The Death of Elmer McCurdy (Maine) 32:10

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Strung up in the corner of a roadside amusement park funhouse was the figure of a man, coated so many times with phosphorus paint that it glowed in the dimly lit space, intended to frighten any carnival goers who dared enter. It was alarmingly lifelike, and yet in the several years the figure was on display, no one dared question if the man was anything more than a mannequin.

This story begins in Washington, Maine, but spans the entire country. It's a different kind of true crime story, about the life and death of a man named Elmer McCurdy. Elmer McCurdy was shot and killed, but his death was not investigated or prosecuted as a murder.

Elmer McCurdy was a criminal himself in the final decade of his life. A lousy one by most accounts, but that wasn't what made Elmer the center of national attention and intrigue in the late 1970s, 66 years after he died. What happened to Elmer McCurdy in his death, and during the nearly seven decades before he was finally interred, that's the story here.

I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the bizarre story of Maynard Elmer McCurdy's life after death on Dark Down East. Born in Washington, Maine in 1880, Elmer McCurdy seemed to land in the midst of unfortunate circumstances from the very start. According to the New England Historical Society, his mother was Sadie McCurdy, just 17 years old and living at home when she had Elmer.

Though unconfirmed, many sources report that Elmer McCurdy's father was a cousin of Sadie's, who had lived with her family for a short stint. Having a baby out of wedlock during this time left women and their families with permanently tarnished images. To protect the McCurdy family from the expected societal judgment, Sadie's brother George and sister-in-law Helen adopted Elmer and raised him as their own alongside their biological son.

Until he was 15 years old, Elmer was a happy boy and teenager. He enjoyed his life with the people he called mother and father. But in February of 1890, George fell victim to the widespread public health crisis that would ultimately claim 2% of New England's population at the time: tuberculosis.

Helen had all she could do to care for the home and the two boys after George's passing, and so her sister Sadie moved in to help. The burden was still too much though, and Helen told Sadie that Elmer would have to be her responsibility. Helen was essentially giving Elmer back. And so, together, they told Elmer the truth.

And the truth was that the woman he knew as his mother was actually Elmer's aunt, and the woman he called Aunt Sadie was his biological mother. The news rattled Elmer. The feeling of betrayal sent him spiraling. At 15 years old, he began drinking heavily and started getting into trouble with the law. In 1895, Elmer ran away, eventually making it to his grandparents' home in Bangor,

His grandfather, Hardin McCurdy, helped Elmer find a job as an apprentice to a plumber. He was relatively skilled at it for a young man and made a decent living for the time. After three months with his grandparents, Elmer decided to move back in with his birth mother. He bonded with Sadie and became what the New England Historical Society describes as her protector.

Much of Elmer's life and misadventures are documented by writer Mark Svenvold in his book Elmer McCurdy: The Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw. Svenvold reported that just five years after Elmer found out that Sadie McCurdy was his mother, he lost her. Sadie got sick in late 1899 and died August 24th, 1900 at 37 years old. It was a ruptured ulcer.

And then, Elmer's grandfather, Hardin, passed away too, just a month later. On top of the mounting losses in his family, Elmer's employment circled the drain. Maine was not immune to the downturn of the global and national economy of the time. Thousands lost their jobs, and for Elmer, plumbing work dried up. He'd reached a pivotal moment in his life that would set into motion a series of events that wove an unbelievable tale.

Up until his mother and grandfather's deaths in 1900, Elmer lived between Washington, Maine and Bangor, Maine. But after their passing and with the economic downturn, Elmer ventured across state lines, never to look back. Nothing in my research shows that Elmer ever returned to his home state after 1900. Perhaps with his family gone, he had nothing to go back to.

Elmer was a drifter. He landed in the Midwest, first, Iola, Kansas, where he picked up jobs as a plumber to get by. He didn't go by the name of Elmer, though. Historians speculate that anti-Irish sentiment of the time caused Elmer to assume the pseudonym Frank Curtis. Frank, aka Elmer, embedded himself into the Iola community.

According to Mark Svenvold's research, he became a volunteer firefighter and joined the local trade union. This born-and-raised Mainer blended seamlessly into his new life out West, that is, until a demon from his younger years emerged once again. Elmer never did fully escape his struggles with alcohol.

One night, after finding himself at the bottom of a bottle, Elmer told his boss, with whom he also lived, that he was using an assumed name and, shockingly, confessed that he'd killed a man in a bar fight in another state. When he'd sobered up the next day, his boss asked him to elaborate. Elmer admitted that he'd been using the alias Frank Curtis, but denied the murder.

For what it's worth, reporting in a Maine publication does note that Elmer was in a bar fight when he was a teenager, and there are other sources that speak to some issues as he was traveling out west, but it doesn't sound like any fight he was in was, in fact, deadly. Whether Elmer killed anyone in any fight anywhere is unconfirmed.

In addition to picking up plumbing jobs, Elmer went to work in a zinc mine as a mucker, shoveling upwards of 60 tons of ore by hand each day and earning just $2 for his efforts. The work was brutal and hazardous. His lungs were lined with zinc dust and lead. In 1907, Elmer saw a way out, an opportunity to travel abroad.

He enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the 13th Infantry. Before he ever deployed to join the regiment in the Philippines, though, the 13th Infantry returned to base in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He carried out his enlistment there in the Quartermaster's department and was discharged in 1910, but not before learning a skill that would lead to Elmer McCurdy's next career move, criminal with a specialty in explosives.

Elmer McCurdy learned about field demolitions using nitroglycerin through a two-week curriculum taught by fellow servicemen and future five-star general Douglas MacArthur. Months before he was discharged, Elmer learned how to blow up bridges and other structures. When he left the service, those skills were put to use elsewhere.

In the few weeks after Elmer McCurdy was discharged, employment evaded him. His discharged pay dwindled. As Svenvold writes in his book about McCurdy, one evening in November of 1910, Elmer and a fellow serviceman on leave were stopped by police for looking suspicious.

Upon searching their persons and bags, police found even more reasons to be suspicious of the men. A force screw, assorted drills and saws, chisels, a nitroglycerin funnel, gunpowder, and more.

Lacking good reason for lugging around such devices, Elmer and his friend were arrested on the spot for a crime of possessing, quote, mechanical devices adapted, designed, and commonly used for breaking into vaults and safes, end quote. It was a felony, punishable by two to ten years behind bars. Elmer entered a plea of not guilty and awaited arraignment in jail.

That's where he met his new pal, Walter Jarrett, who was serving out a 50-day sentence for drunk and disorderly conduct. Walter talked of his success robbing banks in Oklahoma and said that anytime Elmer wanted to come visit to look him up,

Elmer finally did go on trial on the possession of burglary tools charges, but he managed to argue that these weren't intended for burglary at all. Elmer was a plumber, and plumbers needed drills and chisels and saws too. His argument proved successful. Elmer was released from jail, and no sooner did he get out, Elmer made his way to Oklahoma to find his friend Walter.

And when he did, Walter wasted no time weaving a plan to make a quick buck. And he would need Elmer's knowledge of explosives to make it happen. On March 23, 1911, Walter, Elmer, and two others jumped a Pacific Express Company train, known to be carrying large amounts of silver in its safe.

Elmer rigged an explosive to the safe, relying on his knowledge obtained in the army. Except, it was his first time blowing up a safe, and he misjudged just how much nitroglycerin was needed. The resulting blast tore the door of the safe clean off, sending it through the side of the train car. The $4,000 of silver inside? It melted, and became forged to the back corner of the car.

The ragtag crew made off with just $450 worth of silver. That was strike one of his less-than-stellar criminal career, and it ended his relationship with his friend Walter. But Elmer kept on. Next up was a bank vault about six months later on the evening of September 21, 1911. Again, Elmer overloaded the nitroglycerin,

The Sedan Times star wrote of the blast, "...it blew the outer door of the safe and through it with terrific force against the front door of the vault. That vault door, with its iron frame, was blown out of place and across the room to the plate glass window. It plowed its way through the furniture, leaving everything in its path a complete wreck."

When Elmer and his associate stepped into the vault after the initial blast, they realized the interior door was unaffected. He tried to rig another charge, but they had to flee the scene before Elmer could finish. They made off with whatever was in the tray on top of the safe, less than $200. Less than a month later, Elmer attempted his third and final strike, this time back on the railroad.

According to reporting by the Tulsa Daily Democrat, Elmer and his two co-conspirators held up the MK&T passenger train on Katy Railroad in Oklahoma. They'd heard that car number 23 would contain large sums of money, except when the crew hopped the train, they ended up on car 29 instead.

Terry Whitehead, author of the Terry's Place blog, unearthed some original reporting on the event. Bartlesville Enterprise wrote of the poorly executed heist, quote, "...the hall made by the robbers was one of the smallest in the history of train robbing. They failed to find as much as a copper cent in the safe in the express car."

The express agent opened the door for them and allowed them to look in. They took $40 in currency and a Hampton watch worth $25 from the mail clerk, a coat worth $25 from the conductor McCormick, and from the train auditor, Paul Hagen, they took an automatic revolver. They also made away with two gallons of whiskey, and during the holdup, they knocked in the head of two kegs of beer and drank part of the contents.

After the robbery, the men escaped hastily. Elmer fled looking for a hideout and found it at a ranch. He introduced himself by a new alias, Frank Amos, and asked for a place to sleep. The ranch hands put him up in the hay barn, but overnight, a detail of officers, both local and federal, closed in on Elmer, having been hot on his trail with bloodhounds. At first light, a shootout began.

Elmer fired first, and for an hour they took turns hurling bullets across the fields. Elmer refused to surrender, and when he suddenly no longer returned fire, a ranch hand stepped inside the barn to find Elmer dead. When Elmer, the less-than-great nitroglycerin burglar, died, his body was transported to the funeral home.

The undertaker proceeded to embalm the corpse, also employing arsenic in the procedure. And then there his body waited for someone next of kin, anyone to come and claim him for burial. Meanwhile, Elmer became somewhat of a post-mortem celebrity. Local papers called him the leader of a gang of outlaws, a desperado, apparently needing more of a compelling story than the death of a kind of bumbling criminal.

With Elmer's numerous aliases, tracking down original reporting is tricky. But Marx-Fenvold notes in his book that with the increase in newspaper coverage of the McCurdy crimes and the shootout that resulted in his death, his embalmed body, still not claimed from the funeral home, became a sort of attraction.

In one publication referenced in Svenvold's book, quote, hordes of people viewed the embalmed remains. People from all parts of the United States visited the Johnson Undertaking establishment and anxiously gazed upon the inanimate form, with a fear and horror that they might recognize a long-lost son, a wayward brother, or a truant husband, end quote.

Still, with thousands of eyes laid upon Elmer McCurdy's remains, not a single pair recognized him. He was a long way from his home state of Maine, after all, many of his family members long since passed, and not to mention, he was consistently inconsistent with the name he gave to new friends and foes alike. The morbid attraction of a dead man's body was not lost on the traveling shows that made their way through Oklahoma.

A number of these circuses and carnivals attempted to buy Elmer's body to add to their list of bizarre sideshow attractions, but the undertaker held firm, telling the local paper, quote, they were advised it was being held in the hope that relatives would claim it, end quote. It's speculated, though, that this undertaker, Joseph Johnson, liked all the attention his own business received from the Elmer exhibit.

There's a photo shared in almost every source covering this story, one that Joseph snapped himself. Elmer is laying in a coffin-shaped wicker basket, looking like the downtrodden outlaw he was at his death. In a second photo captured by Joseph, he'd apparently dressed Elmer up and combed his hair. Six months after he died, Elmer McCurdy was still at the funeral home. The embalming fluid, complemented by arsenic,

kept him looking nearly living. It also made his body rigid. Once again, Elmer was dressed in the same clothes he died in. He was removed from his basket casket and stood upright, perched in the corner of a funeral home. He became known as the embalmed bandit. In later reports, the Johnson Funeral Home denied making a deliberate display or ever charging visitors to view Elmer's remains.

Whether or not their denial is true, or simply an effort to save professional face, well, more reporting suggests the fact that Elmer was indeed on display, until one day, when Joseph Johnson received a phone call. On the other end of the line was a man claiming to be Elmer's brother. He wanted to claim Elmer's remains. It had been five years since Elmer died.

The man introduced himself as Mr. Aver, Elmer McCurdy's long-lost brother. Mark Svenvold detailed the meeting between Mr. Aver, Joseph Johnson, and the sheriff in his book about Elmer's life and death. During that meeting, Mr. Aver and his partner convinced everyone that he was the next of kin and he needed to honor the dying request of their mother to bring Elmer home to California for burial.

The sheriff and the undertaker couldn't have known at the time that Elmer was a Mainer, not a Californian, and that his mother died nearly two decades earlier. And they didn't seem to question the timing of the so-called brothers' arrival in town. It was the very same day that the great Patterson carnival shows presented their sideshow in nearby Arkansas City, Kansas.

Elmer McCurdy's body was released to Mr. Aver, and the next day, his casket was wheeled off to Texas. Elmer became the newest attraction of the great Patterson Carnival shows. For six years, Elmer was on the road, earning the carnival five to ten cents a pop for a gaze at his mummified body. According to Svendvold's research on the travels of Elmer,

By the end of his post-mortem career in show business, he'd traveled the equivalent of one and a half times around the globe. He was a high-ranking exhibit. Setting your eyes upon a real-life bandit preserved in his casket for years was apparently exactly what the people of the early 1900s wanted. But every great showman's career comes to an end, or at least a change of pace.

The end of his interstate travel came in 1922, when Elmer McCurdy's body was given to Louis Sonny, who owned the Wax Museum of Crime in Washington State. According to the Hanford Sentinel, Elmer's body was intended to be collateral on a $500 loan from Louis to the man who ran the carnival. When the carnival owner didn't pay up on his debt, Elmer's remains officially joined the Wax Museum.

He was the one real-life human body on display among the wax likenesses of outlaws such as Jesse James and Bill Doolin. It was Elmer's longest gig, from 1922 all the way to 1971. By then, his remains, quote, "...shriveled up so much and he was so tiny. He looked like an eight-year-old child." End quote.

Louis Sonny's entire sideshow was sold to a proprietor in California, the owner of the Hollywood Wax Museum. But the venture didn't work out, so that same year, Elmer was sold again to another California wax figure museum in Long Beach. His new attraction was named simply the 1,000-Year-Old Man.

But somewhere in that nearly 50-year span, someone dropped the ball on record keeping, or at least, someone forgot to communicate that among the figures sculpted from wax to resemble famed criminals and celebrities and notable historical figures, there was in fact the body of a real human, a real man, a known criminal yes, but a once living, breathing human nonetheless.

a Mainer, continually denied his final resting place for the sake of earning his ringleaders a buck. And if it wasn't for a curious individual in 1976, it's possible Elmer never would have had his chance to rest in peace at all. On the afternoon of December 7th, 1976, Long Beach, California authorities arrived at New Pike, the Long Beach Pike Amusement Park.

They were responding to a strange call. On that day, the park was leased to Universal Television Studios for a day of shooting ABC's The Six Million Dollar Man. The TV show starred Lee Majors as Steve Austin, a former astronaut-turned-bionic man and secret agent for the U.S. government.

Part of the premise of the episode they shot at the park that day, according to Terry Whitehead, was that a secret missile control room was camouflaged as a carnival attraction. A man named Chris Haynes was working with the set dressing crew of the $6 million man that day, and he was inside the laugh-in-the-dark attraction of the park, preparing the setting for the camera. One element of the so-called funhouse caught his attention.

Hanging in the corner of the room was a figure of a man, affixed to the ceiling by a rope around his neck. Everything else in the funhouse was a mannequin, or sculpture, or some definitely not real element intended to startle and frighten those who dared venture through. But this mannequin appeared very much real. Chris Haynes made note of what happened for Terry Whitehead's blog about Elmer McCurdy. Quote,

I noticed that the figure had been cut open and crudely stitched back together. Autopsied. I noticed human features that would not be present on a prop or dummy. I was pointing these things out to another crew member. As our discussion went on, I said if you move his hands away from his private areas, you will see something that is not paper mache. I moved his hand a bit to expose his private parts, and his arm snapped off at the elbow.

Chris Haynes immediately notified Long Beach police. Ultimately, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office also responded to the scene to determine if the figure was in fact a human and not just a mannequin. But you know what they say, it's almost never a mannequin.

It was a human body. The coroner believed it had been preserved for decades, but barely so. During his examination, the coroner found a bullet still lodged inside the hip bone on the man, the first clue as to who the man could be. The speculation about the identity of the man and how he ended up hanging from a noose in an amusement park funhouse began immediately.

Though it would take some time to conclusively give the man his identity back through more scientific avenues, a former owner of the remains, feels odd to use that term owner, but in any case, a former owner came forward to identify the body as Elmer McCurdy. The news was shocking. Outlets across the country picked up the story, all retracing the life and death of Elmer McCurdy.

The tale got more sensational with every new headline. He was called many names: outlaw, bandit, desperado, a mummy. Local stores created and sold Elmer t-shirts to capitalize on the popularity of the bizarre story. Meanwhile, Elmer McCurdy's remains sat in a Long Beach morgue, an eerily similar scenario as the first months and years after he died.

The coroner's office wanted to give Elmer's surviving relatives time to claim his body, but no blood relatives would surface. Instead, about four months after he was cut from his noose at the funhouse, a crew of Oklahomans ventured to California to see if they could retrieve Elmer themselves.

The trio came representing a historical society out of Oklahoma, and they wanted a bit of proof that the body was actually Elmer. It was the 70s, and it's not like they had familial DNA to compare anyway. But they used the most reliable method they could, comparing Elmer's measurements, known scars and markings, and the photos taken by Mr. Johnson, the first undertaker to process Elmer's body.

It all seemed to match up with the Historical Society's records, especially a large scar on the body's right wrist. Members of the Historical Society were satisfied and decided that it was their duty to collect Elmer McCurdy and give him a quote, quiet and dignified interment, end quote.

Once he made it back to Oklahoma, he'd be buried in a plot in the old territorial section of a Guthrie cemetery, an area also known as Boot Hill, and home to the burial sites of other bandits of Elmer's time. Historical Society member Ralph McAlmont told the Desert Sun, quote, We thought he should be put in with people he would be comfortable with, end quote.

On April 16, 1977, Elmer McCurdy was loaded into the cargo hold of a plane out of Los Angeles International Airport for an 8:30 a.m. departure to Oklahoma City. A horse-drawn hearse carried Elmer McCurdy's coffin to the cemetery for a brief service. The carriage was similar to what would have been used had Elmer McCurdy been buried in 1911 when he was killed.

His grave site is marked with a peaked granite headstone. It reads, Elmer McCurdy, shot by sheriff's posse in Osage Hills on October 7, 1911. Returned to Guthrie, Oklahoma from Los Angeles County, California for burial, April 22, 1977.

According to reporting by United Press International, the funeral was attended by nearly 300 people, including local students who got a pass to miss school for the event. The minister, Glenn Jordan, said over Elmer's body, quote,

"We realize now that you were a part of our heritage and a part of us, and therefore, with respect and decency, we commit you to the earth." When the service concluded, a four-inch layer of concrete was poured over the casket just to make sure that Elmer McCurdy was at rest for good. I hope you enjoyed hearing this different kind of true crime story on Dark Down East.

In so many of the sources I encountered about Elmer McCurdy's life and death, the fact that he was a Mainer was glossed over or erased altogether. It made me wonder if somewhere out there, maybe still in Maine, someone might have some familial connections to him. If you do, if the McCurdy name is in your family tree, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you for listening.

Sources cited in this episode, along with additional sources referenced, are linked at darkdowneast.com so you can do some digging of your own. I was inspired to tell this story after discovering Mark Svenvold's book, Elmer McCurdy, The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw. I'll link the book in the show notes for you. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do.

I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.