The Curious Case of Elmer McCurdy’s Embalmed Corpse
Via Wikipedia:
After leaving the Army in 1903, Elmer McCurdy and two associates attempted to acquire money via robbery but were not successful. In their first try, they used too much nitroglycerin and destroyed the money they were attempting to steal. Their second attempt also netted them little. After their third attempt (a train-robbery), a posse tracked McCurdy to a barn, where he then died in a shoot-out.
His body was subsequently taken to a funeral home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. When no one claimed the corpse, the undertaker embalmed it with an arsenic-based preservative and allowed people to see “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up” for a nickel. People would place nickels in McCurdy’s mouth, which the undertaker would collect later. As increasingly large numbers of people came to view his remains, McCurdy was said to have made more money in death than in life. Many carnival operators asked to buy the mummified body from the undertaker, but he refused.
Almost five years after McCurdy died, a man showed up from a nearby traveling carnival known as the Great Patterson Shows claiming to be McCurdy’s long-lost brother. He indicated that he wanted to remove the corpse to give it a proper burial. Within two weeks, however, McCurdy was a featured exhibit with the carnival. For the next 60 years, McCurdy’s body was sold to successive wax museums, carnivals, and haunted houses. The body was part of the official sideshow that accompanied the Trans-American Footrace. The owner of a haunted house near Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, refused to purchase him because he thought that McCurdy’s body was actually a mannequin and was not lifelike enough. McCurdy’s corpse can be seen in the 1933 Dwain Esper exploitation film, Narcotic.[2]
Eventually, McCurdy’s corpse wound up at The Pike, an amusement zone in Long Beach, California which existed under various names until 1979.
In December 1976, during filming at Queens Park (A.K.A. The Pike), of the television show The Six Million Dollar Man episode “Carnival of Spies” (#4.17) (1977), a crew member was moving what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin’s arm (some accounts say finger) broke off, it was discovered that it was in fact embalmed and mummified human remains.
Later, when medical examiner Thomas Noguchi opened the mummy’s mouth for other clues, hewas surprised to find a 1924 penny and a ticket from Sonney Amusement’s Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. That ticket and archived newspaper accounts helped police and researchers identify the body as that of Elmer McCurdy.
His remains were examined in 1976 by forensic anthropologists. The examination revealed incisions from his original autopsy and embalming, as well as a gunshot wound in the right anterior chest and a round in his pelvis. The round was a copper bullet jacket or gas check of approximately .32 caliber; analysis showed that the jacket was manufactured between 1905 and the 1930s.
Video superimposition of the remains with photographs of McCurdy’s corpse in the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collection confirmed McCurdy’s identity.
He was finally buried in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977. The state medical examiner ordered that two cubic yards of concrete was to be poured over the casket, so that his remains would never be disturbed again.
