BOSTON - The heirs of the late Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams yesterday prepared for a legal fight over the final resting place of his body, the latest and most macabre chapter in a family feud that rages even amid the tributes and eulogies for one of America's most enduring sports figures.
His only son, John Henry Williams, has arranged to deep-freeze Williams' corpse - or perhaps only his head - for future revival or cloning, according to Williams' eldest daughter. Barbara Joyce "Bobby-Jo" Williams Ferrell said yesterday that her lawyer was preparing a restraining order halting those plans, to be filed tomorrow.
An attorney for Williams' estate refused to deny her claim, but emphasized that all the preparations under way are being conducted precisely as Williams wanted. There will be no funeral, though Williams' body yesterday rested at an Inverness, Fla., funeral home.
"Ted Williams was a private person in life, and in death he wished to remain private," Eric Abel, Williams' attorney, said in a statement. "He did not wish to have any funeral or funeral services."
But it remains unclear where or in what state Williams' body will ultimately end up - an issue that soon could be the subject of debate in a Florida courtroom. The dispute underscores the bitter rivalry between the Red Sox legend's three children - Bobby-Jo, John Henry and Claudia - who will not equally share in his considerable estate, according to close family friends.
Williams sought to legally and emotionally distance himself from Ferrell over the years, family friends said. But she counters that John Henry's manipulation of the aging baseball great during his final, most feeble, years, led to the estrangement.
The dispute became most strained in recent years, as the formerly vigorous ballplayer succumbed to strokes and heart disease, allowing John Henry to increasingly run his life and business interests.
Williams' only son has led a string of ventures into legal troubles and insolvency, and has been accused of exploiting his father's legacy for profit, even pushing the ailing slugger to sign profit-making memorabilia in order to secure future income.
John Henry Williams did not respond to several phone messages left yesterday. For the moment, the Williams family feud appears centered on the famous patriarch's corpse.
The Scottsdale, Ariz., non-profit allegedly contracted to store Williams's remains, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, refused to confirm or deny that it will take possession of the body. Typically, the company, part of the fringe industry of cryonics, almost immediately places client corpses on ice, then flies them to Arizona, an Alcor official said.
Ferrell said her father, indifferent toward religion and disdainful of elaborate funerals, desired to be cremated in a simple ceremony. She added that she will seek to enforce that in her legal action.
"In my 53 years, my dad has told me, and anyone that was around him knew, that his wishes were to be cremated," she said. "My dad would flip out if he could see what was going on. And he would flip out if he thought his son was going to do that to him."
But Al Cassidy, executor of Williams's estate and a longtime family friend, said the Red Sox great would be more disturbed at his first-born daughter's behavior.
"We're all sitting here together, we're all grieving, and we don't want to attack Bobby-Jo," he said. "But Ted had private wishes, and he would not like to see it happening like this."
Cassidy said he would meet with the family's lawyers tomorrow to start the process of handling Williams' estate. He declined to say how large the estate was that would be divided among the children.
A close friend of the family, who asked not to be identified, said that all three children were left with individual trusts. Bobby-Jo, born to Williams's first wife Doris Soule Williams, will not receive an equal share but "she will be taken care of," according to the family friend. John Henry and Claudia, born to Williams' third wife, Dolores Wettach Williams, will receive larger trusts. Williams personally told all the children how the distribution would be handled, the friend said.
Abel, who answered the phone at Williams' Hernando, Fla., home yesterday, identifying himself as the family spokesman, said Ferrell has been estranged from her father for more than a year and that John Henry and Claudia were doing nothing to contradict the slugger's last wishes.
But Abel wouldn't say whether there were, in fact, plans to send Williams' body to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calling it a personal matter. "The family is dealing with many issues right now, and that is the least of their concerns," he said.
He pointedly refuted Ferrell's accusations that John Henry sought to preserve his father's body in order to sell Williams' DNA. But he did not deny that Williams would be frozen in liquid nitrogen and warehoused at Alcor.
John Henry and Claudia Williams have been together at Williams' home, along with Abel and Cassidy, since Friday. The siblings used Abel to respond to Ferrell's allegations, first aired on Friday.
"I can tell you as Ted's attorney that it was Ted's desire that there be no relationship between Barbara Joyce Farrell and himself," Abel said. "That's a very hard thing to say at a time like this, but it's true."
One business associate of Williams, who asked not to be identified, supported Ferrell's claims.
"I've known about this cryonics thing for a year and a half and I've been fighting it for a year and a half," he said. "Ted wanted to be cremated. He was a fisherman. He wanted to be sprinkled right off the [Florida] Keys. ... Ted told me two weeks ago he needed an attorney because he made a big mistake. I don't know what he meant by that, but he also told me he felt like a prisoner."
The Hall of Famer divorced John Henry's mother when the boy was 4. While he was a youth in Vermont, his father was living in Florida or he was on extended fishing trips. It surprised many when John Henry, after his 1991 graduation from the University of Maine, moved to Florida to take over his father's business interests. He increasingly limited access to the elder Williams, said Red Sox observers. In the final years of his life, some friends say, Williams was isolated and largely cut off from anybody he knew, with John Henry maintaining an iron grip on his affairs.
John Henry's marketing company, Grand Slam, recently went bankrupt and is now being sued for allegedly shortchanging a Marblehead promoter. His Ted Williams Card Co. is also in bankruptcy court and his Hitter.net Internet site folded recently. During this period, John Henry had at least one public battle with his sister, Claudia, suing her for selling Williams-autographed bats with an estimated value of $1.3 million to a memorabilia dealer. Yesterday, though, Abel said the relationship between the two had been patched up and that the two "have been together for the past 24 hours in deep grievance."
Ferrell said she first heard of the plan during a June 2001 conversation with John Henry. The son had visited Alcor's Arizona facility, she said, and mentioned, against her objections, that their father could benefit from the controversial process.
On Friday, shortly after Williams was pronounced dead by a Florida medical examiner, a hospital source told Ferrell that Williams had been pumped full of blood-thinning drugs, then packed into ice, part of the standard cryonics preparation.
If that process is indeed under way, Williams's blood and brain fluids will be replaced with a special preservation solution administered through holes drilled in his head and chest, according to accounts of the process described on the Web sites of several U.S. cryonics groups.
Then, he would be placed into an aluminum pod filled with nitrogen vapor, which would chill his corpse to minus-320 degrees. He would be stored in a thermos-like container until his estate decides to unfreeze him. Cryonics followers generally await technological advances that could revive the dead, using their corpse or brain, or at least reliably clone them from cells.