A funhouse mannequin turned out to be a man shot in 1911

On 7 December 1976, a television crew was setting up lights inside the funhouse at the Nu-Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, to shoot an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. A technician pushed aside a mannequin hanging from a prop gallows, painted fluorescent orange, and the arm came away in his hand. A human bone was sticking out of the stump.

It was not a mannequin. It was Elmer McCurdy, an Oklahoma train robber shot dead by a posse sixty-five years earlier, on 7 October 1911. He had been charging admission ever since.

McCurdy was thirty-one, a plumber by trade, and had spent two years trying to make a living with nitroglycerine. On 4 October 1911 he stopped a Katy train — the Missouri-Kansas-Texas line — near Okesa, in northern Oklahoma, after a safe holding payments to the Osage, the Native American nation then collecting the oil money from its own land. He had stopped the wrong train: it was a passenger mail run. He got away with forty-six dollars, a revolver, a coat, the conductor's watch and two jugs of whiskey. Three days later the posse found him asleep in the hayloft of a ranch near Bartlesville. The gunfight lasted an hour. McCurdy died of a shot to the chest.

The Pawhuska undertaker, Joseph L. Johnson, embalmed him with an arsenic compound — the standard method of the day, which hardens the tissues and preserves them for decades — and waited for someone to claim the body. Nobody came. Johnson dressed him, stood him upright in a corner of the funeral parlour and began showing him for five cents under a sign: The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up. Visitors dropped the coin into the dead man's mouth.

In 1916 two men turned up claiming to be McCurdy's brothers. They were the Pattersons, owners of a travelling carnival, and they took the body away to exhibit it across the Midwest. From there it passed from hand to hand for sixty years, always as an attraction: a crime museum that toured California charging to see real murderers, and an anti-drug propaganda film shot in 1933. At some point, by the sixties, somebody stopped mentioning that it was a corpse: they coated it in phosphorescent paint and hung it in a Long Beach ghost ride, where for years the staff treated it as what they believed it to be, a cheap wax dummy.

The identification was made by the Los Angeles County coroner's office, then run by Thomas Noguchi, the coroner who had signed the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy. Inside the body they found a .32 calibre bullet that nobody had ever removed. And in the mouth, where the visitors of 1911 had pushed their coins, two things had stayed behind that dated the corpse's life: a 1924 penny and a ticket from the Los Angeles crime museum. With that, and with the photographs from the Pawhuska funeral parlour, he got his name back.

Oklahoma claimed the body. He was buried in April 1977 in the Boot Hill plot of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, beside Bill Doolin, another outlaw shot dead in 1896, and concrete was poured over the coffin so that he could not come out of it again. Sixty-five and a half years had passed between the shot and the burial.