The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up
We dressed him in the clothes he had worn in his last fight and stood him in the corner of our mortuary
He cycled through several nicknames few over the years: ‘The Oklahoma Outlaw,’ ‘The Mystery Man of Many Aliases’ – but in the end ‘The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up’ was the one that stuck. It was bit clunky but fit well enough. Elmer McCurdy had never made much of a name for himself in the train robbery game, but he was nothing if not tenacious during a short career peppered by frequent run-ins with the law.
One such legal entanglement pre-dated his first attempt. Two weeks after his military discharge, McCurdy was arrested alongside army buddy Walter Schoppelrie for possession of gunpowder, chisels, hacksaws, a nitroglycerin funnel and money sacks. The local paper ran with the headline, “Police Think They Nabbed Two Yeggs.” McCurdy had no resume to speak of. A string of odd jobs up and down the eastern seaboard had followed a troubled childhood.
At 27 he found a form of stability in the U.S. Army. He received high marks learning to operate machine guns and deploy nitroglycerin for demolition. But exiting the armed forces into a job market still reeling from the bank crisis of a few years prior left little in the way of opportunity. Why cops stopped the pair at a Kansas train station isn’t entirely clear, but they ultimately decided the evidence made a strong enough case for trial.
Called to testify, McCurdy pulled a crowbar from the evidence table, explaining that it was the first of three legs that would comprise a prototype machine gun tripod whose development had been rudely interrupted by overzealous local authorities. Incredibly, the tact worked, capitalizing on the invention fever that permeated the country in the early 20th century.
During his stint in jail, McCurdy befriended Walter Jarrett, a man who fancied himself an outlaw of the first order. It was a romantic dream to become the latest in a long line of celebrated outlaws whose legends continued to loom large over the American West well past its frontier heyday. McCurdy’s own exploits failed to match such lofty dreams. An extremely liberal reliance on nitroglycerin demolished a train’s safe in one instance, causing the gang to sift through the wreckage and recover roughly a tenth of the anticipated haul. In another incident, a bank’s lobby was turned to rubble.
His career was cut short the year it began. A final robbery in Oklahoma targeted the wrong train, netting the group a total of $46. A warrant was issued for the arrest of a sickly McCurdy now suffering the effects of tuberculosis and pneumonia. Three sheriffs deputies descended on the ranch where he sought cover, killing him with a single gunshot wound to the chest.
In death, his legend grew.
Undertaker Joseph Johnson applied an arsenic mixture to McCurdy’s body. The concoction was reserved for occasions that required extended preservation. With no known family, the body went unclaimed. McCurdy remained in the home, as Johnson would not pay for a burial. A year later, Jarrett joined him, having succumbed to a similar fate – though his body was claimed by family in a timely fashion. McCurdy’s remained. No one wanted it – and anyone who might have were likely unaware. Word of his presence did, however, manage to make its way beyond the funeral home. It was then that McCurdy earned his first posthumous nickname.
“[A]s ‘The Embalmed Bandit’ had already become an object of local interest,” Johnson’s son, Luke, later recalled, “we dressed him in the clothes he had worn in his last fight and stood him in the corner of our mortuary.”
Five years after his death, a man claiming to be McCurdy’s estranged brother reached out to the home. He told Johnson that he would finally give the dead man a proper burial. The body was shipped back to Kansas, where the false sibling ran a traveling carnival. ‘The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive’ was a featured attraction for next dozen years.
Dwain Esper, director of such films as Marihuana: The Devil’s Weed and Sex Maniac, purchased the body to promote his latest. McCurdy played the role of “a dead dope fiend” in movie theater lobbies during screenings of Narcotic. After a cameo in a different film, the now mummified body traveled the country as part of a new exhibit, before intense winds at Mt. Rushmore blew digits off of the deteriorating body’s hands and feet. It was finally time to retire from the road.
Location scouts ultimately settled on Long Beach’s The Pike amusement park to shoot the finale of The Six Million Dollar Man season four episode, “Carnival of Spies.” In it, Colonel Steve Austin discovers an East German missile launch site hidden among the rides. As the crew set the location up for the shoot, an arm fell off one of the Laff in the Park funhouse mannequins, revealing the mummified body inside.
“Then we picked him up and laid him on a rubber stretcher, and the coroner’s office wheeled him out to the country morgue car, a black, Chevrolet station wagon,” concession stand manager John Purvis told a reporter. “They covered him in a white sheet and hauled him out, just like they would anybody else.”
McCurdy was given a proper burial 65 years after his death by shotgun. Three-hundred people attended the funeral of the man who had once again found himself making headlines. He was buried in Oklahoma next to Bill Doolin, a legendary outlaw in his own right.
Sources:
Elmer McCurdy: The Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw by Mark Svenvold