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The eldest daughter of the baseball great, who died in July, has given up her battle to get her father's body back from a cryonics facility for cremation.
By CARRIE JOHNSON and ALEX LEARY
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 21, 2002
INVERNESS -- Five months ago, Ted Williams' oldest daughter launched a crusade to rescue her father's frozen remains from an Arizona cryonics lab.
She ended her battle Friday with a check for $211,000, a stack of legal bills and the ashes of her father's Dalmatian.
A lawyer for Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell announced his client would drop her claim to the body after a circuit judge agreed to distribute a $645,000 insurance trust to Ferrell and her two half-siblings.
Ferrell, 54, said she still believes her father's final desire was to be cremated but says she cannot afford to continue battling her siblings in court. The family spent more than $87,000 in legal fees and the cost of continuing the fight would have surpassed $250,000, said Ferrell's husband, Mark.
"I learned after approximately 21/2 months that the financial cost of my struggle would be extraordinary and would result in significant difficulties for my family," Bobby-Jo Ferrell said in a statement.
"Although I received tremendous support from the hearts of my father's friends and fans, the financial support simply was not available."
The three Williams children were originally supposed to wait 10 years before receiving the money from the 1986 trust. On Friday, Judge Patricia Thomas granted permission for estate trustees to distribute the money immediately and they each received their share.
The trust was set up separately from Ted Williams' estate and represents only a portion of his wealth. The value of his estate has not been made public.
Ferrell said she asked for her portion early so she could sever all ties with the managers of her father's estate, as well as John-Henry and Claudia Williams.
While the court battle over Ted Williams' remains erupted in a frenzy of media coverage, with satellite trucks from television stations throughout the country crowding into downtown Inverness, interest in the story diminished with time. Only three reporters were at the court hearing Friday to witness the end of the saga.
The sensational, at times macabre, dispute unfolded July 6, the day after Ted William's death at age 83. Amid the tributes to his life, Ferrell accused her half-brother of violating their father's last wishes by shipping his remains to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale.
She sued to return the body to Florida so it could be cremated and sprinkled off the coast, as directed in Ted Williams' 1996 will.
"When I think of my Daddy, I see him hanging upside down in a metal tube at minus 350 degrees with two other bodies," Ferrell wrote on her Web site, tedwilliamslastwish.org.
To counter her claims, John-Henry and Claudia Williams produced a handwritten note which, they said, proved their father later changed his mind.
The note, which had been folded and stained with grease, read: "JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put into bio-stasis after we die. This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance."
John-Henry and Claudia Williams said the note was drafted Nov. 2, 2000, when their father was a patient at Shands at the University of Florida at Gainesville. The note appeared to bear Ted Williams' signature, although Ferrell's lawyers, as well as some handwriting experts, questioned its authenticity.
Already struggling financially, Ferrell set up a legal fund in early August. Her Web site even allowed potential donors to make a contribution with a credit card.
But the fund failed to attract benefactors. All told, only $3,200 was raised, said John Heer, the Cleveland-based lawyer who assisted the Ferrells.
Asked how far that money went toward paying her legal fees, Heer laughed. "It covered maybe two days in July."
"I can assure you, Bobby-Jo is not very happy today," Heer continued. "She will always believe that her father's last wishes as described in his will never changed. But she just couldn't continue to pay her legal bills to fight the fight."
Ferrell looked pale and fragile Friday morning as she left the office of her Inverness attorney, Richard Fitzpatrick.
She clutched a small marble urn, which Heer said contained the ashes of Slugger, Ted Williams' faithful Dalmatian. The dog died in 1998, but the remains were kept so they could be scattered with the baseball legend's.
Neither John-Henry, 35, nor Claudia Williams, 31, could be reached Friday. Their lawyer, Bob Goldman, said their father "would be proud" of his three children for reaching an agreement.
Representatives for Alcor would not confirm Ted Williams body was housed at their Scottsdale lab, but did issue a brief statement: "We are extremely pleased to learn that members of the family of Ted Williams have reached a favorable conclusion to all outstanding issues," said president Jerry Lemler.
The lab "suspends" human bodies and heads in nitrogen and replaces body fluids in the hope that someday science will find a way to revive them. The process is viewed with skepticism by the scientific community.
Friends and fans of the Hall of Famer responded to the news Friday with a mixture of disappointment and relief.
"Ted always said he wanted to be sprinkled in the deep water off the coast of Florida," said John Sullivan of Crystal River, who worked as an aide to Williams from 1997 to 2000. "It's too bad that's not going to happen. But I'm happy it's over."
John-Henry and Claudia Williams' mother, Dolores Wettach, strongly dismissed Ferrell, calling attention to a provision in her husband's will that considered his oldest daughter to have predeceased him.
"I think Ted would be absolutely furious if he knew how she was able to make waves like this," Wettach said from her home in Vermont.
Williams' third wife affirmed her son's belief in cryonics. She said she spoke to him recently about the possibility. "I said, 'In 100 years you won't be alive.' He said, 'Oh yes I will. I'm going to come back, too. Wouldn't that be nice? I can go fishing with daddy."'