Bob Nelson

To minimize the damage, Bob and his team replaced the blood with special chemicals, a process called perfusion.

Meanwhile, they packed ice around the head and body.

A lot of ice.

The goal was to get Murray into a giant stainless steel container, cooled by liquid nitrogen.

A cryonics buff in Arizona had started building capsules for exactly this purpose.

That's where Dr. Bedford ended up, sent there by his son after the first freezing.

But it wasn't clear where to send Marie.

The Cryonics Society had no place to keep a frozen body.

For all they knew, centuries might pass before she could be thawed out and brought back to life.

Which is to say, they needed someplace really permanent.

That was going to cost a lot of money.

Marie Sweet's husband managed to scrape together a few hundred dollars.

That's it.

And the society was broke.

What the society did have was a lot of enthusiastic members, all of them hoping to be suspended.

Bob figured he'd let them decide whether to keep Marie frozen.

It wasn't a very tough room.

This very reasonable position led Bob into a lot of very unreasonable decisions over the next few years.

Decisions he's still explaining decades later.

And what happened next is that another member of the society died.