When someone dies, a death certificate is issued and a body is prepared for its return to nature… most of the time. For so-called “Oklahoma Outlaw” Elmer McCurdy, whose eternal rest was deferred for 66 years, the afterlife proved exhausting.
The unbelievable true story of this unclaimed corpse-turned-sideshow attraction is told in the new Broadway musical Dead Outlaw, featuring music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses. David Cromer directs.
Yazbek sees the folktale of Elmer McCurdy as a story that taps into something innate and inescapable about the human experience. “People don't like to think about death," said the composer. "It makes them a little uncomfortable, or a lot uncomfortable, but it's only in really thinking about it that you can live your life without being afraid of it.”
Drawing particularly on Mark Svenvold’s Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw (2002), Richard J. Basgall’s The Career of Elmer McCurdy, Deceased: An Historical Mystery (1989) and the BBC Timewatch documentary on McCurdy (1998), what follows is the prevailing narrative of the life and lore of Elmer McCurdy. Still, as with any heavily scrutinized historical enigma, there are points of contention, conspiracy and rumor too long-unsubstantiated to properly resolve. Reader beware: spoilers ahead!
THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE MUMMY
Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880 in Washington, Maine, the illegitimate son of 17-year-old Sadie McCurdy. The father, it is believed, was Sadie’s cousin. Elmer was raised by Sadie’s brother, George, and sister-in-law, Helen, until his uncle’s passing from tuberculosis in 1890 necessitated a move to Bangor. There he learned of his true parentage—his aunt and mother had switched roles to save face—and began his lifelong dependency on alcohol, drinking out of resentment for the deceit he perceived as a betrayal.
As a consequence of a drunken bar fight, teenage Elmer was sent to live with his grandfather, who secured the boy a plumbing apprenticeship that afforded him a comfortable living. At the turn of the century, pressured by an ongoing recession and faced with the consecutive deaths of both his mother and grandfather, Elmer decided to head out on his own. He roamed the east coast before heading west, likely hopping freight trains in search of work.
It would have been one of the largest heists in U.S. history. Then Elmer and his accomplices boarded the wrong train.
Elmer soon built a life in Iola, Kansas, albeit under one of several aliases, including that of “Frank Curtis.” Arriving too late to get rich on the discovery of natural gas but finding sufficient work as a plumber, Elmer was starting to put down roots. For two years, he was a mostly upstanding member of small-town society, joining the volunteer fire department and the local trade union, attending meetings, becoming acquainted with a prominent merchant’s daughter—until his drinking got the better of him. Elmer drunkenly divulged his real name to a coworker and, in a show of bravado, alleged that he killed a man in a barroom brawl in another state. Word got back to his supervisor. When pressed, Elmer admitted his true identity but denied having killed anyone. His boss could not forgive the fabrication. Elmer was fired, having sabotaged possibly his one shot at happiness.
First a bastard, then an orphan: a hardened, rough-riding, whiskey-drinking Marlboro Man of dubious parentage might’ve been right at home in the early days of the Wild West. But the west was wild no more: The age Elmer belonged to had locomotives, indoor plumbing, electricity and Model T Fords; Jesse James and Billy the Kid were in the ground and the vestiges of the old frontier were tinged with nostalgia. Elmer moved on to Carterville, Missouri, where he shoveled tons of zinc ore, extracted from the mines by hand, and developed miner’s consumption.
A SOLDIER AND A STOOGE
By 1907, Elmer had enlisted in the army and was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During his time in the Third Infantry of Company E, he served in a machine gun detachment and developed an interest in nitroglycerin explosives. He was honorably discharged in 1910 and began drinking away his discharge pay in St. Joseph, Missouri where, weeks later, he and an army buddy were arrested on suspicion of plotting to crack a safe. They were carrying all the necessary tools but the fuse. Elmer’s mugshot remains the only photograph taken during his lifetime. The charge fortunately did not stick, thanks to some crafty courtroom defense tactics, but Elmer’s time in jail left a lasting impression. While awaiting trial, he became acquainted with fellow inmate Walter Jarrett, who portrayed Elmer to his brothers as an explosives expert.
In 1911, Elmer and the Jarrett brothers attempted to hold up an Iron Mountain Train at gunpoint. It took four rounds of dynamite to crack the onboard safe, having blown off one side of the train car in the process, but the heat from the repeated explosions had melted and fused the silver coins inside. The bandits made off with just $450 between them. Another failed attempt took place at Citizens State Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas, where Elmer was unable to crack the safe, despite using a hefty nitroglycerin charge. The paltry $150 loot was split three ways. On October 4, 1911, an MKT train carrying $400,000 in Osage land royalty payments was scheduled to pass through Okesa, Oklahoma. Had they pulled it off, it would have been one of the largest heists in U.S. history. Then Elmer and his accomplices boarded the wrong train. They escaped carrying jugs of whiskey, kegs of beer, a watch, a pistol, a coat and $46 in cash.
News of the bungled robbery eventually caught up with Elmer, who was hiding out in the hayloft of a nearby farm, drinking from the spoils of his stolen whiskey, when one of his co-conspirators supposedly dropped a dime on him. On October 7, Elmer McCurdy was shot in the chest and killed during an hour-long standoff with law enforcement. Or at least, that’s the most widely accepted version of the story—more on this later.
IN DEATH, A NEW GRIFT
Elmer’s body was transported to the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home for an autopsy, where he was embalmed with so much arsenic for preservation that his corpse remained toxic to handle for more than 60 years. Still, death was only the beginning for Elmer. There was no next of kin to call and the body sat in a corner unclaimed for several years, mummifying in the open air. It is unclear why the body was never buried—though the corpse became a source of fascination for the locals who would come by the parlour to ogle Elmer.
In 1916, two men arrived from the Great Patterson Carnival Shows, one of whom claimed to be Elmer’s estranged brother. With their ruse successful, the corpse of Elmer McCurdy entered the carnival circuit, traveling on display from Arkansas City to West Texas and beyond. (He was not the only mummy exhibited in this way, but he is the only one, so far, to inspire a Broadway musical.)
In 1922, while the circus sideshow was stationed in Washington state, Louis Sonney took possession of Elmer’s mummy after it was put up by a carny as collateral on an unpaid loan. Sonney was the proprietor of the Wax Museum of Crime, which later came to be based in Los Angeles, and was known for displaying likenesses of notorious outlaws and U.S. presidents. He dubbed Elmer “The Oklahoma Outlaw” and included the mummy in a carnival procession that traveled in tandem with the 1928 Transcontinental Footrace. After Louis’ death, his son inherited the business along with the body. In the 1960s, Sonney Amusement Enterprises merged with Entertainment Ventures Incorporated, leading Elmer’s corpse to be used as a promotional prop for an exploitation flick called Narcotic. Apart from playing a role in the occasional workplace prank, Elmer’s body was left to collect dust in a back office storage room.
SKELETON IN THE CLOSET
By 1968, two wax museum promoters had purchased Elmer and installed him in a haunted house in Long Beach, California, christening him the “One Thousand Year Old Man.” When the haunted house closed in ’72, Elmer, believed to be a mannequin, was shuffled into an electrician’s closet at the Long Beach Amusement Company. From there, he was painted DayGlo orange and hung by a noose as a jump scare inside the Laff-in-the-Dark funhouse spook ride at Nu-Pike Amusement Park.
The unknown hanged man was at last discovered in 1976 by crew members filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. Upon confirming that the presumed prop was, in fact, mummified human remains, Elmer's corpse was brought to the L.A. County Medical Examiner for identification. Inside his atrophied mouth was a copper penny from 1924 and a ticket stub for Louis Sonney’s Wax Museum of Crime. Tissue analysis revealed him to be suffering from pneumonia, tuberculosis and trichinosis at the time of his death, casting serious doubt, in hindsight, on whether he was even physically capable of taking part in the ill-fated train robbery that cost him his life.
In April of 1977, representatives from the Oklahoma Territorial Museum assisted with identifying Elmer and transporting him to Guthrie. Despite Long Beach Amusement Co. reportedly asking for their mummy back, Elmer McCurdy was finally laid to rest under a permanent slab of concrete at Summit View Cemetery, next to notorious outlaw Bill Doolin.
Or most of him, anyway. As it transpired, the body that arrived from the medical examiner’s office was missing his lower jaw.
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
In the spirit of the great oral storytelling tradition, it seems that those of us seated around the campfire still haven’t heard the last of ol’ Elmer McCurdy. Dead Outlaw is the latest in a field of study that biographer Mark Svenvold has dubbed “McCurdyana”—works inspired by, and indebted to, the peculiar mummification and mythopoesis of Elmer McCurdy. At present, the canon of McCurdyana encompasses true crime podcasts, documentaries, biographies, songs, poetry collections and even a themed bed-and-breakfast murder mystery weekend. There has been no shortage of postmortem Elmer effigies since he attained folk-hero status, becoming a kind of everyman stand-in for anyone who has ever sought immortality or otherwise attempted to cheat death.
For Yazbek, Elmer’s story offers perspective. People often become so preoccupied with the legacy they leave behind that it stops them from living in the present. “You can slap your name on as many buildings as you want,” he said. “But there's going to be a point, and it's going to be soon, when whatever hole you were filling by slapping your name on that building is going to be gone, because you will not be here.”