he knew that John-Henry and I both were struggling with the fact that right when we were starting to get to know him and love him and understand him, we were losing him, you know? And it was awful. We didn’t want that to happen. So I know he did it for us. There’s no doubt in my mind. And he’s like, ‘What the hell, who knows, it might happen,’ you know.”
Ultimately, Claudia thought, getting Ted to agree was “easy. It was easy! If your kids came to you and said, ‘Dad, please. Dad, please. We’re going to miss you so much. Give us something to hold on to. Just sign this.’ Are you going to say no to your kids?”
After the pact was signed, John-Henry looked at his sister and held it up with a smile, almost in triumph. Then he tucked the note in his pocket.
The very crudeness of the pact attests to the fact that it was never meant for public consumption, Claudia said—merely as a private expression of a decision taken. “John-Henry and I never wanted to bring that note out. We were praying that we would never have to bring that note out. Because we knew it’s crude. It’s stained. But we never thought we would have to use it. Never! Never! It was among us. It was us. And there were three people in that room: John-Henry, me, and Dad. Then after Dad died it was for two of us to hold on to when we lost the third leg of our stool. The only reason we brought out the note was because we were afraid Bobby-Jo was going to take it all away. It wasn’t meant to be shown. It’s a pact. It was our little secret.”
She bitterly resented that they were forced to reveal that their father’s remains were frozen in the first place, that their privacy was invaded, their beliefs questioned. “Why do I have to prove anything to anybody? I’m certainly not going to tell you that you have to cremate your mother. I wouldn’t say to someone, ‘Give it up. God doesn’t exist.’ Don’t stomp on my faith. I’ll stomp on yours. It’s private, personal family business, and people forget that but
for a jealous, estranged daughter, it never would have been made public.
“Everybody wants to say something bad about John-Henry and I. What we did! What did we really do? Think about it. What did we really do? We loved our dad. There was no greater love, in my opinion, that existed than between John-Henry and his father. No greater love. And then you have someone like Bobby-Jo, who resented it and was going to fight it the only way she knew how: by telling vicious, mean lies. She did whatever she could to just tear us down. She got an awful lot of people out there thinking John-Henry was an awful boy. I’m ‘Fraudia’ and John-Henry’s ‘Freezer Boy.’ I mean, that’s pretty crude. It was just awful.”
After the pact was signed, Claudia said John-Henry put it in a folder he carried with him in his car and apparently forgot about it. “He lived in his car.”
Seventeen months went by. In the days following Ted’s death, as pressure mounted to prove what Williams’s wishes truly were, John-Henry and Claudia met at Ted’s house with Goldman and with Eric Abel, who was helping to map out a legal strategy. Goldman said the way he read Florida law, they were going to need something in writing from Ted saying he wished to be cryonically preserved.
“When Goldman left the house, John-Henry said to me, ‘You know, Claudia and I and Dad signed something, but I don’t know if it’s what Goldman’s looking for,’ ” Abel recalled. “I said anything Ted signed, even on a napkin, would help their case. He started telling me about this note. I asked him where it was. He didn’t know. Next day, John-Henry said, ‘I looked here, looked there, couldn’t find it.’ I said, ‘Keep looking.’ Finally he found it and showed it to me. I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It was just amazing he had it in writing. It was like finding a gold mine. The crudity of the document meant nothing to me. He said it was in the trunk of the car.”11
On why Ted signed the pact as Ted Williams rather than Theodore S. Williams, which had been his habit when signing any kind of official document, Claudia said: “Dad for the last probably five years of his life didn’t have to sign any more official documents because John-Henry did that for him. All Daddy had to do was practice ‘Ted Williams’ so that he could sign memorabilia for John-Henry. It was easy. Dad at that time could barely see. But he could basically close his eyes and sign ‘Ted Williams.’ ”
On why John-Henry called Shands Hospital on July 10 and asked for the date of Ted’s catheterization procedure, Claudia said she had not known that he did. “Let’s just assume for a second that John-Henry did make that phone call, and he asked for the date because he wanted to make sure he had the right date on the note, and the whole damn thing is forged, you know? With that aside, what is so wrong with what he did? Dad died, okay? Dad died. He left two children behind that were heartbroken that they had lost their father. Two children behind that for the last good three years of his life were around him all the time, okay? What is so wrong? Why, why do people want to just say, ‘Aha! Look at that! They’re bad. They did something wrong.’ The fuck we did!”
And Claudia bristled when considering Carter’s and Brothers’s accounts that she could not have been at the hospital on November 2. “I can’t believe that they have the nerve to say I wasn’t there then, because I had an accident that day on the way up to be there. So I mean, it is crazy. I was rushing to get up there and I had a car accident. Right off the exit, near the hospital. I had to go see a doctor while I was there just to make sure I was okay.” Yet when Claudia learned that the accident report placed her in Gainesville on November 5, not November 2, she was devastated and burst into tears. “I know it happened,” she said, referring to the written pact. “But now you won’t believe me! I know what I felt, saw, and lived.”12
Bobby-Jo’s lawyers thought the fact that Ted, when he was alive, had never applied to Alcor himself cast further doubt on what his true wishes were. And the fact that John-Henry had not bothered to fill out an application on his father’s behalf until after Ted died raised an interesting legal question: while the son’s power of attorney clearly empowered him to deal with Alcor on Ted’s behalf while he was alive, after Williams died, didn’t John-Henry’s power of attorney expire as well? This was an issue that young Williams’s attorneys were not anxious to litigate. One of them, Peter Sutton, acknowledged that the power of attorney did die with Ted, while Eric Abel thought John-Henry still might have some wiggle room. “Many lawyers would say no, the power of attorney does die on his death,” Abel said. “But that doesn’t mean some attorneys wouldn’t argue that there are residual powers. If it helps my client, I would argue it.”
As John-Henry and Alcor waited for the question of Ted’s wishes to be resolved in court, they were facing other difficulties, since it appeared that their compliance with multiple sections of Florida law regulating anatomical gifts could be challenged unless the pact was accepted. The law at the time said that if a decedent did not execute an agreement to make an anatomical gift while he was alive, as Ted had not, certain “classes of persons” could make the donation for him upon his death. The first class was the spouse, but Ted was not married when he died. The second class was “an adult son or daughter of the decedent.” But the law went on to say that a person in this class could only make the donation “in the absence of actual notice of contrary indications by the decedent or actual notice of opposition by a member of the same… class,” such as Bobby-Jo.*
Moreover, the Florida law placed restrictions on the “donee,” in this case Alcor, if the children were making the gift. The statute said: “If the donee has actual notice of contrary indications by the decedent or… actual notice that a gift by a member of a class is opposed by a member of the same or prior class, the donee shall not accept the gift.”
Alcor seemed particularly vulnerable on the question of whether it had been given notice of Bobby-Jo’s opposition to the cryonics procedure, since early on the afternoon of Ted’s death, hours before his body left Florida, she had e-mailed Alcor to notify it that she was opposed to her father being frozen. But the company went ahead anyway. In accepting Ted’s body, Alcor also seemed to have violated its own policy. The company had a clause in its “Third Party Application for Membership,” filled out by John-Henry for Ted, that explicitly stated that if an applicant had a will specifying that he wished to be cremated, the agreement to freeze the person would be invalid. Included in the Alcor application were two questions, each followed by Yes and No boxes to check: “Does Donor have a will?” and “If ‘Yes,’ does it include any provisions contrary to cryonics?” John-Henry did not answer either question.*
Abel said that the night Ted died, Alcor called John-Henry and asked him to sign some of the documents again. “They were making up the agreement and wanted it resigned, making it more specific to the case,” Abel recalled. “Then they wanted Claudia as next of kin also.” That was probably because Alcor knew that, unlike Florida law, the Arizona statute on anatomical gifts had language specifying that in the event of a conflict between the decedent’s children over whether to donate the body, the majority ruled. Claudia signed her set of papers and faxed them to Alcor between 9:10 and 9:33 p.m. eastern time on July 5, 2002. More than twelve hours after Ted’s death, she officially became the majority vote.
And there were still other problems: though Ted’s body was flown from Florida to Arizona, only Florida law likely governed the transaction under the legal test of “significant contacts.” When the laws of two states might conflict, the law of the state where the principals involved have the most “significant contacts” takes precedence. Ted lived in Florida, his estate was probated there, and all three of his children lived in Florida.
When the cryonics news became public, John-Henry entered into a negotiation with Alcor, asking for concessions on its $170,000 bill ($120,000 of the bill was for Ted’s “whole-body” procedure, which covered his trunk, and $50,000 of it was for the “neuro”). John-Henry thought a deep discount was appropriate, if not a waiving of the fees altogether, given the publicity boon the com
pany was getting—indeed, he was even willing to consider waiving the confidentiality provision to let Alcor speak about Ted publicly if the price was right.
But Alcor balked, pointing to its costs in chartering the private jet that flew Williams’s body from Florida to Arizona and arguing that it was incurring extra costs because of new security demands and having to add people to handle all the phone calls they were getting. The company knew it had the upper hand, since John-Henry had failed to negotiate any price concessions when he had far more leverage—when Ted was alive. Now Williams was dead, and Alcor had his body.
The Alcorians were worried about Bobby-Jo going to court, and when John-Henry and Claudia produced the written pact, there was considerable relief—and a touch of skepticism—in Scottsdale. “When the note was revealed it buttressed our position internally that even though we never met Ted Williams and no one ever spoke to Ted Williams, this at least indicated that John-Henry had talked to Ted and Claudia in this bemusing note hidden in the trunk,” said Bill Haworth. “But the note seemed so bizarre. You had to question it. It didn’t pass the smell test, but that’s what we ended up with. Alcor and Jerry Lemler were just so thrilled with the prospects of someone like Ted Williams becoming a patient, as they called him, they didn’t want to even suggest that John-Henry didn’t discuss it with his father. They wanted to believe it was the truth because that validated what Alcor wanted to gain. We were also worried about John-Henry’s power of attorney and whether it could survive Ted’s death. Was he carrying out his father’s wishes or his own?”
John-Henry thought there was a real possibility that Bobby-Jo would win her legal challenge and that Ted’s body would be ordered out of Alcor. But, he confided to his girlfriend at the time, Jenna Bernreuter, he had a contingency plan in place: if Bobby-Jo succeeded, he would move Ted’s body to a cryonics facility in Germany, where, his research indicated, the legal climate was more favorable.13
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 100