Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Six members of a laboratory group who were detained in January during a search for a missing frozen head have filed false arrest claims with Riverside County totaling $225,000. The claims for damages stem from the December beheading of 83-year-old Dora Kent so her head could be frozen for theoretical revival at a future date. The six members of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation were detained by Riverside police Jan. 7 as officers searched the premises.

Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams was decapitated by surgeons at the cryonics company where his body is suspended in liquid nitrogen, and several samples of his DNA are missing, Sports Illustrated reported. The magazine's report, appearing in this week's issue, is based on internal documents, e-mails, photographs and tape recordings supplied by a former employee of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

An organization that freezes the bodies of the dead in hopes that they may be revived in the future filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against state health officials. The lawsuit was filed by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Riverside and an unidentified Los Angeles man who said the state will not issue the permit necessary for him to have his body placed in so-called cryonic suspension after his death. The suit seeks to have David W.

Seven shiny stainless steel containers, each 9 feet tall, offer no hint of their contents. Certainly no one would guess that one of baseball's greatest players, the Splendid Splinter himself, is stored upside down inside one of them, preserved at minus-320 degrees. Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 in the majors, is among 18 people whose bodies have been frozen with care -- inside and out -- in a process known as cryonic suspension.

A UCLA Medical Center research associate has been placed on leave while university police investigate whether medical equipment seized at a Riverside cryonics laboratory was stolen from UCLA, a spokesman said Wednesday. Jerry Leaf, who keeps an office at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation laboratory in Riverside, was expected to remain on leave with pay for at least 15 days, UCLA spokesman Richard Elbaum said.

Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams was decapitated by surgeons at the cryonics company where his body is suspended in liquid nitrogen, and several samples of his DNA are missing, Sports Illustrated reported. The magazine's report, appearing in this week's issue, is based on internal documents, e-mails, photographs and tape recordings supplied by a former employee of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

A cryonics laboratory under investigation for homicide in the beheading of an 83-year-old woman has frozen and stored another body at the facility without legal permission to do so, authorities said Thursday. The body of an elderly man who died May 7 of heart disease at his home in south Florida was transported by air to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation laboratory here the following day and suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen, authorities said.

While Richard C. Jones' body lay suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen at a warehouse in Riverside on Tuesday, a bitter tug-of-war commenced in Los Angeles Superior Court over the Emmy-winning television producer's deathbed decision to change his will, cutting by half the $10-million legacy he had previously left to a cryonics laboratory. In 1987, Jones, who worked under the name of Dick Clair, set up a will and trust to give his $1-million Toluca Lake estate and residuals from hit televisions shows, including "It's a Living," to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Riverside, which freezes bodies in hopes of reviving them at some future date.

UCLA police on Wednesday asked Riverside County prosecutors to bring grand theft and possession of stolen property charges against a cryonics laboratory here allegedly in possession of more than $7,000 worth of equipment stolen from the UCLA Medical Center, a university spokesman said. The investigators "are submitting crime reports to the district attorney's office seeking criminal filings for grand theft and receiving stolen property," said UCLA School of Medicine spokesman Rich Elbaum.

The Riverside County coroner's office has determined that the death of an 83-year-old woman, whose head was severed and frozen in hopes that future science would reanimate her with a new body, was a "homicide," resulting from a lethal dose of a barbiturate. Calling the death of Dora Kent the "killing of a human being by another," a coroner's official said late Tuesday that the case has been turned over to the district attorney's office for further investigation and possible criminal charges.

It stands 10 feet tall and gives off a loud, gasping hiss from its nozzles and gauges. It looks like a giant thermos, but sounds like a cappuccino maker. And it's now the resting place of perhaps the most talented hitter in baseball history. But not the final resting place, not according to officials at Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

They have boarded airplanes with a human brain as carry-on luggage, turned a bullet-riddled lawyer into a Popsicle and employed a dog surgeon to operate on people who want to conquer death. Now, after two decades of freezing heads and whole bodies for possible future revival, they have fled California. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's leading cryonics company, has packed up its icy clientele and moved to Arizona.

Prosecutors have quietly closed their investigation into the death of Dora Kent, the elderly woman whose head was cut off and frozen by a Riverside cryonics laboratory. The Riverside County district attorney's office had hoped to file homicide charges in the 1987 death of Kent, whose head was severed at Alcor Life Extension Foundation and placed in a tank of liquid nitrogen in hopes that science would one day reanimate her with a new body. But Asst. Dist. Atty.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has given renewed life to a group that freezes the dead in hopes they may be revived someday. Judge Aurelio Munoz ruled Tuesday that it is illegal for the state Department of Health Services to refuse to provide death certificates and body disposition permits for those who want their bodies frozen after death. Until now, those who had chosen to have their bodies frozen after death have been left in legal limbo.

A Superior Court judge on Friday rejected the petition of a computer consultant with an inoperable brain tumor who sued the state for the right to have his head frozen before he dies in the hope that scientists will discover a way to remove the tumor and attach the head to a healthy body. The suit, the first of its kind in the county, could have broad implications in the issue of a terminally ill person's right to choose how and when he dies.

To date, 26 people have been cryonically suspended--frozen for the future--in the United States. As it happens, 24 of them are in California, where the urge to live forever is beginning to look like a serious business. The numbers are still tiny. And cryonics, an ad hoc science that was born with the icy suspension of a Glendale physician in 1967, still faces some daunting questions about its practicality and legal status.

Coroner's investigators probing the death of an 83-year-old woman whose head was frozen by a cryonics laboratory here are waging a "vicious smear campaign" against the lab, a spokesman for the organization and the woman's son charged Monday. Michael Darwin, president of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, asserted at a press conference here that the investigation is a "witch hunt" carried out by "people who have been given guns and badges, but little training and less supervision."

Prosecutors have quietly closed their investigation into the death of Dora Kent, the elderly woman whose head was cut off and frozen by a Riverside cryonics laboratory. The Riverside County district attorney's office had hoped to file homicide charges in the 1987 death of Kent, whose head was severed at Alcor Life Extension Foundation and placed in a tank of liquid nitrogen in hopes that science would one day reanimate her with a new body. But Asst. Dist. Atty.

While Richard C. Jones' body lay suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen at a warehouse in Riverside on Tuesday, a bitter tug-of-war commenced in Los Angeles Superior Court over the Emmy-winning television producer's deathbed decision to change his will, cutting by half the $10-million legacy he had previously left to a cryonics laboratory. In 1987, Jones, who worked under the name of Dick Clair, set up a will and trust to give his $1-million Toluca Lake estate and residuals from hit televisions shows, including "It's a Living," to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Riverside, which freezes bodies in hopes of reviving them at some future date.

A cryonics laboratory and the family of an award-winning television writer whose remains were frozen at the lab are locked in a dispute over millions of dollars in residuals from hit television shows, attorneys said. The body of Richard C. Jones, a three-time Emmy Award-winning writer-producer who worked under the name Dick Clair, was frozen at Alcor Life Extension Laboratory in Riverside this week after he died of an AIDS-related illness, The San Bernardino Sun newspaper reported Friday.