On December 1976, a crew was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man inside a funhouse at an amusement park in Long Beach, California. There was a body hanging from the ceiling, painted orange, part of the ride. A crew member went to move it out of the shot and its arm came off in his hand.

There was bone inside it.

The dummy was a man named Elmer McCurdy, and he had been dead since 1911.

McCurdy was, by any measure, one of the worst criminals in the history of the American West. He was born in Maine in 1880 to a teenage mother, learned about explosives in the Army, drank heavily, could not hold a job as a plumber, and decided to become an outlaw instead.

His first big job was a train near Lenapah, Oklahoma. He got to the safe. He then used so much nitroglycerin on it that he melted the silver coins inside and fused them to the wreckage. His crew sat there scraping metal off the frame.

He tried a bank in Chautauqua, Kansas next. He spent hours chipping through the outer wall, blew the vault, destroyed the inside of the room, and never got the actual safe open. He left with about $150 in loose coins.

His last job was supposed to be the big one. A train was carrying $400,000 in payments to the Osage Nation and he was going to take it. He stopped the wrong train. It was a passenger train. He got $46, two jugs of whiskey, the conductor's watch and a coat. A newspaper described it as one of the smallest train robberies ever recorded.

A posse cornered him in a hay barn on October 7, 1911. He had been drinking the whiskey. He announced he would not be taken alive, and he was right about that, which may be the only thing he ever got right.

Nobody claimed the body. The undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed him with an arsenic solution so strong that the corpse hardened and could stand up on its own. So the undertaker stood him in the corner, put a rifle in his hands, gave him a name, "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up," and started charging a nickel to look at him. Customers put the nickel in his mouth.

In 1916 two men showed up saying they were his brothers and they had come to take Elmer home for a proper burial. They were the Patterson brothers. They ran a carnival.

He worked for the next 60 years.

He toured with sideshows. He was sold, resold, rented out, put in a crime museum, used to promote movies, and eventually cast in a 1967 exploitation film called She Freak. He got damaged in a windstorm at Mount Rushmore. Somewhere along the way the paperwork stopped mentioning that he was a person, and he was passed off as a wax figure, coated, repainted, and hung up in a funhouse in Long Beach where he swung there for years while teenagers walked past him on dates.

When the coroner finally opened him up in 1976, he found the bullet that killed him still inside, along with ticket stubs from a crime museum and a 1924 penny that people had left in his mouth.

They buried him on April 22, 1977 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, on a hill with actual famous outlaws, and poured two feet of concrete over the casket so that nobody could take him anywhere ever again.

Elmer McCurdy stole about two hundred dollars in his entire life. Then he worked steadily for six decades and never saw a cent of it.

Credit: Echoes of War, X Social