So, Elmer died when the spies were captured. Did the FBI shoot him? Did he die of shock (we’re assuming he was pretty old)? was it friendly fire, or was he used as a shield?
Lincoln wheat pennies were minted from 1909-1959, just FYI.
Was the penny put in Elmer’s mouth before or after his death?
Was it put in his mouth by one of the “spies”?
So, tell me if I have this correct: Steve and the spies were characters (although you didn’t answer the “movie” part, so they could have been characters in anything), but Elmer was a real-live nogoodnik.
Was the spies vs good guys thing meant as a form of entertainment (like a play or TV show) or something else (like a training exercise)?
Was he killed by Steve (or the actor playing Steve)? By police? By someone else?
In this scenario involving the spies and the good guys, was Elmer there as an observer/audience member? A willing participant? By accident?
Did Steve et al know who Elmer was when they captured him? Had they known him before they captured him, either as Elmer-the-outlaw or under a different name?
Was the penny a superstitious thing? A symbol of some kind of group affiliation?
Was it put in Elmer’s mouth as an intentional message?
I’m strongly suspecting the penny may be something of a red herring. I think we have some kind of situation of a former outlaw, Elmer, who either didn’t realize he had an outstanding warrant, or that there was no statute of limitations on something he’d done, and thought he was in the clear, and was appearing as a walk-on in movies and TV shows-- possibly even had a SAG card, when someone put 2 & 2 together, and Elmer got taken down on the set of something where the hero was named Steve.
I’m trying to remember what might have had a hero named Steve in 1976, but I thought of Steve Trevor on Wonder Woman in 1976, and now that’s all I can think of.
FWIW, while I doubt it’s the same guy, there was a former train robber involved in films in the silent days. He taught Lillian Gish to shoot a rifle, and she took up target shooting as a hobby-- skeets and clay pigeons. When she was in a Western called The Unforgiven in 1962, the director took her to teach her to shoot, because she had to fire a rifle in one scene, and discovered she could shoot better than he could.
I just had a thought.
Is it possible that a location shot was being prepared for a movie or TV shoot featuring a hero named Steve, and in preparing the shot, the crew found a body? And the body happened to be the body of an outlaw who had gone into hiding a long time ago, and gotten himself stuck some place and died there? Otherwise, he may have been murdered by accomplices, and his body hidden.
I’m sort of puzzled by a group of people, spies notwithstanding, finding a “train-robber” in 1976. Train robbing was just not happening then. Trains got looted secretly in the station, or had goods embezzled by companies, but no one staged actual robberies of moving trains with passengers by 1976.
At first I was thinking the robber had to be someone really old, who had some kind of secondary career playing “old guy” in background scenes, or delivering a single lines, in Hollywood. Gawd knows, if I live to be very old, with mind intact, and body relatively so, that’s on my list.
But now I’m thinking the bad guy could have been a dead body, so he could have robbed trains any time-- heck, he could have robbed wagon trains.
If you look at the verbal side-stepping-- the passive-voice sentences, and such, in the original question, it could all be phrased that way to cover up the fact that Elmer was a corpse.
That also explains how he could have been a “notorious” outlaw none of us have heard of. If he was notorious in 1875, well, time goes on.
The significance of the penny may have been that it gave an upper date to Elmer having gone into hiding (or being murdered). If the penny was dated, say, 1917, then Elmer had been where he was no earlier than that time.
As for why it was in his mouth, my only WAG comes from stories of Holocaust victims, who said they used to keep pebbles in their mouths because it relieved the feeling of thirst. A small coin might have the same effect. Also, copper has a taste. If you are desperately hungry, sucking on a penny might help. Another story Holocaust victims told was chewing on sticks, then spitting out the wood when it was pulp in their mouths. Having the feeling of chewing something helped with hunger a little. If Elmer used the penny for that reason, that could confirm a theory suggested by other evidence that he got somehow stuck or stranded in his hiding place.
reply to RivkahChaya:
So, Elmer died when the spies were captured. Before. The spies were captured after all of this happened.
Did the FBI shoot him? Shot and killed by police. Did he die of shock (we’re assuming he was pretty old)? was it friendly fire, or was he used as a shield? No to shock, friendly fire, shield.
reply to SurrenderDorothy:
Was the penny put in Elmer’s mouth before or after his death? After
Was it put in his mouth by one of the “spies”? No.
So, tell me if I have this correct: Steve and the spies were characters (although you didn’t answer the “movie” part, so they could have been characters in anything), but Elmer was a real-live nogoodnik. Yes.
Was the spies vs good guys thing meant as a form of entertainment (like a play or TV show) or something else (like a training exercise)? Yes.
Was he killed by Steve (or the actor playing Steve)? No. By police? Yes. By someone else? No.
In this scenario involving the spies and the good guys, was Elmer there as an observer/audience member? A willing participant? By accident?
None of these correctly describe the situation. Accident is closest, but he was supposed to be a not-unwilling participant too…
Did Steve et al know who Elmer was when they captured him? No Had they known him before they captured him, either as Elmer-the-outlaw or under a different name? No.
Was the penny a superstitious thing? No. A symbol of some kind of group affiliation? No.
Was it put in Elmer’s mouth as an intentional message? No.
I like your theories RivkahChaya.
OK.
So, 1) Elmer was a corpse who was discovered by a film/TV crew setting up for some project featuring a hero named “Steve.”
- The significance of the penny has less to do with where is was, or how it got there, then the date of the penny.
Am I on the right track?
Questions:
Was Elmer found in the place where he died, or did someone else put his body there?
Was anything else found in his mouth along with the penny?
You say it was an “ordinary” penny, and have implied that it was a copper penny, but was it in fact, a wartime steel penny, so that while it was unusual, it was still indistinguishable from other steel pennies?
Which was the bigger issue: identifying the body, or connecting him to his crimes?
Was Elmer a skeleton, or had he mummified, “soap-mummified,” or somehow otherwise gotten preserved in a way that helped identify him?
Was the TV hero Steve Austin? He’s the only one that immediately comes to mind for that period.
Oh…! Yes! I’ll bet that’s it! I was having this mental block and couldn’t think of anything but Steve Trevor. The Six-Million-Dollar Man sounds like just the sort of show for a plot about spies!
reply to RivkahChaya:
So, 1) Elmer was a corpse who was discovered by a film/TV crew setting up for some project featuring a hero named “Steve.” Yes
- The significance of the penny has less to do with where is was, or how it got there, then the date of the penny. Both are important.
Am I on the right track? Yes.
Questions:
Was Elmer found in the place where he died, or did someone else put his body there? someone else.
Was anything else found in his mouth along with the penny? Yes.
You say it was an “ordinary” penny, and have implied that it was a copper penny, but was it in fact, a wartime steel penny, so that while it was unusual, it was still indistinguishable from other steel pennies? Not a wartime steel penny.
Which was the bigger issue: identifying the body, or connecting him to his crimes? ID
Was Elmer a skeleton, or had he mummified, “soap-mummified,” or somehow otherwise gotten preserved in a way that helped identify him?
mummified/preserved.
reply to Bayaker:
Was the TV hero Steve Austin? He’s the only one that immediately comes to mind for that period.
Yes
We are pretty close on this. Some of the minor details are missing, but if you can explain the penny in Elmer’s mouth and take a stab at how the body came to be where it was, we can call this a wrap.
OK. So Elmer’s body got discovered by a crew preparing for an episode of The Six-Million-Dollar Man, involving German spies.
I was a spotty watcher of that show, and was 9 in 1976. I wouldn’t recall this episode even if I’d seen it.
Did this episode actually get produced, or did the finding of the body halt production?
I’m kinda at a loss here, because I don’t know how I can figure out the rest of this unless it made the news at the time, and something jogs my memory, which isn’t happening, or somehow the reality of finding the body was incorporated into the script, and that would take someone who knows the show better than I do.
Did the penny have 1) something to do with the preservation method; or 2) relevance to some other place the body was before it was where the crew found it?
Did the body spend time elsewhere before it was placed where the crew found it? Was it deliberately put in a place so that the crew could find it?
Was the nature of the other item(s) in his mouth natural (like insects) or manufactured, like the penny itself?
So had the body regularly been used as a prop for other things? You said he had been in a movie in the 60s, too.
Oh lord- “disarmed” doesn’t mean his arm fell off, does it? 
Was the penny placed during one of his previous… er… “acting jobs”?
Was the age of the penny significant because it helped determine how long he had been dead?
Oh, cripes! Somehow, a real, mummified body got mixed up with prop bodies at whatever studio produced The Six-Million-Dollar Man, and they only figured it out because the arm fell off when they were setting up for the “German spies” episode?
So, I’m going to assume that the body had to be sent to the coroner’s office, and stuff, including a penny, was found in the mouth, and this stuff led them to identifying the body as Elmer, former notorious train robber.
I’m guessing that Elmer was killed (probably shot) either during a robbery or some kind of arrest attempt, and the body got embalmed, maybe because nobody claimed it. At some point, and here, I have no guess as to how this happened, it got appropriated for a prop body. Maybe it was an accident because coffins were rented from the funeral home, or maybe it was deliberate by someone who had a family member killed by Elmer, and wanted to humiliate him in death.
Anyway, I don’t know why someone put a penny in his mouth, but I’ll take two guesses. 1) The embalmer did it to hold his tongue or cheek a certain way. 2) If using him as a prop was done to humiliate him, then someone “paid” him a penny (in other words, a pittance) for his “work.”
Was Elmer the robber from Oklahoma whose body wound up in a freak show, and then somehow forgotten about(in storage?) for 50 or so years? If so, I learned about him from either one of Cecil’s columns or a SDMB thread.
I can’t figure what the penny had to do with it though.
You guys got it.
Elmer McCurdy was killed in a shootout with police after robbing a train in 1911. No one claimed the body so what was a poor mortician to do? In this case it was to embalm/mummify the body and preserve it outside the funeral home in a box to show the quality of the mortician’s work. The body proved popular enough that it was purchased by entrepreneurs and afterwards people had to pay to see the corpse at various carnivals and shows.
Now you and I might not think it was worth our five cents to pay to see Elmer McCurdy’s corpse. But others certainly did. It was also deemed fun to add an additional penny or ticket stub directly into the mouth of the deceased McCurdy-thing. Good times! Elmer’s dead body was not the only one touring the country getting pennies and stubs either. Such was entertainment in the early twentieth century.
Elmer passed to various owners. The corpse began to show its age. The body was supposedly further damaged while being transported on top of a car like a Christmas tree in South Dakota. For some reason at some point the body was painted neon orange.
The body appears in the low-budget sixties horror flick, She-Freak. Then it traces to a carnival fun house in California, where it dangled from a noose as the rickety cars passed by it in the hall of horrors. And at some point it seems people forgot it was actually a real body.
Then The Six Million Dollar Man team came along and rented the place to film their episode “Carnival of Spies.” Someone decided to move the hanging mannequin…and accidentally pulled off its arm, horrifyingly revealing real bone and tissue. Production came to a quick halt. (Good guess on the “disarming” SurrenderDorothy) The police were called to investigate this gruesome discovery.
The authorities found a 1924 penny still lodged in Elmer’s mouth, along with some ticket stubs and the truth was soon pieced together. Everyone had a good laugh. Elmer is now buried in Oklahoma, and hopefully will cause frights no more.
Here’s one link to this story, but you can google and find many more:
Archie and John were lifelong companions. But whenever John went abroad, he never took Archie with him. Why?