Investigators Believe Woman Was Dead Before Decapitation

Investigators believe that an 83-year-old woman was dead when her head was surgically removed at a laboratory run by a group that freezes bodies in hopes of immortality, but they have not ruled out homicide as a cause of death, Riverside County coroner’s officials said Thursday.

“She was not alive at the time of decapitation,” Daniel Cupido, coroner’s supervising investigator, said at a press conference. But Cupido said investigators still have questions about her death. “Did she die naturally? Did she die by some outside agent? The action of some person?” he asked.

The coroner’s office has been investigating the death of Dora Kent, whose head was removed after her death Dec. 11 at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, an organization that freezes heads in liquid nitrogen in the expectation that the heads will be brought back to life with new bodies at an uncertain date in the future, a practice called cryonics.

Alcor officials have refused to make Mrs. Kent’s head available to the coroner on the grounds that defrosting it for autopsy would preclude Mrs. Kent from ever being revived.

However, Riverside County Coroner Ray Carillo said that the search for the woman’s head has been made secondary for the time being to an investigation of whether Alcor was in possession of equipment stolen from the UCLA Medical Center.

Carillo said coroner’s investigators and UCLA campus police Thursday began examining truckloads of equipment seized in a 30-hour search of the laboratory. UCLA police confiscated hospital beds, prescription drugs, medical books and surgical gowns, Carillo said. Coroner’s investigators also seized computers, samples of Mrs. Kent’s body fluids, a plastic jar containing her hands, and controlled drugs such as phenobarbital, he said.

Alcor officials say any equipment from UCLA was legally purchased at salvage sales and that any drugs were used for legitimate research.

On Wednesday, Riverside Superior Court Judge Victor Miceli issued a temporary restraining order barring investigators from disturbing any of the human remains kept frozen at Alcor pending a court hearing on the matter Feb. 1. Alcor attorneys argued that coroner’s tests could melt the body parts and destroy chances that science may one day be able to revive them. The order would apply to Mrs. Kent’s head, if the coroner finds it.

Meanwhile, a source in the coroner’s office said Thursday that investigators are looking into the roles played by two UCLA Medical Center employees in the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Kent’s death.

Dr. Steve Harris, an internist who is on the staff of the UCLA Medical Center geriatrics department, signed a death certificate on Mrs. Kent that was rejected by Riverside County health officials, who then referred the matter to the coroner. The source said the death certificate listed pneumonia and arteriosclerotic heart disease as the cause of death, but also said Mrs. Kent died at a “residence.” The death certificate was rejected because there was no physician present at the woman’s death and because officials questioned whether the Alcor lab is a “residence.”

The other UCLA employee is James Leaf, a research assistant at the university’s School of Medicine and a member of Alcor. Attorneys representing the foundation described Leaf as the person who severed Mrs. Kent’s head after she died.

According to documents filed in Riverside Superior Court by Alcor attorneys in support of the restraining order, Harris, described as Kent’s “attending physician,” determined on Dec. 9 that Mrs. Kent was gravely ill and near death at an unnamed convalescent home in the Riverside area. Based on that conclusion, Mrs. Kent’s son, Saul Kent, moved his mother from the nursing home to the Alcor laboratory.

In an affidavit filed with the court, Saul Kent, a longtime believer in cryonics and financial supporter of Alcor who lives in the Riverside County community of Woodcrest, said his mother had years earlier expressed a desire to be preserved by cryonics. She also had requested that no “heroic efforts” be made to prolong her life should she become terminally ill.

“Once at Alcor, my mother was maintained briefly with a respirator,” Kent said in the affidavit. “Thereafter, the respirator was withdrawn and, on Dec. 11, 1987, she died.”

In another affidavit filed by Alcor attorneys, Leaf described in detail how he and other Alcor members determined that Mrs. Kent was in fact dead.

“Mrs. Kent’s chest was opened and I visually observed that there was absolutely no movement of her heart muscle,” Leaf said in the affidavit.

Leaf could not be reached for comment Thursday, but attorney Christopher Ashworth, who represents Kent and Alcor, said that Leaf was licensed to perform such activities. “He is not allowed to perform surgery on a live person,” Ashworth said. “A dead one, he can.”

Cupido said at the press conference that “I think her own physician was under the assumption that she was not a terminal patient.” Cupido would not identify that physician.

In an interview, Harris said he was not present when Mrs. Kent died, or when her head was removed. He did not see her after death, Harris said, but signed the death certificate based on what the Alcor staff had told him and because he had examined her the day before she died.

“She was clearly dying of pneumonia at the time,” Harris said. He added that “physicians quite commonly sign certificates on persons they haven’t actually seen dead.”

Harris said there was nothing wrong with stating on the death certificate that Mrs. Kent died at a residence. “The Alcor facility is indeed a residence,” he said. “Several people live there.” He would not identify them, but said that they guarded the laboratory at night from possible intruders.

Harris expressed fear that publicity about his association with cryonics would harm his professional standing. He is not an officer of the foundation and has never accepted payment for his work with them, he said.

He condemned the coroner’s investigation as “a witch hunt . . . that has gone far beyond what is necessary for a simple investigation of cause of death.”

Louis Sahagun reported from Riverside and T.W. McGarry from Los Angeles.