The bandit who wouldn’t give up

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Today we're going to be talking about Elbert Elmer McCurdy's
bizarre after life. So let's take a look at this story.
During the turbulent era of gun slingers and train robberies
and frontier justice, there were several legends, and one of
them was Elmer McCurdy, a little known outlaw whose fame
emerged not from his crimes but from macobb posthumous journey.

(00:21):
Born in eighteen eighty eight or around there and Maine,
McCurdy drifted west, working as a plumber and soldier before
turning into a life of petty crime. His criminal career
was actually unremarkable. When he and his gang targeted at
Missouri Kansas in nineteen eleven in Missouri Kansas Texas train
in Oklahoma, they expected a four hundred thousand dollars silver hull. Instead,

(00:43):
they hit the wrong train, escaping with just forty six
dollars and some whiskey track to a barn in Osage County. McCurdy,
drunk and defiant, declared he never be taken alive, and
Posse obliged, killing him in a shootout. His body was
taken to an undertaker in Pawhuska who embalmed it with arsenic,
preserving it unusually well, but it was unclaimed and unable

(01:06):
to profit from displaying the body. The undertaker sold it
in nineteen sixteen to a carnival promoter posing as mccurty's brother.
Thus began mccurty's bizarre afterlife. The Battened the Bandit Who
Wouldn't Give Up was the size show attraction. For over
six decades, mccurty's mummy traveled through carnivals, wax museums, and

(01:26):
haunted houses that appeared in low budget films. Was even
used as collateral for a debt painted in garish colors
that changed hands repeatedly as True Nature Forgotten. In nineteen
seventy six, when filming an episode of A six Million
Dollar Man, a crew member accidentally broke off the prop's arm,
revealing human bone and tissue, and autopsy confirmed it was mccurty,

(01:46):
identified by a nineteen twenty four bullet in his stomach.
In nineteen seventy seven, mccurty was finally laid to rest
in the Boothill section of Summit View Cement Cemetery. Think
about that, over fifty years history blending the wild West
lawlessness was really with Early twentieth century showmanship reflects an
error where even the dead could become legends.