 So I am very happy to say we have Kate Bolling with us today talking about the story of El McKinney. Thank you very much. Okay. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's seven. I know there's a lot of things on. I know you're probably all exhausted. So am I. But this will be good. Now, before I begin, I just want to put out say a couple of things because I'm the kind of person who likes warnings. And my warning is there are a couple of photos of a dead guy in here. He's been long dead. And I don't just mean historically. I mean, he's been long, long dead by the time the photo was taken. So if that's not your bag, the exits are there, there, there, there. I don't mind. It's fine. Also, if you're expecting these to be really super high res, multi-death, 28K, every single pour, no. Pretty much most of these, these are from books. These are badly photocopied. You're lucky they're not on microfilm. Ask your parents. So, you know, they're not going to be great. These slides are going to be tweeted out afterwards because I'm the kind of person who likes to share the stupid things I find on the internet. So have fun with that. Go next. Thank you. So we are now going back in time to the 1970s. There is a rundown amusement park on the coast of Long Beach, California. It's had a whole bunch of names over the years. And in the 1970s, it's called Queens Park because the Queen Mary, that big old ship, is right next to it. And they thought, oh yeah, now people will totally come here. But all the locals call it the Pike. And all the locals think it's rundown. It's seedy. There are tattoo parlors. There's sailor's cheap dive bars. There's rigged amusement parks, arcades even. There's rigged arcades. It is a trashy, trashy place. It's for sailors and teenagers. But it's a really cheap theme park and it's great for filming. So Hollywood adores it. Next. Thank you. As proven by this shot, this is from Colombo. I love Colombo. This is identity crisis, which was shown in 1975. And there's a dead guy in this shot right now. Okay, wait, I shouldn't say right now because actually Patrick McEwen and Leslie Nielsen are both dead now. But in 1975, there is a dead guy in that shot. You won't be able to see it, but he's there. This is Laugh in the Dark, the fun house at the Pike. It's pretty terrifying. On the outside, they've got a laughing sow, which is one of those really, really creepy animatronic creatures that just rocks back and forth and laughs hysterically in a really creepy way. But actually, the real creepiness is inside. Because it's December 1976. They're filming an episode of the $6 million man. And so the crew, the teamsters, they're getting there. They're setting everything up. They're going, yeah, this is great. This will be a great shot right here. And they're like, oh my God, this outlaw, this Oklahoma outlaw set. It's not cool. We got to move it. It's just, it's not fitting my vision. So teamsters say, right, this painted day glow, dead cowboy hanging from the wall, he's got to go. That's okay. It's fine. We'll take it down. So they take it down. They pick him up. They're like, he looks a little weird. We're going to have a better look at this. And when they look at it, his arm breaks off. And there's bone inside. That's a real dead guy. In that day glow orange covered in wax. It's a real dead guy in there. And they're just like, what has happened here? So the cops are called. Everybody goes, what do we do about this? We don't know what to call it. It's a dead guy. But he's not dead. He's not long, you're freshly dead. He's kind of dead. We don't know what to do. Let's go back and forth. And eventually the LA County's coroner's office gets involved. And this is when Dr. Thomas Noguchi shows up. He's a celebrity coroner. There's no other way to put it. He's done the autopsy of Marilyn Monroe, all the movie stars that have died in tragic circumstances. He has made, managed to make money off of them because he wrote books. In fact, he includes this whole story in his second book, Coroner at Large. You really can't beat it. Honestly, I've got an e-book copied later on. I'll read from it. It's great. So he goes, okay, hands us over to Dr. Joseph Choi, who's one of his coroners and says, here's a body for you. We don't know how old it is and where the heck it came from. So have fun with that. And they look at it and they investigate. They discover that an autopsy has already been done. He's got a big old autopsy scar that there was a bullet hole. There was a bullet wound, but the bullet's been removed. But the gas jacket, which is the little tiny bit at the bottom of the bullet, is still embedded in his, they say thigh, but it was probably more of his hip. It's about here. And they're like, okay, that's progress. They also find that he's got a hell, a hell of a lot of arsenic in his system, which has obviously been used as the embalming fluid. And then in his throat, they find a 1924 penny and a ticket to the Sunny's Museum of Crime. And they're going, these are clues. We can do something with these. So like I said, a gas check, some embalming fluid, that penny, and that ticket. So the gas check was only made from 1905 to 1942, narrows it down. The arsenic stopped in about 1920s. So they're again, narrowing it down. And the 1924 penny, well, heck, that just gives it away. And then the ticket. So they go to the Sunny family, they go, so we found this in like a dead guy's throat. And they're like, oh, oh, we think you found Elmore McCurdy. Who? What? What is this? So now we're going to go back in time even further. And we're in 1880. And that's when Elmore McCurdy's born. He's kind of brushed childhood. He starts drinking really early. And then he learns how to be a plumber, but he alternates being a plumber with being a lead miner, which isn't really grateful, great for producing a particularly great number of society when you're mining for lead every day and drinking every night. He, 1907, he joins the army and he becomes a machine gun operator and he gets a tiny bit of a demolition's knowledge and he learns how to use nitroglycerin. Good for him, right? He gets discharged. And then he gets arrested two weeks later because they find him with a whole bunch of burglary tools, including some nitroglycerin. And they're like, Elmore, what the heck? So he gets released after a brief stint in county. And that's when he decides, I'm going to become a bank robber. Elmore, what are you thinking? Because he's really bad at it. That tiny bit of nitroglycerin training he got? Terrible. He's terrible at it. He blows safes, but he blows safes. They used to do a robbery and they managed to get around $450 in silver coins, but that's only what they managed to scrape off because it had all melted. That's how bad he is. So in 1911, they decided they're going to rob the KT Limited, which is a train that went from Missouri, Kansas, Texas. That's why it was called the KT because Kansas and Texas. And they got told that there was going to be $400,000 on that. That's a good haul. If they get pulled that off, it's heist movie time. But because he's so bad at it, they got 46 bucks from the mail clerk, two big old things at whiskey, and a pocket watch from the conductor. So he holds up on his French ranch, drinks all the whiskey, and while he's sitting there, he's also got tuberculosis at this time, so he's really not doing great. And he's really drunk, and the sheriffs come find him, and he says, you will never take me alive. And they didn't. Come on. So the Johnson funeral home takes him and says, okay, we're going to embalm him. We're going to use our lovely arsenic stuff because that keeps people around for a while, and it's fine. We're going to just, you know, when people show up to claim him, he's right there, and he's all ready to go. And they wait, and they wait, and they wait, and nobody's coming to pick up this guy. So they're like, that costs a lot of money. We got to do something about this. So they put them on display. They go, hey, come see the Oklahoma outlaw, the man who would never be taken alive. Here, when you come, it's a nickel, and you put the nickel in his mouth. It's great, and it was, it was ridiculously popular. Everybody came to see it. There's also, this is apocryphal because I didn't find an actual source for it, but apparently the Johnson's kids, when they wanted to terrify their friends, would stick him on roller skates and wheel him around the funeral home. That's what fun you can have. So in 1916, so we've had a few years of really profiting off of the dead dude. Two brothers show up and they go, really? Okay. Two brothers show up and they go, oh my God, our long lost brother Elmer. Oh my God. We finally got him. Please, can we take him home? Please. And they go, yes, of course you can. They weren't his brothers. They were the Patterson brothers of the great Patterson carnival shows. So now he's on a side show. He's going everywhere. He's traveling the world. In 1922 then, they sold him to Louis Sonny, the man of the ticket, and he's now in the Museum of Crime. He has a brief moment in 1933 when he's in the great big display there for the movie Narcotic. He was a hop head who robbed a liquor store for his fix and died. It worked, apparently. And then he was briefly in She-Freak. I actually went through all of She-Freak. I could not find him, but if you really want to watch a bad 1960s knockoff of Todd Browning's freaks, it's on YouTube. Have fun. But he's mostly been sitting in storage. He sits in storage and he waits and he waits and he waits and nothing happens. He briefly gets loaned out to a Canadian group in Niagara Falls who say, oh, he's a bit too gruesome. Oh, take him back. We don't want him. He gets sold then to Spooni Singh who runs the Hollywood Wax Museum. And Spooni goes, this is good. This is a huge job lot of waxworks. So this is by now what nobody realizes that this is a real person anymore. He is now a waxwork. And Spooni goes, well, he's okay, but we're not going to stick him anywhere. So we're going to sell him to Laugh in the Dark. And that's where he was when the coroner found him. And they managed to do this really neat trick because there were no fingerprints. DNA wasn't a thing back then. And they took an x-ray of his skull and a photo of what we knew was Elmer McCurdy and lined them up and the bone structure matched. So after they managed that, they then said, okay, now we got to bury him. We figured him out who he is. He's got to get buried. And my God, he should really stay put this time. There's still no one to claim the body though. And all the funeral homes are like, oh my God, me, me, me, such a publicity stunt. Oh my God, yes. And they're like, no, no, no. And then finally, boot hill goes, you know, Oklahoma outlaw, we should really take him. So he got picked up by Dr. Judy Melanick, who by the way has an amazing blog post about this. And she takes him and she releases him to boot hill and he gets buried. And right now that's where he sits in Oklahoma under several feet of concrete. So he ain't going to go anywhere else anymore. So there he goes. There he rests. Now, along with loads and loads and loads of kids seeing this as a child, there was one kid who saw it when he was very little and it terrified the hell out of him. Then in the 80s, when he's working for Mattel as a lead designer and he's coming up with this fantasy line, he's like, oh my God, that scary dead guy I saw creeped me out. I know exactly what I'm going to do. And that's how we got Skeletor. So the next time you're in a funhouse or a spookhouse or a ghost train and you see a skeleton hanging from the ceiling, just take a second and go, could that be what I think it is? So like I said, the slides are going up right now on Twitter. And basically, if you guys have any questions, feel free. Otherwise, we can all skedaddle to the talk about zombies because hi. Wow. Well, that raised a lot of questions. Thank you very much. Does anybody have any questions about that? That's all. Is anybody going to hand it? No. They're all too stunned by, is it, by the way, is this a true story? That's my first question because- Oh my God, this is entirely a true story. This is exactly what happened. Maybe a bit of it's apocryphal, but you know, most of it's true. Definitely was a real dead guy. Nobody, they're all too stunned. I know how they feel. That was quite stunning. Well, thank you very much. That's my favorite dead guy. I know a lot more stories about dead guys. Come find me later. I take coax. It's great. And there's a promise. Okay. Well, thank you very much once again. That was brilliant.