Elmer McCurdy wasn’t your typical outlaw—his life of crime was defined by failure, and his bizarre posthumous journey only added to the tragic comedy of his existence.
In October 1911, the Leader, a newspaper in Guthrie, Oklahoma, announced that the criminal life of Kansan Elmer McCurdy had come to an end.
Special officers are hot on the trail of the two bandits yet at large who held up and robbed a Katy train near Okesa last Wednesday morning and it is believed that their arrest is but a question of [t]ime. With the complete identification of the body of Elmer J. McCurdy, the Katy detectives and officers believe they have rid the country of the leader of the gang which has been committing so many depredations in the Northeastern and southwestern Kansas during the past few months.
But the story’s drama omitted the fact that while Elmer was, indeed, a public nuisance … he wasn’t that good of a criminal. It wasn’t Elmer’s fault. Again and again, he had attempted to pull off daring robberies and brazen crimes, but he never quite succeeded. And the bad luck of one of the state’s most hapless criminals would follow him long past his death.
Born in Maine in January 1880, the future robber drifted around the eastern part of the United States for much of his early 20s, until making his way to Kansas, where he lived and worked in Cherryvale and then Iola.
At 27, Elmer joined the United States Army and spent three years at Fort Leavenworth, where he was evidently trained in the use of both weapons and nitroglycerine, skills he would use, but not effectively, after his honorable discharge from the Army.
In late March 1911, Elmer and some partners robbed a train on the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern railroad outside of Coffeyville.
Elmer was called to open the safe. He used four nitroglycerine charges to blow it open—and destroyed a good deal of the plunder.
“Taking into consideration the amount of damaged money that we have found,” H.W. Walker, superintendent of the Pacific Express Company, told the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, “I do not see how the robbers profited more than $100 by their work.”
By “damaged money,” Walker was referring to Elmer’s use of so much explosive that his blast turned the silver coins within the safe into molten slag, which then became stuck to the safe’s interior upon cooling.
A similar thing would happen, with a very similar headline in the Chanute Times when McCurdy and two partners went after the Citizens Bank in Chautauqua in September of that same year. As related in a piece titled, “Robbers Made a Light Haul,” the trio made away with roughly $150 in silver after tunneling into the bank vault. This time, Elmer’s nitroglycerine charge “blew the safe clear through the front door of the vault, knocking the vault door through the front of the brick building into the street.”
The article concludes by stating that “the only money they got was in the counter changer that stood on top of the safe” and intimating “the noise made by this explosion frightened the robbers away.”
At this point, Elmer has committed two big robberies, with less than $300 in silver to show for it.
Well, unfortunately for Elmer, good things and bad luck come in three.
The next crime—the aforementioned Katy train robbery near Okes—was an absolute failure for Elmer and his two cohorts. They evidently thought they were robbing a train “carrying a large shipment of money to the Osage tribe,” as reported in the Sentinel-Record. It seems that train, carrying roughly $400,000, was about two hours behind the train McCurdy robbed. This meant the robbers made off with $46 stolen from the station agent in Dewey, Oklahoma.
Elmer holed up on a ranch in Oklahoma until on October 7, 1911, just three days after the failed robbery, three deputy sheriffs—Bob Fenton, Stringer Fenton, and Dick Wallace—surprised and surrounded Elmer when he was sleeping in the barn. A shootout erupted, and Elmer was taken dead from a shot to the chest and a shotgun pellet to the neck.
It was an inauspicious end for an inauspicious criminal.
But Elmer’s luck grew worse.
After preserving and embalming Elmer’s corpse in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, the director of the funeral home, Joseph L. Johnston, began exhibiting Elmer’s body for five cents a look as “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up.”
This went on for five years, until Charles and James Patterson pretended to be McCurdy’s long-lost brothers who were there to take their sibling home and put him to proper rest.
They were actually the men behind a carnival, the Great Patterson Shows, and from 1916 until 1922, they exhibited Elmer’s mummified body as “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive.”
From there, Elmer’s body wound its way through a series of less-than-dignified posthumous adventures, including popping up in the David F. Friedman sexploitation movie She Freak, before finally making its way to the Laff in the Dark funhouse at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. It was there in December 1976 that an art director for The Six Million Dollar Man attempted to move a wax dummy prop while filming the episode “Carnival of Spies.” The dummy’s arm broke off, revealing that it was in fact, a human mummy, not a dummy. Upon inspection, they discovered enough evidence to figure out that this funhouse cadaver was, in fact, the late Elmer McCurdy.
Once identified, McCurdy was taken to Guthrie, Oklahoma, where the Oklahoma Historical Society interred him in the Boot Hill area of the Summit View Cemetery. To ensure McCurdy stayed put, two feet of concrete were poured on top of the casket.
It might even take four charges of nitroglycerine to blow through that barrier. But given that Elmer is on the other side, something would be bound to go wrong.
