Cryonics Center Searched for Clues in Beheading of Woman, 83

Police and coroner’s authorities searched a Riverside cryonics center Thursday and held six volunteer workers for questioning in an attempt to determine if a terminally ill woman was clinically dead when she was beheaded and frozen last month at the center.

Riverside County Supervising Coroner Daniel Cupido, investigating the death of 83-year-old Dora Kent, arrived Thursday morning with a search warrant at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The center freezes the dead and their body parts in the hope that they can be later thawed when science finds a cure for their ailments.

Cupido said coroner’s aides went to the center, located in southwest Riverside County, to retrieve records and the head of Kent, who was suffering from a degenerative brain disease and severe arthritis when her son, a member of the Alcor Foundation, brought her to the center Dec. 11.

Authorities could not locate the head, however, and workers initially refused to say where it had been moved, Cupido said. Later, however, coroner’s aides said the six are now cooperating with authorities in retrieving the head.

“This is one of the most unusual cases this office has ever investigated,” Cupido said. “We are reviewing records relating to six other heads and one full body in suspension at the facility.”

Cupido said that his office is looking into the “cause and mode of death.” The six taken into custody for questioning included center president Mike Darwin. They were released four hours later.

“We are continuing to cooperate with the coroner’s office,” Darwin said. He insisted that Kent “was not alive” when she was beheaded but was “clinically and legally dead.”