Son cremates dead parents after freezer fault begins a thaw

Raymond Martinot and his wife were the toast of the world cryonics movement. For years they were France's best preserved corpses, lying in a freezer in a chateau in the Loire valley, in the hope that modern science could one day bring them back to life.

But the French couple's journey into the future ended prematurely when, 22 years after his mother's body was put into cold store, their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had started to thaw.

The couple's bodies were removed from their faulty freezer and cremated this week. Under French law a corpse must be either buried, cremated or formally donated to science. But the couple's son had vowed to go to the European court of human rights to be allowed to keep his frozen parents in his cellar. If he failed, supporters in the US had offered to take them in.

On Thursday Remy Martinot said he had no choice but to cremate his parents' bodies after the technical fault had seen their temperatures rise above the constant level required of minus 65oC.

"I realized in February that after a technical incident their temperature had risen to minus 20oC probably for several days. The alert system [on the freezer] had not worked and I decided at that point that it was not reasonable to continue," he said.

"I don't feel any more bereaved today than I did when my parents died, I had already done my grieving. But I feel bitter that I could not respect my father's last wishes. Maybe the future would have shown that my father was right and a pioneer," Martinot said.

Raymond Martinot, a doctor who once taught medicine in Paris, spent decades preparing for his demise in the belief that if he was frozen and preserved scientists would be able to bring him back to life by 2050. In the 1970s he bought a chateau near Samur in the Loire valley and began preparing a freezer unit for himself. But his wife, Monique Leroy, died first, of ovarian cancer, in 1984, and was the first to enter the intricate stainless steel freezer unit in the chateau's vaulted cellars.

She remained in the freezer for almost 20 years while Martinot met his high refrigeration bills by allowing paying visitors to visit the cellar. He once told reporters that ideally he would like to open his wife's freezer every day and tell her "Hello, I'm so glad to see you", but that it was better it stayed shut. He said he opened it to check it every five years. The freezer was rigged up to a generator with an alarm to alert Martinot to changes in temperature or anyone opening it.