In the lead-up to the Christmas of 1976, the cast and crew of the hit television show The Six Million Dollar Man was in Long Beach, California, shooting an episode at The Pike amusement park. One scene involved a shootout in a funhouse between the bionic hero of the show and an evil German spy. The art director, wanting to create a spookier atmosphere for the shoot, started rearranging some of the props, including an old spray-painted dummy with a noose around its head. For the previous four years, the dummy had been hidden away in a dark corner, swinging from the gallows, barely noticed by the carts full of scared passengers that rushed past him.
As the art director picked up the dummy, one of its arms snapped off. Not surprising, really. It was old and crummy and made of brittle wax…Except that it wasn’t. As the crewmember got a closer look at the fallen appendage, he noticed a real human bone surrounded by tissue poking out. The dummy wasn’t a dummy at all, but a mummified person.
This might sound like an urban legend, but it is absolutely true. The police were called in and the discovery was initially treated as a possible prank. Things only got weirder as the corpse made its way to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. It had sustained numerous injuries and mistreatments over the years, unsurprisingly, and it had shriveled down to a lean fifty pounds. But the cause of death was likely the copper-jacket bullet still lodged in its chest, dating to the early 20th century.
After about a week of unusual leads and bizarre questions, detectives uncovered the true identity of the body – he was Elmer McCurdy, a turn-of-the-century criminal who got killed in a shootout with the law after robbing a train in 1911. But that still begged the question – how exactly did a Wild West outlaw get mummified and end up as a prop in an amusement park funhouse?
Early Years
If we are being perfectly honest here, the best bits of Elmer’s story happened after he died, but we are going to start from the beginning. As you will see, he was quite a hilariously inept criminal, more Wet Bandit than Wild West Outlaw.
We don’t have a lot of info on McCurdy’s early life – mainly his military records and whatever bits and pieces historians have been able to dig up. According to his army documents, Elmer McCurdy was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1880. There was a bit of hanky-panky that went on with his birth records because his mother, Sadie McCurdy, was young and unmarried so, to prevent her from being ostracized, little Elmer was adopted and raised by Sadie’s older brother, George McCurdy, and his wife Helen.
George McCurdy became a doctor but died from tuberculosis in 1890. Afterward, Sadie moved in briefly with Helen to help raise Elmer and Helen’s own son, Charles. It was only around this time that Elmer found out that his “Aunt” Sadie was actually his mother. He took it well at first, with the two of them even moving into an apartment together. However, as he entered the terrible teens, Elmer grew resentful of Sadie for keeping the secret from him. He took to drinking, became “unruly and rebellious,” and, in 1895, ran away from home.
McCurdy lived with his grandfather for a while, taking a job as an apprentice plumber. It seems he was pretty good at it, too, being described later in a report as a “skilled tradesman in the plumbing profession.” He even moved back in with his mother and it started to look like he was on the path to a quiet and happy life. But fate had other plans for Elmer McCurdy.
The year 1900 was a rough one for him. His mother developed a peptic ulcer and died of peritonitis in August. Then, just a month later, his grandfather died of Bright’s disease. Not much was keeping Elmer in Bangor, anymore, so he packed up his bags and started wandering the United States, looking to make his fortunes elsewhere.
For the next few years, McCurdy drifted from state to state and city to city, plying his trade as a plumber, sometimes as a miner. He usually went by “Frank E. Curtis” during this time, possibly because he may have gotten into trouble with the law or possibly because he didn’t want to be mistaken for an Irish immigrant who were commonly discriminated against. McCurdy was skilled at his work, but he also descended pretty heavily into alcoholism by this point, so he never kept a job for long. Eventually, he decided he needed a change of scenery and spotted an army recruitment ad in the newspaper. He went down to the recruitment office and in November 1907, Elmer enlisted in the army.
A Failed Criminal Career
Not much to say about Elmer’s time in the military. Probably the most interesting thing, which is somehow fitting given the rest of his life story, is that they misspelled his name in his enlistment papers as Mcuardy instead of McCurdy and it appears like that in all his army records. Other than that, Elmer was assigned to Fort Leavenworth with the 13th Infantry and he learned to use nitroglycerin to blow sh** up, a skill which he would later put to not-very-good-use in his criminal career. McCurdy kept his head down and served quietly for three years, opting not to reenlist in 1910 and receiving an honorable discharge. Another fun fact: one of his instructors was the future General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
After his discharge, McCurdy made his way to St. Joseph, Kansas, where he tried and failed to find a job before spending all his money on booze. He met up with a friend he made in the army, a guy named Walter Schoppelrei, and we can only speculate on what their intentions were, but they were arrested for carrying around burglar tools, something which was a felony in Missouri. Elmer was looking at a few years of prison time, but the jury found him not guilty and he was again a free man in January 1911. He and Schoppelrei parted ways, but McCurdy teamed up with another guy he met on the inside while awaiting trial. He was a hardened criminal named Walter Jarrett and, this time, there was no speculation about what their intentions were.
On March 24, 1911, McCurdy and several other men consisting of Walter Jarrett and his brothers robbed the Iron Mountain Train near Lenapah, Oklahoma. Elmer was brought in for his demolition expertise, but we use the term extremely loosely here. McCurdy knew how to use nitroglycerin to blow stuff up with a loud bang. Precision was not his strong suit. Elmer used so much nitro that it blew the safe door across the room and through the side of the train car. Inside the safe were around $4,000 in silver coins…which had melted into the safe in the explosion. McCurdy managed to salvage around $450 worth and, as you might expect, the others weren’t happy about it. They got into a fight and Elmer went his own way which ended up being a blessing in disguise because the others were soon arrested.
Even though his first job didn’t exactly go swimmingly, McCurdy decided to give it another go. In September of that same year, he and a couple of accomplices snuck into the bank in Chautauqua, Kansas, after hours, hoping to rob it during the night. But good ol’ Elmer didn’t learn his lesson and used way too much nitro again. The explosion blew the outer vault off its hinges and completely trashed the interior of the bank, but the safe remained intact this time. Perhaps fearing that somebody heard the explosion, the gang didn’t set off a second charge and, instead, made off with $150 in silver coins sitting in a tray beside the safe.
Once again, it wasn’t exactly the crime of the century, but McCurdy had grand ambitions for his third heist. On October 4, 1911, three outlaws robbed a train that was carrying a fortune of $400,000 in cash as a payment to the Osage Nation. At least, that’s what they thought it was carrying. In fact, it was transporting sacks of mail because the robbers…wait for it…got on the wrong train. The criminal masterminds made off with a major haul of $46 cash, a watch, a coat, and a few jugs of whiskey.
After the grand heist, the gang split up and a posse caught up to McCurdy while he was taking a quick power nap in someone’s barn after drinking his share of the profits. The posse confronted Elmer, a shootout ensued and McCurdy was killed. Multiple accounts gave us differing versions of the story, but they all ended the same way – with Elmer McCurdy dead from a serious case of lead poisoning. Normally, this is where the bio ends, but in Elmer’s case, this is where it starts to get weird.
The Wild West Mummy
Joseph L. Johnson was the man who embalmed McCurdy and he did a pretty good job, too. Johnson filled Elmer with copious amounts of arsenic-laced embalming fluid to preserve him for a long time and waited for someone to claim him. But no one ever did so Johnson, determined to recoup his losses, began exhibiting Elmer and charging people to come see him. “The Embalmed Bandit,” as he came to be known, became quite an attraction, which only goes to show you how bored people were before television and the internet.
In 1916, two mysterious men finally came to claim Elmer’s body. Supposedly, they were distant relatives from California…except that a few weeks later, McCurdy was on display again at the Patterson Carnival Shows.
This became Elmer’s life…well, you know what we mean, for the next few decades. In 1922, a guy named Louis Sonney acquired Elmer for a wax figure sideshow titled “The Museum of Crime.” By that point, McCurdy, who wasn’t very big to begin with, had completely mummified and shriveled up to the size of a child. During the 30s, Elmer made his way into the hands of exploitation movie producer Dwain Esper, although whether he bought him from Sonney or received him as a loan is a matter of who you believe. Either way, the outlaw mummy eventually made his way back to the Sonney family. When Dan Sonney took over his father’s business in the late 40s, he decided to scrap the whole “Museum of Crime” exhibit altogether and put them all in storage, Elmer included.
Besides making a quick cameo as a set piece in the 1967 horror movie She Freaks, McCurdy spent the next two decades in storage until Sonney sold the entire figure collection to Spoony Singh, the guy who owned the Hollywood Wax Museum. He didn’t like Elmer…because he thought he didn’t look real enough, so he sold him to the guy who had his own exhibit on the Long Beach Pike.
And we finally circle back to the beginning of our story. By this point, McCurdy had been passed around so much that not only had his identity been lost, but people officially didn’t know that he was a real person, anymore. They just thought he was a crappy-looking dummy. After a while, Elmer was moved to the funhouse and that’s where he spent his final years until he was discovered by The Six Million Dollar Man crew.
In February 1977, Elmer McCurdy was buried in the Summit View Cemetery, next to another notorious outlaw named Bill Doolin. And, thus, finally, the improbable story of the Wild West mummy came to an end.
