Bob Nelson

It was enough money, at least, to solve Bob's most pressing problem, to get a legal place to store the frozen bodies he was keeping in the garage.

So he bought a plot of land and built a vault in a cemetery in Chatsworth, 30 miles north of L.A., a 15-by-20 room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside.

Now all he needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity.

Mrs. Marie Bowers was a housewife from Detroit.

A few years back, her father had died, and she'd arranged to have him frozen by Ed Hope, the same guy who was storing Dr. Bedford in Phoenix, Arizona.

Her father had spent a year and a half there in a one-man capsule the size of a standard water heater.

Now, as it turned out, Marie was in a fix of her own.

Why didn't you tell her?

Were you afraid?

Was there a part of you that was nervous if you did tell her that she might not go for it?

So why not tell her?

What's the risk?

The capsule arrived at the mortuary in Buena Park in the spring of 1969, and Bob was there to greet it.

A cryonic container is basically a giant thermos, one steel tube inside another, with a vacuum in between.

So long as you added liquid nitrogen once every few months, the tank stayed really cold.

These containers weren't designed to be open and shut again, so when the time came to add the extra bodies, Bob had to improvise.

He drained the liquid nitrogen and had a welder open the capsule with a blowtorch.

They spent most of the night unsealing the tank and arranging the bodies, which they wrapped head to toe in mylar.

Joe Klockether was there, too.

Here again, I'm just kind of helping them because it's here.