Nothing in Elmer McCurdy’s life could have suggested he’d someday become a legend, one of those unforgettable bandits who helped carve out an enduring myth of the Old West. This guy was no Jesse James.
McCurdy’s criminal career lasted about six months, and his few attempts at snatching ill-gotten gains were pathetic and almost comical.
Still, this third-rate crook is remembered today, in books, comics, film, and music. Now, his story is headed for the bright lights of Broadway in a quirky musical called “Dead Outlaw.”
The world became aware of McCurdy in December 1976, when one of America’s hottest TV shows—“The Six Million Dollar Man”—took over a southern California amusement park to shoot an episode in a dilapidated fun house called Laff-in-the-Dark. It was filled with hideous props — ghouls and skeletons crafted of balsa wood, wax, and papier-mâché.
The set crew came upon a mummy, painted in Day-Glo red and hanging from a wall by a noose.
Set decorator Chris Haynes thought it looked “awful real,” he later recalled in a BBC2 documentary. He tried to move one of the arms, but it snapped off in his hand.
Inside the arm “looked like beef jerky wrapped around a bone,” Haynes recalled.
L.A. chief medical examiner Thomas Noguchi, dubbed the “Coroner to the Stars” for his work on such celebrity corpses as Marilyn Monroe, was soon on the case.
An autopsy revealed that the mummy had once been a young man — around 30 years old — who was shot dead early in the 20th century. His last meal consisted mostly of whiskey.
The exam also revealed a clue in the mummy’s mouth — a 1924 penny and ticket stubs from “Louis Sonny’s Museum of Crime” in Los Angeles.
With that lead, investigators traced the mummy to a film production company that had purchased it in the ’60s. They learned that it was thought to be the remains of McCurdy, who died in Oklahoma in 1911.
Born in Maine in 1880, McCurdy’s mother was unmarried, and his father had disappeared by the time the child came into the world. An aunt and uncle took the baby in. Later, his grandfather got him a plumbing apprenticeship, wrote Mark Svenvold in his 2002 book “Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw.”
A series of family misfortunes sent young McCurdy to the bottle. He soon left home, a drifter, and survived through plumbing, mining, other odd jobs, and a stint in the army.
His first arrest was in 1910. Police picked him and an accomplice up for possession of safecracking tools. A jury set him free.
Army training had given McCurdy some experience with explosives. After his discharge, he tried to apply his skills to criminal pursuits. The trouble was, he wasn’t very good at it. An attempt to use nitroglycerin on a bank safe succeeded only in blasting it across the floor of the building.
Another time, McCurdy and his gang used dynamite and nitroglycerin to try to snatch $4,000 in silver dollars from a train safe. Four blasts opened it, but the attempt generated so much heat that the coins melted and fused to the safe walls.
Then there was that time when the gang targeted a payment train carrying about $400,000. But the bandits showed up early and instead held up a passenger train along the same track.
Their efforts yielded $46 (around $1,500 today), a watch, and a couple of jugs of whiskey.
Still, the robbery sent an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse and bloodhounds after these bungling desperados. The law caught up with McCurdy as he hid in a barn near the town of Pawhuska in the badlands of Osage County. The fugitive, who had been drinking heavily, refused to surrender and took some shots at the deputies.
“BANDIT SLAIN IN DESPERATE FIGHT WITH OFFICERS,” was the page one headline of The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 8, 1911.
Sheriff’s deputies escorted his corpse to the nearest mortuary, where undertaker Joseph Johnson embalmed him with arsenic and waited for someone to claim the body.
No one came. So Johnson propped him up in a corner of his establishment and left him there.
This was the start of McCurdy’s rise to fame. People flocked to see the bandit’s cadaver and by 1912, Svenvold noted, McCurdy’s “change from cadaver to curiosity was now completed.”
In 1916, five years after his death, two men appeared at the mortuary, saying they were McCurdy’s kin, and they wanted to bring the body home for a proper burial.
They were actually employees of a traveling carnival looking for an essential sideshow attraction — a mummy. For the next 65 years, McCurdy’s corpse bounced around in the freak show Netherworld. Until the 1940s, his home was the Louis Sonney Wax Museum of Crime. Later, he was passed around to other carnivals and exhibitions until he landed in Laff-in-the-Dark.
After McCurdy’s body was discovered in 1976, his story, image, and influence began to pop up in surprising places — poems, ballads, a murder mystery weekend, and documentaries. The sight of the mummy was said to have inspired the comic book supervillain Skeletor.
And in April, “Dead Outlaw,” a musical that has been winning raves Off-Broadway for a year will have its Broadway debut at the Longacre Theater.
Will the real McCurdy make a cameo appearance? It’s not likely.
In May 1977, the roaming mummy was given a proper burial in a Guthrie, Okla., cemetery next to other, more successful Western bandits. As soon as it was in the ground, the coffin was covered with a heavy layer of concrete to discourage grave robbers from trying to disturb his well-deserved rest.