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A "wax" mummy hung in an old amusement park funhouse for 50 years until a strange event revealed its horrible secret - that underneath the ghastly bandages was the embalmed body of an outlaw killed in a turn-of-the-century shootout.

The grim reality surfaced in December 1976, when a television production crew visited the old house to shoot an episode of the TV series The Sic-Million Dollar Man. Filming was under way when one of the crew gave out a ghastly scream...... One of the mummy's stick like arms had snapped off and fallen. Where it had shattered  were leathery shreds of skin and horrible clumps of human tissue clinging to the human bone. The mummy was rushed to an autopsy room in Los Angeles county morgue and history's strangest manhunt began. 

Under the many layers of wax, Los Angeles coroner Dr Thomas Noguchi found the withered body of a man. He had died long ago in his early 30's from a gunshot wound. The corpse had then been carefully embalmed with such heavy concentrations of arsenic that it had been on display in the Long Beach, California, funhouse since the 1920's, when it was brought from a bankrupt carnival operator. The time lapse meant that the police had little chance of solving the mystery. They feared that the mummy was the victim of a crime. But the only theory that anyone could come up with was even stranger than that. For it was suggested the mummy might have been a criminal himself!

The incredible story put forward by a former employee of the funhouse was that underneath the wax coating was the corpse of an Oklahoma outlaw named Elmer McCurdy.

Oklahoma authorities confirmed that there had been an Elmer McCurdy operating in the wild Ohlahoma Territory in the early 1900's. He specialized in robbing trains and banks. After a Jesse-James-type robbery in October 1911, McCurdy escaped to an outlaw hangout on the Big Caney River. When a posse from Pawhuska tracked him down, he died in the shootout.

But who would pick up the bill for embalming a footloose outlaw? The undertaker saw only one way to get his money: An embalmed Elmer stood in the corner of the funeral parlour where visitors could gape at him for a nickle apiece. He then fell into the hands of the traveling carnival man who sold him to the amusement park.

Fact or fiction? No one can be sure. The only question worrying Los Angeles county was what to do with the body. The answer was supplied by the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Guthrie. The outlaw was returned to Oklahoma on 14 April 1977, and in an elegant old hearse pulled by a team of horses, Elmer was buried in the town's Boot Hill cemetery.

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