Elmer McCurdy
American outlaw
Elmer J. McCurdy (January 1, 1880 – October 7, 1911) was an American outlaw who was killed in a shoot-out with police after robbing a train in Oklahoma in October 1911. Dubbed "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up", his mummified body was first put on display at an Oklahoma funeral home and then became a fixture on the traveling carnival and sideshow circuit during the 1920s through the 1960s. After changing hands several times (it is not possible under U.S. law to own a human cadaver), McCurdy's remains eventually wound up at The Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, California, where they were discovered by crew members for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man and positively identified in December 1976.
In April 1977, McCurdy's body was buried at the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
McCurdy is the subject of the musical Dead Outlaw, which premiered off-Broadway in 2024 before transferring to Broadway in April 2025.
Early life
Elmer McCurdy was born in Washington, Maine, on January 1, 1880. He was the son of 17-year-old Sadie McCurdy, who was unmarried at the time of his birth. The identity of McCurdy's father is unknown; one possibility is Sadie's cousin, Charles Smith (McCurdy would later use the name "Charles Smith" as an alias). In order to save Sadie the social stigma of raising an illegitimate child, her brother George and his wife Helen adopted Elmer. After George died of tuberculosis in 1890, Sadie and Helen moved with Elmer to Bangor, Maine.
“Elmer McCurdy” enters the record as american outlaw. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Elmer, McCurdy and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3051572. VIAF identifies the subject as 4111522. The Library of Congress control number is n91067520. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880, 1911, 1976 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elmer McCurdy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.