Elmer McCurdy: The Man Who Accomplished More in Death

In December 1976, the production crew for the top 10 rated, Six Million Dollar Man television show was preparing to shoot a scene for episode eighteen of season four, entitled “The Carnival of Spies.” The show starred Lee Majors in the title role as former Air Force test pilot Steve Austin, whose body, after a spectacular plane crash, was bionically rebuilt withhigh-powered,high-tech gadgets that made him “Better than he was before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster.”

Theepisode'splotrevolved around Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, who was tasked with tailing an East German rocket scientist. This scientist had deviously installed a ground-to-air missile site in a carnival fun-house ride. His sinister plan was to shoot down an experimental U.S. military bomber, setting the stage for a thrilling chase and a highstakes showdown.

The month before shooting began, location scouts for Universal Studios had leased the “Laff-in-the-Dark” funhouse ride at the NuPike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California for the scene being shot for the episode.

The “Laff-in-the-Dark” ride was a love-canal-like ride in which couples were pulled along a track in small cars through a dark maze filled with coffins and skeletons. Throughout the ride, various creepy things brushed against riders' faces and arms, and goblins and ghouls would pop up from time to time.

As the morning of the shoot unfolded, the crew members meticulously set up the props and equipment in the funhouse. The atmosphere was filled with anticipation as they encountered a variety of plastic masks, fake hair, fake skeletons, and scary figures. Deep into the funhouse, the tracks led to a mannequin hanging from a wall with a noose around its neck. With its eerie glow-inthe-dark paint job, this mannequin was a key element of the freight fest. The cars would race headlong into the darkness, towards the glowing mannequin suspended in the air. At the last moment, spotlights would illuminate the mannequin, creating a dramatic effect as the track tookaninety-degreeturnand continued to the end.

After a while, a few of the crew members became curiousaboutthemannequin and they began poking at it. The mannequin was very light, so light in fact that it would stir with even a slight breeze. Some thought the mannequin was made of balsa wood; others suspected papier mache. Finally, one of the crew members walked over to the mannequin and pulled on its arm, which snapped off. Upon examination, the arm was not hollow like a normal mannequin nor solid like something made of plaster or wood. Instead, the arm was dark and textured, almost like beef jerky and in the center was something resembling bones. The crew member then called over his co-workers, and they began to examine the figure, which wasunclothedandwhenthey checked between its legs, they noticed male genitalia. Itwasshrunkenandmummified, but it was clearly male genitalia along with faint areas of pubic hair. At that point, the production crew realized they were looking at a complete, desiccated, mummified human body. The authorities were notified then, and the production was halted for the day.

When the body was examined at the medical examiner’s office, it was discovered that there was evidence of a small hole just below the right nipple. Upon finding the possible hole, the medical examiner had the body X-rayed to determine if there was a bullet in the chest cavity. However, the results of theX-raystartledeveryonein the room. Instead of showing bones and a bullet, the film was entirely white. It was clear from the X-ray that the body was packed with some sort of radio-opaque material that had fogged the X-ray. Everything about this autopsy baffled the examiners. Further examination revealed that the chest cavity had previously been opened by a modified Y-incision, a technique used in the previous century. The medical examiner also noticed two embalming sutures in the groin area. It was then determined thatthebodyhadbeen embalmed with arsenic, a heavy-metal compound used in the last century to preserve bodies for long periods of time. During the internal examination of the body, the medical examiner found a bullet had entered the right chest, traveled through the liver and then lodged in the pelvis. The medical examiner then found the remains of an antique bullet assembly called a “gas-check” bullet. Gas-check bullets were designed to contain exploding gasses inside a rifle, and this bullet was a 32-30 caliber bullet from a gun with a barrel with a six-right rifling. That type of weapon was first used in 1905 but was discontinued just before World War II. This established the time of death between 1905 and 1940. Then, based on the suture lines of the skull and analysis of the pelvis, the medical examiner estimated the age of the decedent to be between forty and fifty years old.

However, the biggest surprise of all came later in the day. While removing the jaw, mandible and teeth for a routine dental analysis, the medical examiner found a single green, corroded copper penny dated 1924 in the mouth of the decedent, along with several ticket stubs, with one reading “Louis Sooney’s Museum of Crime, 524 South Main Street, Los Angeles.”

Upon discovering the Louis Sooney ticket stub, police investigators contacted Don Sooney,thesonofLouisSooney and the current owner of theSooneyMuseumofCrime. Sooney told the investigators that the body was that of an early-day outlaw named Elmer J. McCurdy. Investigators then were left to wonder, who was McCurdy, and how did his body end up hanging in a funhouse in Long Beach, California? Investigators quickly found that McCurdy was a notorious outlaw in the early 20th century. And they would soon determine that he was more accomplished in death than in life.

McCurdy was born out of wedlock on January 1, 1880, in Washington, Maine, to seventeen-year-old Sadie McCurdy. The identity of his father was unknown, but his family speculated that his father was Sadie’s cousin, Charles Smith. To save Sadie from the social stigma of raising an illegitimate child, her brother George McCurdy and his wife Helen adopted McCurdy. Sadly,Georgedied when McCurdy was just ten years of age, and Sadie and Helen moved with Elmer to Bangor, Maine. Eventually, Sadie revealed to Elmer his father’s identity and this revelation caused McCurdy to become “unruly and rebellious.” As a teenager, he began to drink heavily, causing him to become an alcoholic. This was a cross he bore for the remainder of his short life.

McCurdy would eventually live with his grandfather, and he became an apprentice plumber. He was a good worker and did well in plumbing; however, a few years later, he lost his job due to an economic downturn near the end of 1898. Then, in 1900, his mother Sadie died from a ruptured ulcer, and then two months later, his grandfather died. These events, all occurring within several months of each other, had a devastating effect on McCurdy, and he left Maine and began drifting around the eastern part of the United States, working occasionally as a plumber and coal miner.

Unable to keep a job due to his alcoholism, McCurdy found himself in Kansas, working part-time as a plumber. Then, in 1907, he enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kans., where he was trained to operate a machine gun and to use nitroglycerin explosives. After three years, he was honorably discharged from the Army in 1910.

After his discharge from the Army, McCurdy moved to St. Joseph, Kans., where he found an old army buddy and within a few months, both were arrested for possessing burglary tools in November of 1910. The St. Joseph Gazette reported that during his arraignment, Mc-Curdy told the judge that the tools were not burglary tools but were, in fact, tools he and his friend were using to build a new type of machine gun they were attempting to invent. In January of 1911, McCurdy was acquitted of the charge and released from the county jail. It was then that he embarked on his life as an outlaw.

McCurdy’s preferred crimes were burglaries and robberies, and he liked to incorporate nitroglycerin into these crimes, using it on bank and train robberies. Most of the time, he failed in his attempts because he would either use too much or too little nitroglycerin, and he failed to obtain the riches he sought in his criminal endeavors.

In March of 1911, Mc-Curdy moved to Oklahoma, where he continued his life of crime. Shortly after arriving in Oklahoma, he and two other men decided to rob the Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific train number 104. McCurdy had been told the train had a safe and usually carried about $4,000 in silver coins. The men were able to stop the train successfully, but when they found the safe, McCurdy put too much nitroglycerin on the safe’s door to open it, and the blast destroyedthesafe,alongwith most of the silver contained therein. They could only find about $150 in silver coins, as the remainder had melted and fused to the safe’s frame.

Then, in September 1911, McCurdy and two other men attempted to rob the Citizen’s Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas. After spending a few hours using a hammer to break through the bank's brick wall, McCurdy placed nitroglycerin around the outer door of the vault. The ensuing blast blew the outer door completely through the bank, destroying the interior, but the inner vault door was unharmed. McCurdy then tried to blow open the inner door, but his fuse failed to light, and the men got scared and ran away. They could only steal about $150 in coins from a tray outside the vault. Then, McCurdy fled to Oklahoma, hiding on a friend's ranch near Bartlesville.

McCurdy’s final robbery occurred in the Osage Nation area of Oklahoma on October 4, 1911. He was targeting a Katy Railroad train which was carrying about $400,000 in royalty money owed to the Osage Indians. But once again, McCurdy bungled the robbery, stopped the wrong train, and he and his accomplices could only steal about $45 from the train mail clerk, along with two jugs of whiskey, a gun, a coat and the conductor’s watch. News reports of the robbery labeled it “one of the smallest in the history of train robbery.”

McCurdy returned to the Bartlesville area to hide out again at his friend’s ranch and began drinking heavily. By this time, he was suffering from tuberculosis, pneumonia and trichinosis. Due to the latest train robbery, a bounty had been offered for his arrest or apprehension, carrying a $2,000 reward.

Three days later in the early morning of October 7, 1911, Bob Fenton, Stringer Fenton and Dick Wallace, comprising a posse of three deputy sheriffs, tracked Mc-Curdy to the ranch where he washiding. Theysurrounded thehayshedwhereMcCurdy was sleeping and waited for daylight. One of the posse members, Bob Fenton, told the Bartlesville Daily Examiner newspapers the following about their encounter with McCurdy.

“It began just about 7 o'clock. We were standing around waiting for him to come out when the first shot was fired at me. It missed me and he then turned his attention to my brother, Stringer Fenton. He shot three times at Stringer and when my brother got under cover he turned his attention to Dick Wallace. He kept shooting at all of us for about an hour. We fired back every time we could. We do not know who killed him ... (on the trail) we found one of the jugs of whiskey which was taken from the train. It was about empty. He was pretty drunk when he rode up to the ranch last night.

McCurdy died from a single gunshot wound to the chest, which he sustained while lying down firing at the posse members. His body was then taken to the undertaker in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Since the body was unclaimed, the mortician, Joseph Johnson, embalmed McCurdy’s remains with an arsenic-based embalming fluid that was typically used when a body needed to be preserved for longer periods oftime.Thismethodhadbeen used on the body of President Abraham Lincoln so that he could be preserved for the long procession across the northeast and Midwest parts of the United States. Since no one ever claimed McCurdy’s body, Johnston refused to release the body until he was paid. Johnston dressed the body in street clothes, placed him in a coffin with a rifle in his hand, and stood him in the corner of his funeral home. To recoup his money, Johnston charged visitors a nickeltosee“TheBanditWho Wouldn’t Give Up.”

McCurdy’s remains became a very popular attraction for town folk and visitors alike, which drew the attention of carnival promoters. It was not long before Johnston began receiving offers to sell McCurdy, but he refused.

Then, in October of 1916, a man claiming to be from California contacted Johnston and told him he was McCurdy’s long-lost brother seeking to retrieve his “brother’s” remains. The next day, that man, along with another claiming that he too was McCurdy’s brother, arrived at Johnston’s funeral home, and Johnston released the body to the men he believed were family members of McCurdy. They paid him for his services and loaded the body on a train believed to be bound for California. However, they shipped the body to Arkansas City, Kansas, instead. The first man was actually Charles Patterson, the owner of the Great Patterson Carnival Shows, a traveling carnival. The men had heard about the popularity of McCurdy’s corpse, so they had concocted the scheme to get the body released to them by Johnston because they wanted to use it in their show.

For the next six years, Patterson featured the body of McCurdy in his carnival as “The Outlaw Who Would Never be Captured Alive.” In 1922, Patterson sold Mc-Curdy’s remains to Louis Sooney,theownerofSooney’s traveling Museum of Crime, which featured wax replicas of famous outlaws such as Bill Doolin and Jesse James. By 1928, McCurdy’s remains were part of the official sideshow that accompanied the Trans-American Footrace. Then, in 1933, the body was acquired by director Dwain Esper, who used it to promote his exploitation film, “Narcotic!” Esper would have McCurdy’s body placed in the lobby of theaters as a “dead dope fiend” who he claimed had killed himself while surrounded by police after the robbery of a drug store. By the time Esper acquired McCurdy’s body, it had become mummified, and theskinhadbecomehardand shriveled, which caused the body to shrink.

After Sooney died in 1949, the corpse was placed in storage in a Los Angeles warehouse. In 1964, Sooney’s son, Dan, lent the body to a filmmaker for use in the movie “She Freak,” released in 1967. Then, in 1968, Sooney sold the body and several wax figures to Spoony Singh, the owner of theHollywoodWaxMuseum. Singh had bought the figures for two Canadian men who exhibited them at a show at Mount Rushmore. While exhibited there, McCurdy’s corpse sustained damage in a windstorm. The tips of his ears and a few fingers and toes were blown off.

The Canadian men then returned the body to Singh, who decided that the body was “too gruesome” and not lifelike enough to exhibit, so he sold McCurdy to Ed Liersch, part owner of the Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California. By 1976, McCurdy’s corpse was hanging in the Laff-in-the-Dark funhouse.

After being discovered by the Six Million Dollar Man production crew, the story of McCurdy’s after-life journey was featured in newspapers, television newscasts and radio. By December 11, 1976, numerous funeral homes had contacted the medical examiner’s office, offering to bury McCurdy free of charge. But officials decided to wait and see if any actual family members came forward to claim the body.

Fred Olds, who represented the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerns, was finally able to convince the Chief Medical Examiner for Los Angeles County to allow him to retrieve McCurdy’s remains and bury him in Oklahoma. The Medical Examiner agreed, and the body was released to Fred Olds.

On April 22, 1977, a funeral procession was conducted, and McCurdy was transported to the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. A graveside service was held, and approximately 300 people attended. Mc-Curdy was buried next to Bill Doolin, another famous outlaw. To ensure that Mc-Curdy’s body would never be stolen again, authorities poured two feet of concrete over his casket.

Today, thousands of people still visit McCurdy’s grave each year, all interested in the story of the man who accomplished more in death than in life. And McCurdy is still accomplishing more in death than in life.