This is a bit of a strange one. It sounds like it should be an episode of The X-Files, but it is a genuine story. It involves robbery, a corpse and possibly one of the most useless criminals I’ve ever read about.
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Elmer McCurdy was born on New Year’s Day 1880 in Washington, USA. His mother, Sadie, was an unmarried 17-year-old, and his father was unknown. At this time, it was considered scandalous to have an illegitimate child, so Sadie’s brother George and his wife Helen adopted Elmer. George died in 1890 from tuberculosis, and Sadie, Helen and Elmer moved to Bangor, Maine. Here, Sadie explained to Elmer that she was his biological mother and didn’t know his father, although it could have been her cousin, Charles Smith. This news upset Elmer; he didn’t react well, becoming unruly and as a teenager, he began drinking heavily; this habit would follow him throughout his life.
He moved back to live with his grandfather and started training as a plumber. He worked well and was financially comfortable until the economy stuttered in 1898, and Elmer lost his job. His mother died in 1900, and his grandfather died just a month later.
Elmer became a bit of a drifter, moving around working as a miner and a plumber. He ended up in Kansas before being arrested for public intoxication in 1905. In 1907, he joined the US Army and was honourably discharged in 1910. In the army, he learnt how to use nitro-glycerine, an explosive liquid.
On November 19th, 1910, Elmer and a friend were arrested for possessing items believed to be related to a planned burglary, chisels, gunpowder, etc. At court, Elmer told the judge that the tools weren’t for criminal purposes but for a ‘foot-operated machine’ he was working on. The jury believed him and released him. Shortly after this, Elmer’s oh-so-wonderful career as a bank and train robber began.
Elmer thought incorporating his nitro-glycerine training into his attempted robberies would be a good idea. He was, to be perfectly honest, absolutely useless and tended to cause more problems than he solved.
In 1911, Elmer and three others attempted to rob the Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific train after Elmer had a tip-off; one of the train cars contained a safe with $4,000 inside. They held up the train and found the safe – so far so good. Then, Elmer attempted to use nitro-glycerine to blow open the safe door. He managed to blow up the entire safe and most of the money. Instead of $4,000, they came away with $450, mostly made up of melted silver. Oh, Elmer.
Later that year, Elmer and two accomplices decided to break into The Citizens Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas. They broke through the bank wall using a hammer - so far, so good. Then along comes Elmer with his nitro-glycerine again (because, apparently, Elmer never learns). The first explosion removed the vault door but not the door of the inner safe. He tried to blow this open, but the nitro-glycerine didn’t detonate. Elmer and his accomplices ran away with $150 in loose coins—nice one, Elmer.
Elmer’s final robbery was on October 4th, 1911 and was planned around a Katy Train (a train on The Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway) that was rumoured to be carrying $400,000 in cash. But Elmer, being Elmer, held up the wrong train. They stopped a passenger train and ended up with the grand sum of $46, a gun, a coat, a watch, and a couple of demijohns of whisky.
Elmer was disappointed (understatement of the year) and went to Revardi’s Ranch on October 6th. By now, he was ill with tuberculosis and mild pneumonia and was working his way through the demi johns of whisky. He wasn’t aware that his name had been mentioned in relation to the train robbery and that there was a $2,000 reward for his capture. On October 7th, 1911, 3 sheriffs, Dick Wallace and brothers Bob and Stringer Fenton, found Elmer after using bloodhounds. A single gunshot killed Elmer. Bob Fenton recalled:
“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 taken from the train. It was about empty. He was pretty drunk when he rode up to the ranch last night”.
Elmer’s body was taken to Joseph L Johnson, an embalmer and funeral director in Oklahoma. He embalmed the body using an arsenic-based preservative (quite common then), shaved his face and dressed him in a suit. Elmer’s family had died years previously, and no one came forward to claim his body. Johnson wasn’t going to bury a body without payment, so he changed Elmer’s burial suit to casual clothing, popped a gun in his hands and stood him in the funeral home as an advertisement and an attraction. People were charged a nickel to come and see Elmer under his various guises, such as:
‘The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up’.
‘The Oklahoma Outlaw’
‘The Mystery Man of Many Aliases’
‘The Embalmed Bandit’.
Some people would insert coins into Elmer’s mouth, and there was even a rumoured incident involving Johnson’s children popping roller skates on Elmer and rolling him around the house.
Five years after his death, Johnson was contacted by someone claiming to be Elmer’s long-lost brother, Aver. Aver already had permission from the authorities to take Elmer for burial. Aver turned up with another brother, Wayne, and they took Elmer with them.
Plot twist – they weren’t Elmer’s long-lost brothers. I’m shocked.
Their real names were James and Charles Patterson; James owned Great Patterson Carnival Shows. James had learned from Charles about Elmer’s famously embalmed body and had decided he would be an excellent addition to the carnival. Elmer’s corpse was featured as ‘The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive’ until James sold the carnival to Louis Sonney in 1922. Elmer performed well as an attraction (certainly better than he ever did as a criminal); there is always a market for morbid curiosity.
Elmer was used in Sonney’s travelling ‘Museum of Crime’, next to waxwork replicas of famous outlaws such as Jesse James. In 1933, Elmer’s corpse was borrowed by film director Dwain Esper. Elmer was placed in theatres that were showing Esper’s exploitation film, ‘Narcotic’; theatregoers were told that Elmer had robbed a pharmacist to feed his drug addiction, was surrounded by police and had killed himself to avoid being arrested. This was just a story used to promote the film.
By this time, Elmer had been dead for 22 years, and his corpse was deteriorating; his skin was shrivelled and hard, and his body shrunk.
Louis Sonney died in 1949, and Elmer was placed, with the waxworks, into storage. Many years later, Sonney’s son Dan allowed filmmaker David F Friedman to use Elmer’s corpse in a film. In 1967, 56 years after his death, Elmer was a film star, appearing in the film She Freak.
In 1968, Dan sold the waxworks, along with Elmer, to the owner of the Hollywood Wax Museum, Spoony Singh. I believe it to be around this time that people started to forget that Elmer was an actual corpse and not a waxwork. Whilst being exhibited, poor Elmer became damaged (the guy can’t catch a break). During a windstorm, he lost the tips of his ears, fingers, and toes. He was described as ‘too gruesome’ and not lifelike enough. I’m unsure how much more life-like you can get than an actual corpse, but there we go. Singh sold Elmer to Ed Liersch, part owner of an amusement zone in Long Beach, California, called The Pike. Elmer was left in the funhouse exhibition, ‘Laff In The Dark’. He was there, hanging from the gallows for four years, only moving when the passenger carts went by and caused a draft.
It was December 8th, 1976, when they started filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man at The Pike (the episode was called ‘Carnival of Spies’). Whilst shooting, the art director decided to move a glow-in-the-dark orange waxwork, and the waxwork arm snapped and revealed human bone and tissue. Yes, it was our friend, lucky Elmer. The crew quickly realised this was an actual body they were handling and alerted the police. The police arrived and contacted paramedics to report a severe case of dehydration. I’m not sure it could get much more severe, to be honest. The paramedics did arrive, but I think it’s safe to say it was a bit late to revive our friend Elmer.
Police took Elmer’s mummified body to the Los Angeles coroner’s office; by this point, Elmer had withered away to just 5’3” and weighed just 50 pounds. An autopsy revealed the cause of death as a single gunshot wound. The body was petrified with age and covered in wax and paint. There was a hole drilled through the neck to accommodate a noose. Inside Elmer’s mouth was a penny from 1924 and ticket stubs to The Museum of Crime. The authorities contacted Dan Sonney, who informed them of the body's identity. After radiographs of the skull, they could positively identify Elmer McCurdy.
By this time, the media had discovered Elmer’s long journey. There were many funeral homes who, very kindly, offered to bury Elmer free of charge. Fred Olds, who represented the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerns, was allowed to take Elmer.
On April 22nd, 1977, 66 years after his death, Elmer was finally buried in Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Three hundred people attended his funeral. And, to make sure, two feet of concrete were poured over his casket to ensure he could rest in peace.
The world’s unluckiest criminal. Shot, embalmed as an advert, an attraction, a film star, and a waxwork. Elmer accomplished so extraordinarily little in life but ended up an unexpected celebrity in death. As amusing as I have found this story in parts, I genuinely hope our friend, Elmer, is finally resting in peace.
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