The History of Elmer's Body

Elmer's corpse was acquired by movie director Dwayne Esper in 1933 to promote his exploitation film entitled Narcotic. The Pattersons then shipped the body to Kansas, where it was featured in their carnival shows as the outlaw who would never be captured alive. In 1922, James Patterson sold his operation to a man named Louis Sonny and he featured Elmer's corpse in his traveling museum of crime. It eventually made a brief appearance in the 1967 film, Chief Freak. By 1976, its corpse was hanging in the pikes laugh in the dark Fun House exhibition at an amusement zone in Long Beach, California. This is how a genuine human corpse started to become mistaken for fake.