The Strange Case of Elmer

in December of 1976, a camera crew for the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was filming on location at a second rate amusement park in Long Beach California called The Pike (or the Nu Pike, depending on which account you read) where they were going to film some scenes in the spook house, a crew member had decided to remove one of the props, a hanging man who had been painted day glow orange, when he grabbed the arm of the dummy, it snapped off, and inside was what appeared to be human bone
the arm was delivered to the coroner's office, who confirmed that it was a mummified human arm, and the body itself was transported to the coroner for an autopsy, which, as it turned out, had been autopsied once before
what followed was considered one of the strangest cases to ever come out of the LA county coroner's office, keep in mind that this is LA we're talking about, and they get strange cases all the time, some of the first clues to emerge in the case was the fact that the corpse had been emblamed with arsenic, which is what led to it becoming mummified rather than decomposing, the fact that arsenic was used helped narrow down the timeframe that the body had been killed because arsenic had been banned in the early 1900s for use in autopsies for safety reasons
a couple old ticket stubs and an old coin were also found in the corpses mouth, which helped narrow down the timeframe even more, investigators tracked down the name on the ticket stub, and found records of a man who had once had a travelling museum of crime, the man was deceased, but they managed to track down his son, who vividly remembered not only his father's old crime museum, but this body in particular, from there they were able to trace ownership of the coprse to other other proprieters of freak shows, carnivals, and the like, but found no corroborating evidence as to who the corpse really was
eventually, town officials in Guthrie Oklahoma, who had heard about the story through the press contacted the LA County coroner's office, thinking the corpse may have been that of a small time and somewhat unsuccessful train robber named Elmer McCurdy, who died in 1911 in a shootout with the cops (there was a bullet lodged in the corpse) they were able to produce numerous newspaper reports on the exploits of Elmer, including pictures, one of which was taken after he had died, in his coffin
using what was considered at the time to be breakthrough technology, the LA County coroner took up close shots of the face of the corpse, and compared it to Elmer's picture in his coffin, by projecting both images onto a screen and merging them, he was able to identify the mummy as being that of Elmer McCurdy (they recreated this on a recent TV show I saw, and it was pretty mind blowing to see that there was absolutley no doubt as to the identity)
Elmer was eventually returned home and buried in his hometown, and the LA county coroner was able to close the most bizarre case in it's history, the only one to date where they had to rely on 70+ newspaper clippings and pictures to identify a body
as a corpse, Elmer travelled the country for over 60 years, first under his real name, complete with the outfit he was wearing when he was shot, but, over the years as he was sold and resold, he lost his original outfit, and eventually his identity, when found hanging in the funhouse of The Pike, he had been there for 4 years, and had been part of a big collection of various freak show and carnival attractions, as by the mid 70's, travelling sideshows had basically become a thing of the past, apparently no one who worked for the amusement park had any idea they had a real human mummy on their hands, and the hundereds, probably thounsands of people who passed through the spookhouse had any idea that the day glo orange hanged man they saw was not a dummy at all