26 Part I- Sat., Dec. 11, 1976 Los Angeles Times * MUMMY'S IDENTIFICATION Continued from First Page ed for holding up and robbing the Iron Mountain passenger train just south of Coffeyville, Kans., in March, 1911." (Coffeyville was the site in 1892 of a caper which has become western folklore. Five members of the Dalton gang sought to rob the town's two banks simultaneously. But sharp -shooting citizens surrounded them and during the ensuing gunfire four of the badmen were killed.) During the Oklahoma robbery, McCurdy and an undetermined number of companions, according to the Oklahoman, "forced the engineer to cut the locomotive and mail and express cars and run them up the tracks where they looted them at will." The take: $46 from a mail clerk and "considerable merchandise." McCurdy's mummy, if it is indeed that, was much traveled by the time it reached the "Laugh in the Dark" funhouse at Long Beach's Nu-Pike amusement park. It was discovered Tuesday that the prop was not a wax dummy after all when an arm fell off, exposing a human bone. lahoma sheriff's office to a carnival operator, and the mummy became a sideshow star. Mummified corpses of gunned-down outlaws--or bodies reputedly those of famous badmen -were common carnival sideshow attractions early in the century, according to Friedman, president of Entertainment Ventures, Inc. According to Friedman, the late Louis Sonney, founder of Entertainment Ventures, toured with carnivals in the 1920s and 1930s before setting up the firm here. "He loaned the old 'carney' who had the body $500 and got Elmer as security for the loan," said Friedman. "'The carney never paid him back." After his acquisition, Sonney himself used the mummy as a freak show attraction when he later became a carnival entrepreneur, Friedman said. Sonney continued to exhibit the mummy until World War II when the public taste for such exhibits tailed off, and Sonney retired the mummy to his firm's warehouse on Cordova St. here, Friedman said. The cadaver remained there until 1968 when Dan Sonney, who inherited the firm from his father, sold it to the owner of the Hollywood Wax Museum, along with the McCurdy's hardy remains, according to Friedman, were sold by someone in an Ok- authentic dummies the elder Sonney had collected over the years. "Funny thing, Elmer's arm fell off there, too," said Friedman. The museum later sold the cadaver to the amusement company, but the operators of the Long Beach enterprise apparently never suspected they had bought anything but a wax figure -until Tuesday. Then, a technician for a television series filming a segment at the amusement park watched the arm fall from the mummy : as he moved it. The coroner's office, after examining it, reported the body had been embalmed with a hardening compound of the type used in the early 1900s and that the cadaver was that of a man who had been shot in the chest. This is at variance with the Oklahoma newspaper's story of the time which said McCurdy had been wounded in the head as he exchanged gunfire with his pursuers. But, said Friedman, when the coroner's office opened the mummy's chest, examiners found not only a copper -jacketed bullet in the abdominal cavity-but a tag in the chest on which was printed: "Property of Louis Sonney." Man Held in Attempt to Kill Supervisor A laboratory technician was arraigned in Inglewood Municipal Court Friday on a charge of soliciting the murder of his supervisor at the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile System Organization in El Segundo. Bert Meyers Jr., 52, of Downey was ordered to return to court Dec. 23 for a preliminary hearing. El Segundo police said Meyers, a laboratory analyst for the Aerospace Corp. of El Segundo, was assigned the Air Force facility, where Walter Griessor, 38, of Redondo Beach is government administrator. Police said Meyers was arrested after he approached a private security g guard, who was not identified, and offered $500 to hire him to kill Griessor. The guard reported the offer to police. Police said Meyers had complained that Griessor had subjected him to "mental harassment," and officers noted also that Meyers was at the top of his grade and apparently believed he had been passed over for promotion to a higher position.