Workers at Alcor, the cryonics lab where the frozen leftovers of Ted Williams are being preserved in liquid nitrogen, allegedly decapitated the Splendid Splinter and mutilated his head with a monkey wrench. There goes the greatest sentence ever written.
This is the big revelation of Frozen, a tell-all by Alcor COO-turned-whistleblower Larry Johnson, who first spoke out against his former company in 2003 and who so feared for his life here on the warm side of the cryotube that he apparently wrote his book in hiding. The New York Daily News' Nathaniel Vinton got all the morbid details about the abuse of the corpse known as "Alcorian A-1949":
Johnson writes that holes were drilled in Williams' severed head for the insertion of microphones, then frozen in liquid nitrogen while Alcor employees recorded the sounds of Williams' brain cracking 16 times as temperatures dropped to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.
Johnson writes that the head was balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna to keep it from sticking to the bottom of its case.
Johnson describes watching as another Alcor employee removed Williams' head from the freezer with a stick, and tried to dislodge the tuna can by swinging at it with a monkey wrench.
The technician, no .406 hitter like the baseball legend, missed the can with several swings of the wrench and smacked Williams' head directly, spraying "tiny pieces of frozen head" around the room.
There's something poetic about this. Even in death, even in deep-freeze, Ted Williams stubbornly refused to tip his cap.
Staff at Arizona cryogenics lab Alcor used Ted Williams' frozen head for batting practice: book [New York Daily News]