When Elon Musk was still in diapers, Elizabeth Carmichael was ready to shake up the automotive industry with a highly innovative car idea.
In 1974 – as the United States neared the end of a crippling gasoline shortage – Carmichael introduced the public to Dale: a three-wheeled car that cost just $ 2,000 and is said to reach 70 miles per gallon.
He presented himself as a renegade of the car industry, going against the so-called Big Three car manufacturers, and the media ate it – calling the car “what everyone is looking for”. A poster of Carmichael showed her traveling on a highway in Los Angeles. Dale even shone as a prize for “The Price Is Right.”
“We will shock General Motors and Ford right out of their seats full of clothes!” Carmichael, then 37, argued.
Well, she definitely shocked everyone.
As revealed in the HBO documentary series “The Lady and the Dale”, which premiered at Sun. On January 31, Carmichael was a murderer who jumped on bail, a counterfeiter and a swindler wanted by the FBI. She was also new to the woman, giving birth to a man from Indiana named Jerry Dean Michael, until she staged her own death – through a fake mafia coup.
And Carmichael’s promises about Dale, including that his body “stronger than steel” was bulletproof, were too good to be true.
But the public, smart from rising gas prices and in the midst of a recession, wanted to believe. “The American people liked the idea of following them,” said Leslie Kendall, chief historian at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. “Besides, it was extremely credible – enough to get a few million people out.”
Jerry Michael, as Carmichael was first known, gave birth to five children through three wives until 1961, when he was arrested for forgery. He gave up a bank term, bringing his fourth wife, Vivian, then pregnant with their first child. He penetrated his growing family around the Sunbelt, one step ahead of the law enforcement and the owners. “Moving is cheaper than paying rent,” he once said.
Finally, tired of being pursued by the FBI, he faked his own death, pushing his car into a tree on a dark road. “Jerry’s car was found on the side of the road,” says Vivian’s brother Charles Richard Barrett in the document. “She had blood on him. It turned out he had been killed – but he was still alive … I think he shot his car. And he left. After that, he went underground for a while. ”
In the early 1970s, Michael was reborn in Southern California as Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, a “widow” who falsely claimed to have a degree in mechanical engineering.
Wife Vivian was still on her way for the trip, but now pretending to be the aunt of their five children who continued to live with them; the couple remained legally married. Carmichael worked for a company, the United States Marketing Institute, which sold tips to inventors. “This job was a turning point,” co-director Nick Cammilleri told The Post. “It simply came to our notice then. He came to a place where he could help other people achieve their dreams. ”
One customer, Dale Clifft, had invented a three-wheeled car that looked like a dune cart and was powered by a motorcycle engine. Carmichael was delighted. “He licensed the rights to Dale Clifft,” Cammilleri said. “Dale saw the power of his invention and saw it [licensing it] as a positive step. ”
He hired a PR man, rented production space in Encino, California, and launched 20a Century Motor Car Corporation – describing the atmosphere at work as having a “religious fervor”. Engineer Greg Leas says in the document: “There was energy in that place. Almost like a big family. ”
However, things seemed slightly disappointed to those inside the company. Engineer Gerry McGuinness talks in the document about being paid from stacks of $ 100 bills and recalls the unpleasant numbers in fancy suits around him: “Don’t tell me I’m not a mob.”
But until 1974, when a group of potential investors wanted to see the car in action, Carmichael’s crew had to make a running version. “He had a BMW motorcycle engine,” Hans Hasson, a mechanic at 20th Century Motors, told The Post. “And if you took a sudden turn, [part of the front] went up in the air. ”
After seeing the dangerous-looking vehicle up close, potential investors withdrew. Carmichael referred to the screen as “a three-wheeled abortion.”
However, unsuspecting buyers flooded 20th Century Motors with deposit money, and dealerships paid $ 35,000 each to secure positions as Dale retailers. Carmichael had to keep this money as collateral. Instead, he seemed to fund her lifestyle and company.
Moreover, it sold shares in Dale’s shares without being authorized to do so.
A Dale case was on display at the January 1975 Motor Show, which caused a lot of hype. “It generated a lot of wonder,” said Kendall, who co-starred with his father. “It looked like a bright yellow rocket ship … If the claims were true, it was a game changer in terms of how the cars were built and configured.”
In February 1975, Carmichael and four directors of the company left for Dallas, where they hoped to produce Dales. Then all hell broke out. It was revealed about its illegal share sales and an SEC investigation was underway. For some reason, Carmichael left her two bodyguards behind – former San Quentin cellmates – and got into a heated discussion about how to calm the investigation. One of the former counters wanted to kill the investigator. The other disagreed and a fistfight ensued. A gun was fired and he accidentally disappeared, killing one of the men and getting the kind of publicity Carmichael didn’t want.
Bright media coverage of Carmichael and Dale went dark as customers demanded money back and details of Carmichael’s fraudulent ways surfaced. “Things are starting to fall apart,” McGuinness said in the document. “It simply came to our notice then – boom, boom, boom. You could not turn on the TV without seeing a negative report. ”
With Downstairs, Carmichael and top staff gathered at a house in Dallas, where she and her family were camping. Carmichael’s daughter, Candi Michael, remembers seeing one of the Dale salesmen with a suitcase full of money come to the meeting. “It simply came to our notice then [the company] account. They divided the money and everyone went their separate ways, ”she says in the series. “In less than 10 minutes, our whole family was in the car and we were on our way. That was the end. ”
Director Cammilleri believes Carmichael had every intention of making Dale – even if she could get funding before her deeds return home. “I would say the Dale approached as close as Tesla in 2009,” he said. “If he received the money [from investors], we tell another story. ”
In contact with her family, Carmichael was soon pursued in Miami and arrested on charges of major theft and securities fraud. About $ 6 million of the company’s funds remained unexpressed. She was eventually released on $ 50,000 bail from a studio that hoped to make a film with her life story, probably sparked by revelations that Carmichael was transgender and would undergo gender reassignment surgery in Tijuana.
Following a lengthy California trial, jurors found her guilty of major theft and securities fraud in late 1977.
Carmichael disappeared again, after a series of appeals and even before her conviction in 1980. Nine years later, an episode of the TV show “Unresolved Mysteries” led to her capture in Texas. She was sentenced to 32 months and served more than two years in a men’s prison.
Around 1990, a freed Carmichael perfected an extremely lucrative scheme that hired former homeless people to sell roses on the corners of Austin Street.
One of the four remaining Dale prototypes is now in the Petersen Museum. Carmichael died of cancer in 2004, at the age of about 67, after a life of deception. “What he tried to do in a year, it took decades in Detroit to get right,” Kendall of Petersen said. “He thought he could create a car by force of will.”