On a cold morning in October 1911, a sheriff's posse trailed a small-time train robber named Elmer McCurdy into a barn in the Osage Hills. He had hit the wrong train the night before — a passenger express where he had expected a freight — and made off with forty-six dollars in coin and two jugs of whiskey. The posse killed him in the barn. He was thirty-one years old.
That ended his career as an outlaw. It did not end his career.
McCurdy's body was taken to the funeral parlor of Joseph L. Johnson, in Pawhuska. Johnson embalmed it with an arsenic-based preserving fluid and waited for someone to claim it. No one did. After several months, finding the body increasingly preserved and increasingly known, Johnson propped it up in a corner of the back room and began charging visitors five cents to look at the bandit who wouldn't give up. They paid by slipping the nickel into the corpse's mouth, and Johnson collected at the end of the day.
Five years later, two men arrived from a traveling carnival in Texas, presenting themselves as McCurdy's long-lost brothers. They produced no documents and Johnson asked for none. They loaded the body into a wagon and drove it south.
For the next sixty years, McCurdy moved. He was billed at one point as the "Oklahoma Outlaw" in a sideshow run by Louis Sonney, who toured him through California in the 1920s. He turned up at Coney Island. He hung in a wax museum in Mount Rushmore that closed in the 1960s. By the time he reached Long Beach in 1971, painted in fluorescent orange and hanging from a noose in the Laff-in-the-Dark funhouse at the Pike amusement park, he had been declared a mannequin so many times that no one any longer remembered he was anything else.
In December 1976, a film crew from the television series The Six Million Dollar Man was setting up a scene at the Pike when a crew member moved the orange figure from one part of the set to another. The arm separated from the body. Inside was a human bone.
The Los Angeles County Coroner's office worked the case backward. They found a 1924 penny in the figure's mouth, and a ticket stub from a Los Angeles sideshow operated by Louis Sonney. They followed the carnival circuit upstream — Texas, Arkansas, Missouri — and at last back to the funeral home in Pawhuska. The body had a name. It had been waiting sixty-six years to come home.
Elmer McCurdy was returned to Oklahoma in April 1977 and buried at Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie. The Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerners paid for his headstone, which gives only the dates and the route. To prevent any further moving, the state poured two cubic yards of concrete over his coffin.
He has not moved since.