The Many Metamorphoses of Elmer McCurdy
It was a scene right out of an old Western film. In the early morning hours of October 7th 1911 sheriffs Bob and Stringer Fenton and Dick Wallace surrounded a shed near Okesa, Oklahoma and waited for daylight. With the sunrise came gunfire and the lawmen exchanging bullets with the man holed up inside before he was finally shot and killed by a single bullet to the chest. The man who met his end that morning was named Elmer J. McCurdy, a bank and train robber who only days earlier botched a heist later called "one of the smallest in the history of train robbery". Although he may have gone out with that unenviable record on his hands, his legacy was not solidified in his crimes and his name would unexpectedly end up in the golden pages of Hollywood history.
McCurdy was born in Washington, Maine on January 1st 1880 to seventeen year old Sadie McCurdy who was unsure of the father. He was adopted by his aunt and uncle Helen and George who along with Sadie kept the truth about his mother secret until after George died around ten years later. It was then that "Aunt Sadie" moved in with Helen and the two sat the young boy down and reveled the truth. Allegedly, he took the news well but by the time he was fifteen he had developed an addiction to alcohol while growing increasingly rebellious and resentful. McCurdy's alcoholism would follow him throughout the northeast, cost him numerous jobs, and cause him to be arrested for public intoxication before he decided to join the United States Army in 1907. While stationed in Leavenworth, Kansas he was taught to handle a machine gun and to work with the explosive substance nitroglycerin before being honorably discharge on November 7th 1910.
After he left the service he traveled to meet an old army friend but the meeting was not simply to chat and catch up, the men were planning on becoming partners in crime. The two hit a snag on November 19th when they were arrested while carrying a treasury of equipment that obviously pointed toward burglary including chisels, gunpowder, and even sacks meant to carry their loot. They claimed that the materials were not meant for anything illegal, only to work on a machine gun that they were building. Miraculously, the judge hearing the case found them not guilty and McCurdy walked free in January 1911.
Haphazard planning and botched attempts at robbery began to follow McCurdy, and they only got more dangerous when he added explosives to the mix. Although he handled nitroglycerin while in the army, his training was minimal but that was not going to stop McCurdy who considered himself a professional and set his sights on bigger and bigger targets. By March of 1911 McCurdy was in Oklahoma and he and three accomplices hatched a brazen plan to rob the Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific train that was traveling nearby and allegedly carrying around $4,000. The men got on the train but McCurdy completely overshot the amount of nitroglycerin to use on the safe and the resulting explosion blew the door off the hinges, tore a hole in the side of one of the train cars, and melted the safe and the money inside. With a crowbar the men were able to scrape some of the former coins off the side of the badly damaged safe and they fled with approximately $400 worth of metal scrap. His next attempt at grand scale theft was at a Kansas bank where after spending hours busting through an outside wall to get in things again took a bad turn. McCurdy again misjudged the amount of explosives to use and the blast shot the door of the outside vault into the interior of the bank. Although the safe survived this attempt, he could not get any more explosives to light. He and his partners ran with less than $200 in coins that had been sitting on a tray outside the vault.
Missouri Pacific Locomotive that would have belonged to a train similar to the one McCurdy attempted to rob.
McCurdy's last robbery on October 4th 1911 had a target that most bandits would dream of. A Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad train carrying a fortune of $400,000 was traveling through Oklahoma and he and his fellow burglars made their plans to acquire the biggest score of their lives. The plan may have worked, if they hijacked the right train. Instead of jumping on the train filled with cash, they jumped on a passenger train full of people. They left the train with under $50 in cash, some whiskey, a gun, and the conductor's watch. The haul was called "one of the smallest in the history of train robbery". A disappointed McCurdy ran off and hid in a hay shed where he polished off the stolen whiskey. Three days later he was dead after the hour long shootout with sheriffs Bob and Stringer Fenton and Dick Wallace.
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One would have thought that after he died the misadventures of Elmer McCurdy would have stopped but in an amazing string of events, his biggest adventures were only just beginning.
After the robber's death his body was taken to a funeral home belonging to Joseph L. Johnson in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Johnson embalmed the body with arsenic, shaved McCurdy's face, and dressed him in a suit before storing him in a back room and waiting for someone to come claim him. Johnson refused to bury him until he was paid for his services but no one came for McCurdy so Johnson decided to get his money back on his own terms. The arsenic mixture used to embalm the former thief was so strong that it essentially mummified him and Johnson dressed him in street clothes, put a rifle in his hand, gave him the name "The Embalmed Bandit",and propped him up in a corner of the funeral parlor where visitors could see him for a nickel. The payment was placed directly in McCurdy's open mouth.
The body of Elmer McCurdy as he lay in Joseph L. Johnson’s funeral home.
For five long years McCurdy stood in the funeral parlor and more than paid the dues owed to Johnson. Word of the mummy reached the ears of many carnival promoters who offered to buy him from the funeral parlor but Johnson denied every offer until October 6th 1916 when one man came in that he could not refuse, McCurdy's brother Aver from California. Somehow not overly concerned that his brother was being used as a money making spectacle, Aver told Johnson that he had already contacted the county and arranged for McCurdy to travel by train with him to San Francisco to be buried. Johnson agreed and the next day Aver and another brother, Wayne, picked up the body and put it on a train. While there were some thin whisps of truth to their story, Johnson had no way of knowing he had just been scammed. Yes McCurdy was on a train, but it was headed to Arkansas City, Kansas not San Francisco. And yes the two men were brothers, but they were James and Charles Patterson of the Great Patterson Carnival Shows.
James Patterson who posed as McCurdy’s brother to steal his body.
The fame that Elmer McCurdy craved in life came to him in death. McCurdy traveled the country with the Patterson's carnival and became a celebrity as "The Oklahoma Outlaw" among other monikers. In 1922 the operation was sold to a man named Louis Sonny who continued to use McCurdy's body in sideshows and in his traveling "Museum of Crime" where he was displayed next to wax models of notable gunslingers like Jesse James. In the 1930s his body was used as a prop in a movie theater to promote the Dwain Esper film Narcotic. People who saw the movie were told that McCurdy's corpse was, ironically, that of a drug addict who had been shot dead after robbing a store to support his addiction. The reason Esper gave for his shriveled skin was that it was the result of drug use. Sonny died in 1949 but when he left one small fact may have gone with him, people gradually forgot that the stiff fake-looking body of McCurdy was actually a human corpse. In 1964 McCurdy was put into storage in Los Angeles along with a number of prop bodies.
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The dead bandit would not see the light of day until 1967 when filmmaker David F. Friedman needed a dead body prop for his film She Freak and it was in that film that McCurdy made his Hollywood debut. After being returned to the warehouse his body was sold the following year along with a bunch of wax figures to the owner of the famous Hollywood Wax Museum who then lent the assumed prop to an exhibit in South Dakota. When he was returned to the Hollywood Wax Museum the owner decided he wasn't in good enough shape to exhibit so he was again sold off, this time to the owner of the amusement park The Pike located in Long Beach, California. By 1976 McCurdy's body, still fully assumed to be a prop, was hanging from a noose in The Pike's funhouse called "Laff in the Dark"
Who knows how long McCurdy would have hung in the funhouse had Hollywood not come knocking once again. In 1976 the Laff in the Dark funhouse was being used a set for the "Carnival of Spies" episode of the television show The Six Million Dollar Man. At one point a member of the crew moved the "wax figure" hanging from the gallows when it's arm suddenly fell off...and revealed human bone and muscle.
Laff In The Dark funhouse where McCurdy was discovered
The body was taken to the Los Angeles coroner's office where an in depth examination began. McCurdy's body had shrunk down to just over five feet tall and fifty pounds. He was covered in layers of paint, his hair was mostly gone, and his ears and fingers were missing. Tests proved that there was arsenic in his tissue, a bullet jacket was found, he had numerous scars, evidence of illnesses McCurdy would have acquired during some of his early days working in mines, and a radiograph of the skull matched with photographs of McCurdy taken just after his death. Lastly, examiners found a 1924 penny and a ticket to the Museum of Crime in his mouth. A phone call to members of Sonny family and some more research confirmed that yes, this wax figure was actually the body of the outlaw train robber Elmer McCurdy.
McCurdy at the funeral home after death and as he was found in 1976
News of the discovery of a real life body of a cowboy discovered in a California funhouse being used as a prop ran across headlines and was talked about all over television. The chief medical examiner for Los Angeles found himself in the same predicament as Joseph L. Johnson sixty-five years earlier, who was going to claim this body and bury it? Although many people stepped forward offering to bury him the honor to do so was granted to Fred Olds, a representitive of the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerns who suggested that McCurdy be buried in Oklahoma. On April 22nd 1977 a funeral procession carried the body of Elmer McCurdy to the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma where a crowd of over 300 people attended a service and finally laid him to rest. He was buried next to William "Bill" Doolin, another career criminal who headed up the Wild Bunch who robbed trains and banks in the 1890s.
The grave of Elmer McCurdy
Today the body of outlaw Elmer McCurdy is still at rest in Oklahoma and he will be staying there. To ensure his famous corpse was finally kept in one place and would not find it's way back into a spotlight he was buried under six feet of concrete.
