Mark Svenvold
In 1976 a worker preparing a fun house for the filming of an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” discovered that a dummy was really a mummy. The dessicated, orange-painted body turned out to be that of Elmer McCurdy, a luckless outlaw who died in 1911.
McCurdy was no Jesse James. He’s only known to have committed three crimes. In his first attempt at larceny he had to blast an express car safe four times before it popped open to reveal that the heat of the blasting had welded the silver to the interior of the safe, rendering it immovable. In his second, he destroyed the inside of a bank but failed to open the vault. In his final robbery he picked the wrong train, leading to a haul of less than $50 and a subsequent fatal shootout in Oklahoma.
After his death a local undertaker kept his body - embalmed with arsenic - on display. A few years later a pair of men claiming to be McCurdy’s relatives showed up to claim the body. They were really carnies and McCurdy was soon on the road. After a long career in show business he ended up in the L.A. fun house; after the grisly discovery in 1976, history-loving citizens from Guthrie, Oklahoma buried him, not incidentally getting some national publicity for their town.
Svenvold tells this tale well, seasoning it with interesting material about everything from forensics to carnivals to horror movie fan conventions.