When Elon Musk still had diapers, Elizabeth Carmichael was ready to shake up the auto industry with a wild and innovative car idea.
In 1974, as the United States neared the end of a crippling gasoline shortage, Carmichael introduced the public to the Dale – a three-wheeled car that cost just $ 2,000 and was said to reach 70 miles per gallon.
He presented himself as a renegade of the car industry, going against the so-called carmakers of the Big Three, and the media ate it up, calling the car “what everyone is looking for”. A Carmichael poster showed her riding between a Los Angeles freeway. The Dale even shone as a prize in “The Price Is Right.”
“We immediately surprised General Motors and Ford from their tight seats!” Carmichael, then 37, said.
Well, it certainly surprised everyone.
As revealed in the HBO documentary series “The Lady and the Valley,” which premiered Monday, Jan. 31, Carmichael was a criminal, a forger, and a scammer wanted by the FBI. It was also new to the woman, as an Indiana man named Jerry Dean Michael had been born until he starred in his own death, through a mafia hit.
And Carmichael’s promises about the Dale, including that his body “stronger than steel” was bulletproof, were too good to be true.
But the public, avoiding escalating gas prices and in the midst of a recession, wanted to believe it. “The American people liked the idea they were looking for,” Leslie Kendall, chief historian at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, told The Post. “Plus, it was extremely credible, enough to get a couple of million people out.”
Jerry Michael, as he first met Carmichael, had fathered five children through three women in 1961, when he was arrested for forgery. He skipped a bank order, taking his fourth wife, Vivian, then pregnant with his first child. He wrapped his growing family around the Sunbelt, staying one step ahead of law enforcement and the owners. “Moving is cheaper than paying rent,” he joked once.
Finally, tired of being chased by the FBI, he faked his own death, sinking his car into a tree on a dark road. “Jerry’s car was found on the road,” Vivian’s brother Charles Richard Barrett says in the document. “It simply came to our notice then. It turned out that he had been killed, but he was still alive … He shot the car, I guess. And he left. Then he went underground for a while. “
By the early 1970s, Michael had been reborn in Southern California as Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, a “widow” who falsely claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
Woman Vivian was still accompanied by the journey, but now pretended to be the aunt of her five children who continued to live with them; the couple remained legally married. Carmichael worked for a company, the U.S. Marketing Institute, which sold advice to inventors. “That job was a turning point,” documentary co-director Nick Cammilleri told The Post. “It simply came to our notice then. He ended up in a place where he could help other people realize their dreams.
One customer, Dale Clifft, had invented a three-wheeled car, which resembled a dune stroller and ran on 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 clever public relations man, rented a production space in Encino, California, and launched the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation: Describes the workplace atmosphere as “religious fervor.” Engineer Greg Leas says in the document, “There was energy in that place. Almost like a big family.
Still, things seemed slightly out of the company’s pros. Engineer Gerry McGuinness talks in the paper about paying stacks of $ 100 bills and recalls nasty figures in hanging luxury suits: “Don’t tell me they’re not the mob.”
But in 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,” mechanic Hans Hasson, who worked at 20th Century Motors, told The Post. “And if you made a sharp turn, [part of the front] went up in the air. “
After seeing the dangerous vehicle up close, future investors withdrew. Carmichael referred to the screen as “an abortion on three wheels.”
Still, suspicious buyers flooded 20th Century Motors with deposits, and dealers paid $ 35,000 each to secure positions as Dale retailers. Carmichael was supposed to keep that money in deposit. Instead, he seemed to fund his lifestyle and business.
In addition, he sold shares of Dale without a license to do so.
A shell from the Dale was shown at the LA auto show in January 1975, causing a big hype. “It generated a lot of wonder,” said Kendall, who attended the show with her father. “It looked like a bright yellow rocket … If the claims were true, it changed the game in terms of how the cars were built and configured.”
In February 1975, Carmichael and four company executives went to Dallas, where they expected Dales to produce. That’s when hell was undone. Information about his illegal sales of shares had been leaked and an SEC investigation was underway. For some reason, Carmichael left behind her two bodyguards, former San Quentin cellmates, and got into a heated discussion about how to stifle the investigation. One of the former cons wanted to kill the researcher. The other disagreed and a fist fight ensued. He fired a gun that accidentally fired and killed one of the men and got the kind of publicity Carmichael didn’t want.
Carmichael and Dale’s media coverage went dark as customers demanded a refund of their money and details emerged about Carmichael’s fraudulent forms. “Things started to fall apart,” McGuinness says in the document. “It happened quickly: boom, boom, boom. You could not turn on the TV without seeing a negative report “.
With the downstairs, Carmichael and senior staff gathered at a Dallas home where she and her family were camping. Carmichael’s daughter, Candi Michael, remembers seeing one of Dale’s salesmen with a suitcase full of cash entering the meeting. “It simply came to our notice then [the company] account. They distributed the money and everyone went their separate ways, ”he says in the series. “In less than 10 minutes, our whole family was in the car and we were on the road. That was the end. “
Director Cammilleri believes Carmichael had every intention of making the Dale, even though she could only get funding before her misdeeds got home. “I would say the Dale car came as close as the Tesla in 2009,” he said. “If they got the money [from investors], we are telling a different story “.
With his family, Carmichael was soon tracked down in Miami and arrested on charges of large-scale theft and securities fraud. About $ 6 million in company funds remained undiscovered. She was eventually released on $ 50,000 bail provided by a studio hoping to make a film of her life story, likely sparked by revelations that Carmichael was transgender and undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Tijuana.
After a lawsuit was filed in California, jurors found her guilty of large-scale theft and securities fraud in late 1977.
Carmichael disappeared again, after a series of appeals and just before her sentencing in 1980. Nine years later, an episode of the television show “Unsolved Mysteries” led her to capture Texas. She was sentenced to 32 months and served more than two years in a male prison.
Around 1990, a freed Carmichael perfected a highly profitable scheme that employed homeless people selling roses on the corners of Austin Street.
One of the four remaining Dale prototypes now resides in the Petersen Museum. Carmichael died of cancer in 2004, at the age of 67, after a lifetime of cheating. “What it tried to do in a year, Detroit took decades to hit,” Kendall of Petersen said. “He thought he could create a car by force of will.”