Elmer, All Right . ' LOS ANGELES (UPI) - The "mummy's secret" is out. "Yeah, it's old Elmer, all right," said moviemaker Dave Friedman, identifying the mysterious fun house "mummy." He was Elmer McCurdy, an outlaw's outlaw who came to one bad end after another. Decades after his contemporaries turned to dust in honorable graves, McCurdy was hanging from a gallows in an amusement park, slathered with red fluorescent paint, giving cheap thrills to the impressionable. Before that he had been collateral on a bad debt, a carnival attraction, a fake Egyptian mummy and - in life - the scourge of the railroads in Oklahoma and Kansas at the turn of the century. For the past five years he was presumed to be a dummy and dangled in the "Laugh in the Dark Funhouse" at the Long Beach Pike, blinking on and off in flashes of ultraviolet light. Only when the "Six Million Dollar Man" film crew borrowed the fun house for a set this week was it discovered that the "dummy" had once been alive. As a crewman adjusted it, an arm fell off. Coroners found a ..32-20 bullet in the corpse's chest, and so began the search for the identity of the body, purchased from a defunct wax museum which displayed it as a 5,000-year-old Friedman, president of Entertainment Ventures, Inc., former owner of McCurdy's body, identified it Friday. McCurdy's end was told in the Oklahoma City Oklahoman of Oct. 8, 1911, in a story from Pawhuska, Okla., under the headline "Bandit Slain in Desperate Fight." McCurdy had been practicing his trade train robber - in Oklahoma and Kansas and had vowed "never to be taken alive." He kept his promise when bloodhounds led three sheriff's deputies to his hideout, and was gunned down after "a desperate rifle battle," the newspaper said. As was not uncommon at the time, the sheriff sold the body of the famous outlaw to a carnival sideshow for exhibit. Friedman said Louis Sonney, the founder of his firm, "loaned the old carnie who had the body $500 and got Elmer as security on the loan. The carnie never paid him back." Sonney put McCurdy in his own traveling show until such exhibits went out of style and he was retired to a warehouse in the 1940s, getting mixed up there with a batch of real dummies that were sold in 1968 to a wax museum with McCurdy's much-traveled corpse going along. Two more sales by wax museums put McCurdy right where many Oklahoma train passengers of 1911 probably wanted him - on the gallows.
