A dead Old West train robber, a 1970s TV show, a busted fun house mannequin, and one very real bullet wound all collided in one of the strangest showbiz afterlives ever. Elmer McCurdy was a lousy criminal, but as a corpse, the man had range.
The Six Million Dollar Man Hook That Started This Bizarre Ride
The Six Million Dollar Man was one of my favorite TV shows back when I was a kid. I recall even today watching the premiere on a Friday night alongside my grandfather. He made me turn the TV off before the show ended because it was too violent. My, haven’t times changed?
The Six Million Dollar Man ran for five seasons, 102 episodes, and half a dozen TV movies. It chronicled the adventures of Colonel Steve Austin, a NASA astronaut who suffers a catastrophic crash of his experimental space vehicle and is quite nearly killed. In desperation, government surgeons swap his shattered right arm, both legs, and left eye with bionic replacements. Once he recovers, Austin can run more than 60 mph, see great distances, and lift insanely heavy objects. Colonel Austin spends the next five years on secret missions as a mechanically enhanced super spy.
In 1976, one of the Six Million Dollar Man episodes titled “Carnival of Spies” was filmed in a house of horrors at the Pike Amusement Zone in Long Beach, California. Part of the décor in this frightful fun house was a mannequin that simulated a dead man hanging from the ceiling. Once filming was complete, an assistant director was tasked with repositioning the mannequin. When he did, one of the arms came loose in his hand. Now curious, the TV director studied the severed limb and was shocked to find actual bones, muscles, and cartilage. As stage mannequins are seldom so realistic, he rightfully called the cops. The story behind the actual dead man was way more outlandish than anything in the TV show.
Elmer McCurdy’s Rough Start Before the Gunfire
In 1911, a ne’er-do-well named Elmer McCurdy robbed a train alongside a small group of like-minded cutthroats. Elmer was born in 1880 in Washington, Maine, to 17-year-old Sadie McCurdy. Elmer’s dad was never positively identified, but he was suspected of being a cousin of Sadie’s who lived with the family named Charles Smith.
Illegitimate children were a big deal in 19th-century America, so Sadie’s brother George and his wife Helen adopted the boy. When the poor kid was ten, his adoptive father succumbed to tuberculosis. Helen and Sadie subsequently took young Elmer and moved to Bangor, Maine. Sadie eventually told Elmer the truth about his unconventional parentage, but he did not take it well. The rebellious teenager began drinking heavily, a lamentable habit that would follow him through the rest of his brief life.
Elmer moved in with his grandfather, assumed the alias Frank Curtis, and apprenticed as a plumber. He thrived for a time but lost his livelihood in the economic downturn of 1898. Two years later, both his mom and grandfather died within the span of two months. This two-fold loss kind of pushed the poor guy over the edge.
Army Training Gave Elmer McCurdy the Wrong Skill Set
Elmer moved from place to place but was unable to keep a job due to his drinking. In 1907, he joined the Army and learned both to operate a machine gun and manage high explosives. He was honorably discharged three years later.
Immediately upon his release from the military, Elmer connected with an old Army buddy named Walter Shapilrock, and they began planning for the future. Twelve days after his discharge, Elmer and his friend were arrested with chisels, hacksaws, gunpowder, nitroglycerine, and money sacks in their possession. The two men were arraigned on suspicion of burglary, but then successfully convinced the judge that all that weird stuff was to support a scheme they had to design an improved machine gun for the Army. The hapless judge bought their stupid story and cut them loose. As soon as he was released, Elmer embarked upon a new career as a super criminal.
Elmer McCurdy’s Train Robbery Career Goes Boom
Alongside two other criminals, McCurdy’s big score was to be the robbery of the Iron Mountain-Pacific train No 104. Rumor had it that this train was carrying some $4,000 in a strongbox in one of the freight cars. That would be about $132,000 today.
The three ne’er-do-wells successfully commandeered the railcar containing the safe. They had brought along nitroglycerin to gain entrance to the lockbox. Alas, there is an art to the proper application of high explosives. Elmer misjudged something and pulverized the train car, the safe, and the cash secured therein. McCurdy and his mates fled with nothing to show for their efforts save around $100 in melted silver coins, the mail clerk’s gold watch, and a bunch of really angry cops.
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Blow Up Something Else
Six months later, McCurdy and his buddies tried and failed to rob the Citizens Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas. Once again, nitroglycerin was to be their undoing. Elmer blew the vault door off its hinges but also propelled it all the way through the bank building itself, effectively destroying the structure. Amidst the smoking rubble, they discovered a secondary safe inside the vault. When his second charge failed to detonate, McCurdy’s getaway man got cold feet and split. Now despondent, Elmer abandoned his criminal pals to drown his sorrows in a friend’s hay shed near Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Less than two weeks later, Elmer tried one more time to rob a train. This one was carrying an astronomical $400,000 in cash for the Osage Indian Nation. Alas, Elmer’s robbery crew inadvertently stopped a passenger train instead. After fleecing the passengers, they made off with a nice weatherproof coat, a revolver, the conductor’s watch, two demijohns of whiskey, and $46 in cash. They overlooked a traveling jewelry salesman’s sample case that the man had hidden inside a spittoon.
Armed Robbery Has a Lousy Retirement Plan
By now, Elmer McCurdy was in a bit of a state. Beaten down with tuberculosis, pneumonia, and trichinosis, he climbed back into his hayloft and proceeded to drink himself stupid. Unbeknownst to him, however, a sheriff’s posse was hot on his tail.
Sheriff Bob Fenton said of the subsequent confrontation, “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…we later found one of the jugs of whiskey which was taken from the train. It was about empty. He was pretty drunk when he rode up to the ranch last night.”
In the exchange of gunfire, Elmer McCurdy caught a single fatal round to the chest. Curiously, it seems he was shot with a 7.65mm bullet from a P08 Luger pistol wielded by Sheriff Fenton’s brother, Stringer. The inept train robber was done. The cops tidied up the scene and duly deposited Elmer’s mortal remains at a local funeral parlor. That’s where things got weird.
Elmer McCurdy Becomes the World’s Creepiest Tourist Trap
The undertaker was unable to find anyone who was interested in footing the bill for the demised criminal’s funeral. Now, keep in mind, this was a different time. Determined to turn some lemons into lemonade, the funeral director professionally embalmed Elmer using arsenic (a common practice in America up until the 1930’s), decked him out with a hat, a rifle, and some basic Western regalia, and transformed the dead thug into a tourist attraction. For a fee, curious visitors could get up close and personal with a genuine deceased outlaw, the notorious Elmer McCurdy. In so doing, the enterprising undertaker made way more money than he ever might have had he simply buried the poor man properly.
Over time, the rumor began to circulate that you could shove coins into Elmer’s mouth and get good luck in return. The funeral parlor folks did little to dissuade this. Now gawkers would pay to see Elmer in the daytime, often depositing silver in his lifeless mouth. In the evening, staff would empty his pie hole of coinage and set him up for the next day. Elmer’s moldy corpse had suddenly been transformed into a gnarly machine that made money.
Five years after his gory demise, a small group of concerned kinfolk presented themselves at the funeral parlor to collect their dearly departed relative. Only they weren’t technically related to Elmer. They just knew that idiots were stuffing money into his mouth, so they wanted a piece of that action. In short order, Elmer McCurdy had become a prominent attraction in a cheesy traveling circus.
Time Was Not Kind to This Traveling Dead Outlaw
Dead people are not really designed to be moved from place to place, ogled by curious crowds, and stuffed full of nickels. In 1921, about a decade after the cops first blew him away, Elmer began to show his age. His erstwhile owners subsequently coated him in wax and gave him a proper extreme makeover. At some point, he signed on with a traveling true crime exhibition. Apparently, as dead guys go, Elmer McCurdy enjoyed an exceptional performance range.
After wandering about the hinterlands, Elmer’s corpse was sold to Dwain Esper, the producer of a scared straight-style instructional film titled “Narcotic!” I can only assume that, in the undoubtedly intense narrative, the shopworn dead man was the “After” example. As in, “This is you, now this is you on drugs. Kids, don’t be like this nasty wax-covered dead dude.”
Elmer bounced around doing piddly gigs until 1949, earning his keep, though only barely, by looking thoroughly weird and creepy. Somebody somewhere finally had pity on the poor guy and propped him up in the corner of a Hollywood warehouse. There he stayed undisturbed for some twenty years. Then, in 1967, Elmer was brought out of retirement as an extra in the bizarre, low-budget David Friedman horror film She Freaks. Tragically, this did not signal a dramatic return to show business greatness for the well-traveled room temperature train robber.
The Six Million Dollar Man Prop That Wasn’t a Prop
Once the prop house guys got Elmer back from the set of She Freaks, his show business career seemed to stagnate. They subsequently sold him to the Long Beach house of horrors, falsely claiming he was a mannequin and not an actual dead person. Once Elmer was finally disassembled by the coroner, he was found to contain a gas check from the bullet that killed him. A 1924 penny and ticket stubs to Louis Sonney’s Museum of Crime were found hidden inside his mouth. What remained of the hapless train robber was by then 63 inches tall and weighed some fifty pounds.
And that, my friends, is how a train robber gunned down by the cops in 1911 ended up with a bit part in one of the most popular television shows of the 1970’s. Truth is, as ever, stranger than fiction.
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