Редактирование: History of cryonics (раздел)

== Chatsworth Scandal ==

<blockquote>''"The stench near the crypt is disarming, strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzying somersaults."'' - Walker, David: "Valley Cryonic Crypt Desecrated, Untended." Valley News newspaper, June 1979.</blockquote>

After [[#James Hiram Bedford, Dr.|James Bedford]] was cryopreserved, [[Robert Nelson]] looked for a cooperative mortician for future cases. In September of the same year, he received a letter from Joseph Klockgether, in reply to an ad placed in [http://www.abbottandhast.com/mm.html Mortuary Management magazine]. Nelson replied, claiming he had received offers from 147 mortuaries, but Mr. Klockgether's letter had caused such an impression on him that he had chosen him.

Mr. Klockgether, who owned the Renaker Mortuary at Buena Park, California; accepted the flattery which a decade later led to a million-dollar lawsuit. The first 'patient' under his care was [[#Marie Phelps-Sweet (Mrs. Russ Van Norden)|Marie Phelps-Sweet]], who died in the summer of 1967 and was stored in dry ice at the mortuary due to lack of proper storage facilities. Helen Kline followed, again suffering storage at dry ice (While it is a coolant, its temperature is significantly higher than that of Liquid Nitrogen, so long term storage causes significant decay). Mrs. Kline had virtually no money; and so Nelson continued keeping his patients in dry ice.
Decades later he complained that he had to drive 200 miles every day, carrying dry ice to mantain care, and that this ruined the upholstery of his car. (He drove a Porsche, and couldn't afford a simple dewar).

In September of 1968, [[#Russell Stanley|Russell Stanley]] (The most 'gung-ho cryonicist' Nelson had ever known) died of a heart attack. He was frozen after 24 hours of ischemia; and left behind a substantial sum of money (Between $5,000 and $10,000, according to different sources). He was the third patient to be stored in dry ice at Mr. Klockgether's mortuary, while Nelson used the funds to build a [[#Long Term Storage|storage]] facility. At this point, Mr. Klockgether was insisting that Nelson finish his facility, since a California mortuary license only allows temporary storage of dead persons. "Get your facility built, Bob." He recalled saying in a later interview "Build the facility, Bob. I have to get these people out of here!".

In 1969, the facility remained incomplete; yet Nelson gave an interview to [[#Cryonics Reports|Cryonics Reports magazine]] claiming it already existed. He claimed patients were stored in containers 14 feet in diameter (pictured), capable of holding 15 to 20 people. Each of these patients, he claimed, were stored in pods "very similar to the units that were used in ''2001: A Space Odyssey''," and were "moved by a series of stainless steel cables that guide them into position, and they can be introduced and retrieved at will". It should be noted that the picture in the magazine, besides being fake, was of a tank destined to the storage of bulk nitrogen, and could not possibly have stored cryonics patients.

Marie Bowers, daughter of [[#Louis Tom Nisco|Louis Nisco]], who had been cryopreserved by Ed Hope of CryoCare Equipment Corporation, met Nelson at a cryonics conference and showed her an artist's rendering of the facility, showing technicians with lab coats standing in front of capsules with viewing windows, gauges and dials. He convinced her to turn her father over to his care, saying he would pay $1,100 to Ed Hope to cover her long term storage debts, and she would have to pay less than $50 a month for maintenance.
Nelson opened the dewar, and placed Marie Sweet, Helen Kline and Russ Stanley inside. "We put this one in head first, that one in feet first," Klockgether stated. "It didn't look like there was room, but they fit". Later on, [[Mike Darwin]] contacted the welder that had sealed the dewar, who described it as one of the worst experiences of his life, claiming he could smell hair and flesh burning as he welded the inner can shut. The tank was only meant for one person, leaving little room for Liquid Nitrogen, something none of the relatives of any of the patients were informed of.

Unable to store it in a non-existent facility, Nelson stored it in Klockgether's garage. In July of 1970, Ms. Bowers wrote to Nelson, saying she could not continue paying, but hoping her father would remain in cryopreservation. The facility was finally completed in the same year: Two 8 by 10 feet concrete vaults undernath a 10 by 20 feet plot in the Oakwood Park Cementery in Chatsworth, California. The lot cost $3,872.

While the single storage dewar was filled with four patients; Nelson searched for new members. He visited Iowa where Terry and Dennis Harris, brothers and sons of [[#Mildred E. Harris|Mildred Harris]], said they wanted to have their mother, who they thought was dyeing, "perfectly preserved". For $10,000, he stored Harris in dry ice, and even disinterred her husband, [[#Gaylord Harris|Gaylord Harris]].

The next case was eight-year-old [[#Genevieve de la Poterie|Genevieve de la Poterie]], who died from kidney cancer that metastasized to her lungs. Nelson claimed to have a deep emotional concern for the girl, stating that he "adopted her like my own child" and that "I loved her, and I watched her slowly get sicker and sicker... I never saw this little girl smile till we took her to Disneyland... I told her mother I was going to speak French to the little girl, to make her smile, and that was the only time I saw her smile. Heartbreaking." She died in January of 1972 and was stored in dry ice.

The problem of storage was solved in the same way: [[#Steven Jay Mandell|Steven Jay Mandell]] was a 24-year-old Aerospace Engineering student who died in 1968 and was frozen by the [[#Cryonics Society of New York|Cryonics Society of New York]]. The cementery that housed CSNY's facilities evicted them, not due to unpaid rent but after the realization that cryonics would not be a profitable business venture for them. Pauline Mandell, Steven's mother, and Nick DeBlasio (Who were romantically involved at the time), whose [[#Ann DeBlasio|wife]] died of breast cancer at the age of 43 and later joined the cast of CSC's victims; objected to the two being transferred to a leased facility in Farmingdale, L.I., NY, insisting that the only legal place to store cryopatients was a cementery. Nelson convinced Pauline Mandell to transfer the tank to him, in exchange for charging a reduced fee for Liquid Nitrogen. Ann DeBlasio was only moved to Mt. Holiness Cementery on 17 September of 1971.

"What I had in mind," Nelson said in an interview, "is that this capsule could hold 3 or 4 people. Perhaps I misled her. But on the other hand, perhaps I didn't, you know? I told her I would do my very best to keep that capsule in operation, as long as I possibly could. What more could I promise her than that?". Mildred Harris and Genevieve de la Poterie were moved from dry ice to the Mandell dewar, which was stored at Chatsworth.

In October 1974, Nelson quit his position of president of the [[#Cryonics Society of California|Cryonics Society of California]]; stopped maintaning the tanks and went to Hawaii. In a letter to Marce Johnson, former treasurer of CSC, he wrote: "I am maintaining the facility--have installed a new alarm system and ordered an additional capsule." Nelson started spreading rumors about CSNY, saying the patients were not fully submerged and that their heads were above dry ice temperature. [[Mike Darwin]] called [[#Curtis Henderson|Curtis Henderson]], who told him to come over and see for himself the state of the facilities. "He was visibly nervous," Darwin said. "One eye kept twitching the whole time. I asked him more and more questions, and he got more and more evasive." Nelson had stated that he had no formal arrangement for LN2 deliveries, that he was friends with a driver of a Liquid Nitrogen delivery tank who'd give him what was left over. When Darwin tried to confirm this, not only did the suppliers find the idea ridiculous, they asked if he knew Nelson for he owned them several hundred dollars worth of Liquid Nitrogen bills. Virginia Gregory, President of Gilmore Liquid Air, said Nelson had kept two LS-160 delivery dewars worth almost $7,000, in today's dollars.

Nelson's fraud was found out in 1979, when Genevieve's father began wondering whether his child was properly preserved. Klockgether told him the suspicion might be justified, and on April 2 of 1979 he disinterred Genevieve; who had decomposed. A local journalist picked up the story; and the Harris brothers found out. Dennis was vacationing in Acapulco, where he told the story to a stranger, who has the brother-in-law of attorney Michael Worthington. He was trying to collect a cryonics-unrelated debt from Robert Nelson. In June, of that same year, Worthington and a news team smashed the lock of the door to Nelson's vault. All of the patients had thawed and decomposed, the Liquid Nitrogen having long vaporized. An observed claimed that the bodies had "sludged down into what I can best describe as a kind of a black goo." "I never promised anyone anything." Nelson was quoted as saying. "They had cameras and would zero in, maybe, on a fly on top of the vault, and say, ''Oh, the stench!'' But there was no stench whatsoever." 

The victims of the Cryonics Society of California were: [[#Mildred E. Harris|Mildred Harris]], [[#Marie Phelps-Sweet (Mrs. Russ Van Norden)|Marie Phelps-Sweet]], [[#Steven Jay Mandell|Steven Mandell]], [[#Louis Tom Nisco|Louis Nisco]], [[#Genevieve de la Poterie|Genevieve de la Poterie]], [[#Helen Kline|Helen Kline]], [[#Russell Stanley|Russ Stanley]], [[#Clara Dostal|Clara Dostal]], [[#Gaylord Harris|Gaylord Harris]], [[#Pedro Ledesma|Pedro Ledesma]], and the [[#S.P.|eight year old son]] of an Orange County ADA. The scandal affected cryonics for the rest of its history: There were almost no signups in the early 1980s. Matt Groening, who had followed the Chatsworth Scandal in his youth, was unboudtedly inspired by it when the pilot episode of TV series ''Futurama'' featured a company called ''Applied Cryogenics: No power failures since 1997''. Cryonics became a joke.

In 1980, Chatsworth was repeated when the dewar that contained Ann DeBlasio and a still unidentified woman was recovered: The bottom of the dewar had rusted (Even thought it was made from stainless steel), it had been sitting in six inches of water on a concrete hole on the ground (The 'facility' Nick DeBlasio and Robert Nelson had built). The dewar had long lost its vacuum and the bodies of the two women thawed and decomposed. Nick DeBlasio tried to freeze his late wife yet again, but the Los Angeles court ordered that her remains be buried.