Mind of a Serial Killer - Joe Ball: The Alligator Man of Elmendorf Pt. 2

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

After killing at least two women in his orbit, Joe Ball seemingly got away clean. But when the rumors in town caught up to him.. Joe did something nobody expected. After he was gone, his gator pit and a trail of missing women turned him into one of Depression-era Texas's most chilling figures.If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free on the top of the serial killers and murderous minds show page. This is Crime House. Everyone loves a hometown hero, whether it's a local sports legend and everyday upstanding citizen or someone who went on to major stardom fame. They don't just give us something to feel proud of, but they can shape our sense of where we came from and therefore our own identities.

But not all local legends come in the form of someone to be celebrated. Some towns get an anti-hero. That was the case in Elmendorf, Texas in the 1930s. At the time, the people of Elmendorf needed something to distract them from their Depression-era hardships. Unfortunately, they didn't get a home-run hitter or a Hollywood starlet. They got Joe Ball, aka The Alligator Man. For a while, Joe provided thrilling entertainment in the form of live gator feedings. However, people eventually started to wonder if Joe wasn't just feeding his gaiters,

small animals, but also human flesh. The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is serial killers and murderous minds, a crimehouse original. I'm Vanessa Richardson. And I'm forensic psychologist Dr. Tristan Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what?

makes a killer. Crime House is made possible by you. Follow serial killers and murderous minds and subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts for ad-free early access to each two-part series. Before we get started, be advised that this episode contains discussion of animal abuse, murder, and dismemberment.

So please listen with care. Today we conclude our deep dive on Joe Ball, also known as the alligator man of Elmendorf. Joe was a Depression-era tavern owner who put on horrific live events involving wild alligators. But there was more to Joe's fearful reputation. He was also known for his blatant womanizing. And when multiple women connected to Joe mysteriously vanished, people started to talk. Eventually, the rumors got back to the police.

And Joe's story came to a shocking end. As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how some offenders impulsiveness can be linked to their sense of control and acts of violence, what drives morbid curiosity around gruesome crimes, and why some horrific crime stories give rise to prominent folklore. And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer? In the mid-1930s, Joe Ball was running a tavern in his hometown of Elmendorf, Texas, known as the Sociable Inn.

Joe kept his customers happy with a constant flux of female employees, as well as his infamous Saturday Night Alligator shows, where Joe served live animals to the five gaiters he kept in an enclosed concrete pool behind the tavern. However, it wasn't just the lively spirits and shock value that made the tavern so successful. Joe also had ways of maintaining control over his employees if they ever got out of hand, including killing them. In 1937, Joe murdered his bar manager and ex-girlfriend Minnie Gotthard. After she tried to get between him and his new girlfriend, another bar employee named Dolores Goodwin, who went by the nickname Buddy. At 26 years old, Buddy was 15 years younger than Joe, and just a few weeks after he killed

Minnie, Joe and Buddy were married. Unfortunately, Joe was extremely abusive toward Buddy. He once threw a bottle at her face, which resulted in a prominent scar. Then in January of 1938, Buddy lost her arm in a bad car accident. But rumors spread that Joe had cut Buddy's arm off and fed it to the gaiters. This wasn't true, but it showed that people knew Joe was shady. Not only that, but he'd been making it pretty obvious that he was losing interest in his wife, because Buddy's friend, 22-year-old Hazel Brown, had caught his eye. And in April of 1938, Joe and Hazel started having an affair behind Buddy's back. In episode one, we talked about how Joe relates to the people around him, particularly the women in his life, but now there's a pattern. Joe was enamored with

Minnie, and then he became romantically involved with her. He then became enamored with Buddy and replaced Minnie with Buddy. Now he's enamored with Hazel, and Buddy is being replaced by Hazel. We don't know Minnie's age, but both Buddy and Hazel are significantly younger than Joe. And in each case, the woman being discarded had become either inconvenient, less useful, or simply less interesting to Joe than whoever came next. Joe consistently views people as resources. He dehumanizes them. What makes this particular replacement especially telling is who he chose. It was Buddy's own friend. That suggests Joe was moving within the same social network. of women. In fact, all of these women were within the same social network if you think about it.

That can tell us something about boundary violations and entitlement. Most people would recognize that pursuing a partner's friend or coworker is socially risky, hurtful, and destabilizing. But someone with a highly entitled or predatory nature may not experience those boundaries as important or meaningful. They simply see it as opportunity. So generally speaking, why do you think Joe got married in the first place when he's already shown a history of womanizing? Clearly, he just can't settle down. Was it just the social norm or pressure of the time to get married? Or do you think he just can't see his actions as being wrong?

That's a great question, because it certainly was the social norm and expectation in 1937, and it would be advantageous for Joe to appear as normal as possible with all the abnormal behaviors, business. practices and spectacles that he was otherwise engaged in. Remaining unmarried could certainly draw more attention and rumors or whispers in his direction, but I think there's something more psychologically interesting that's happening here than just conforming to social norms, because Joe got married to someone that he was already being abusive toward, someone he had already permanently scarred with the bottle, and someone he would almost immediately begin cheating on. That's not a man who felt pressure to settle down because he could have done that with Minnie if that was the case. Instead, it reads as a man who wanted the social legitimacy that marriage provided while also absolutely

having no intention of changing anything about how he operated. Buddy was younger and he is a coercively controlling partner. So this could have been an extension of that control. Marrying her could have been a way to entrap her. So to your second point about whether Joe knew what he was doing was wrong, I don't think so, not in a meaningful way. He is morally disengaged, and he was raised inside a system that normalized exploitation. Like we talked about in episode one, that likely caused him to develop an internal framework where his own needs override everyone else's. So marriage for Joe was likely just another resource that served a purpose, and once that purpose had ended, he sought a replacement, just like everything else in life.

Well, unfortunately, the fallout of Joe's affair seemed especially dire, because shortly after he and Hazel became involved, Buddy disappeared. According to Joe, she went to visit family in San Diego, and it didn't seem like she was coming back. People thought maybe she'd caught wind of Joe's affair and packed her bags, or maybe he'd killed her so that she could be with Hazel. But whatever happened to Buddy, Joe's romance with Hazel was short-lived. One night, at the end of a long shift at the social bowl, Joe was checking the cash register,

while Hazel swept the floors. At some point, she put down the broom and approached Joe. She said she needed to tell him something. Joe barely looked up as Hazel explained that she'd met someone, one of their customers, in fact. He had a good job and owned his own house. She didn't want to sleep in the back room of a tavern forever. She saw a real life with this man.

So she told Joe she was leaving. At first, Joe didn't say anything. He continued counting the money as Hazel asked him to speak. Finally, he set down the cash and told her, No, she wasn't allowed to leave him. Not after everything they'd been through. He'd betrayed his wife to be with her. That's when Hazel got angry.

She told Joe it wasn't up to him. It was over, but he still couldn't accept it. Joe stepped around the bar and started yelling. He said he wouldn't allow it, that she belonged to him. Hazel racked her brain for a way to prove how serious she was, and finally she mustered the courage to tell Joe that she knew he'd killed Minnie Gotthard. Not only that, but she suspected he'd killed Buddy, too. And if he tried to get in her way, she'd go to the police.

Enraged, Joe pulled out his pistol and hit Hazel across the face so hard with it, she was knocked unconscious. Then he fired a single shot, killing her. When Joe killed Minnie, it was cold, calculated, and planned. But what happened here with Hazel is something else. This is reactionary and it's personal. And that's because, for the first time, Joe encountered someone setting boundaries with him and meaning it.

Every pattern we've tracked across both episodes shows us a man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it, from people who had very little power to refuse him. Hazel wasn't just ending this affair that she was having with Joe. She was rejecting him. She was challenging his authority and then threatening to expose him, all in the same conversation. For someone with Joe's psychology, that combination is full exposure and a threat to multiple areas of his life. His language is also very telling. Saying she belonged to him really highlights that he views his partners as property. It's possible he experienced a narcissistic injury.

In this case, the reaction is raged because his power, control, or self-image was threatened directly by Hazel. For most people, a narcissistic injury produces an argument, maybe some vengeful retaliation. But for Joe, it produced violence. So what do you think about the fact that his only victim so far that we know of have been women he was romantically involved with? It's a pattern. Since we can't confirm what happened to the women who worked for him. him that disappeared, intimate relationships were clearly the area where Joe felt most entitled and where any threat to his control was the most intolerable. And research consistently tells us

that the most dangerous moment for a woman in a relationship with someone like Joe is exactly what both Minnie and Hazel experienced, becoming an inconvenience or saying no. That's targeted relational violence and it's consistent with abusers who need power, dominance, and control. Joe's murderous rage seemed deeply connected to his lack of respect for women, especially because this time he didn't even bother to bury his victim. After killing Hazel, he stuffed her remains into one of his old whiskey barrels. He loaded the barrel into his car, drove out to his sister's farm in Elmendorf, and left the barrel behind the barn, where he probably figured nobody would find it.

One night shortly after that, Joe told his assistant, Clifton Wheeler, to load up the car with blankets and beer. They'd both been drinking, so Clifton really didn't want to, but he knew he couldn't challenge Joe. Meanwhile, Joe packed a saw, an axe, and a post-hole digger, a tool that makes deep round holes in the ground. Then the two men got into the car, and Joe drove them to his sister's barn. The unbearable smell from the barrel hit them as soon as they pulled up. Clifton knew that for the second time he was helping Joe get rid of a body. They brought the barrel to a spot on the San Antonio River about three miles outside Elmendorf.

Then Joe pulled out his pistol and forced Clifton to dig a grave. Let's talk about Clifton for a moment because his role is psychologically and legally complicated. Clifton worked for Joe. So there was already a power imbalance before the violence even entered the picture. And arguably it had been entering the picture since he started working there. Joe had been abusive and threatening to Clifton from the moment he started working for him. But Joe controlled his employment

and Clifton depended on him financially, at least for himself, but possibly for his family too. And this was not the first time that Clifton had been pulled into Joe's violence. He had already witnessed a murder. We talked about that in episode one, and according to the account, Joe had a gun then too.

Clifton was also forced to help cover that crime, and that matters because by the time Joe hands him a shovel again, Clifton is not encountering Joe's violence for the first time. He already knows what Joe is capable of. He's been on the receiving end of it. He also has already seen him kill. He's already been forced at gunpoint to participate in concealing a murder. So when Joe threatens him again, in that moment, compliance is not him consenting. It's him surviving. And I think Joe appears to understand exactly what he's doing. He chooses someone who is already dependent on him, who's already afraid of him and already implicated from the prior crime.

Clifton is not just physically coerced. He's psychologically cornered. Forcing Clifton to participate serves two purposes. Practically, Joe needs his help. He needs someone to help him dig, move, conceal, or assist in whatever way that this crime requires. But psychologically, it entraps Clifton even more. Because after the first cover up, Clifton already has a reason to stay.

silent. And after the second, that silence becomes even harder to break. That's a pattern we sometimes see in people who commit repeated serious violence. They do not just intimidate people into silence. They pull them into the crime just enough that speaking up becomes dangerous for the witness to. That creates leverage. His fear in the moment is understandable. If someone has already forced you at gunpoint to help cover a murder and then does it again, compliance can be a survival response. I think we can all understand that. But once he is no longer in immediate danger, his failure to report what he knew

and what he had been forced to do does not necessarily erase culpability in a legal sense. What do you think it says about Joe that he waited until both of them were drunk to enlist Clifton's help disposing of Hazel's remains? And what about the fact that he used his gun to force Clifton to help him? It shows just how predatory he is.

Alcohol reduces inhibitions. impairs judgment and reasoning and narrows rational thinking. That makes someone more compliant and less likely to resist. It's the same playbook he used during the murder of Minnie, and it worked. He gave alcohol to both Minnie and Clifton before he killed Minnie. And then Clifton helped cover it up, and he didn't say anything after the fact. And that's for a number of reasons. If we recall from episode one, Clifton is a black man, and he's living in Depression era,

and there's a lot of compounding social factors that pile up against him. Joe is repeating what worked the first time. He's exploiting Clifton. The gun is equally telling, but for a different reason. Joe already had enormous power over Clifton for the reasons I just highlighted. He didn't technically need a weapon or even alcohol to secure Clifton's compliance at this point. Fear alone had been doing that job for years, and especially since Minnie's murder. so pulling a gun was a statement.

It was Joe making it absolutely clear that Clifton's participation was never optional, and it was a reminder of the consequences of refusal or dissent. After a while, Joe told him to stop and help dump the barrel. When they did, Clifton realized he was helping Joe bury Hazel. However, her remains wouldn't fit in the shallow grave Clifton had dug. So Joe dismembered Hazel's body. and then to be extra sure nobody would be able to recognize what was left,

he burned her head. For the moment, nobody knew what they had done. It's unclear whether Hazel had told anyone what she knew about Minnie, but only so many women could disappear before people started asking questions. And when that happened, Joe did something no one ever expected. By the summer of 1938, 42-year-old Joe Ball had killed two of his lovers. Minnie Gotthard and Hazel Brown. His wife, Buddy, had also disappeared. Over the next few months, rumors swirled about Joe's missing waitresses, especially because they weren't the only ones who'd vanished.

Several of Joe's female employees had disappeared over the years. And more recently, a 16-year-old boy who used to come around the tavern a lot also reportedly went missing. People whispered that whenever Joe lost his temper with someone, he fed them to his alligators, which could be why no one said anything. They were afraid of becoming his next victim. Instead, people either kept their distance or they kept living it up at the tavern like nothing was wrong. In episode one, we talked about the various reasons why the people of Elmendorf may not have been alarmed initially and spoke up. But what we're describing now is something that goes beyond that, because at this point, the pattern was impossible to miss. People were even gossiping about

it. This is where we need to draw a distinction between two different things that can look identical from the outside. So for those closest to Joe, what was happening was closer to willful ignorance, a conscious choice to look away because the alternative was costly or dangerous. For the broader community, though, it was something more complicated. Years of normalizing concerning behavior, genuine fear of becoming the next person who disappeared, and a very human tendency to protect access, to the escape that they were using for relief during hardship, were all likely causing motivated reasoning. That's where the conclusion that someone wants to reach actually shapes the thinking that gets them there. These were people who were highly motivated to find reasons to believe that nothing was wrong. Research does show us that people will tolerate

a remarkable amount of concerning behavior from someone who provides them something that they value or need. That's why many people spend years in toxic work environments, for example. And the disappearance of a 16-year-old boy should have been enough to shatter any rationalizations the community was making, but it didn't seem to. Even if it had nothing to do with Joe, it was enough to start taking these disappearances seriously because a 16-year-old is not a transient. No one in Joe's orbit seemed willing to speak out against him. but on September 23rd, 1938, a few months after Hazel disappeared, someone finally said something, and not just through gossip and rumors, but to the police.

That day, Bear County Deputy Sheriff John Gray was hunting doves in Elmendorf when an old man approached him. The man told Deputy Gray that he had something concerning to report, something about Joe Ball. The old man had found a foul-smelling barrel behind Joe's sister's barn, and he'd seen John. Joe leave it there. He was worried that a dead body was in there. This man did what no one else seemed willing to do, but it also took hard evidence, something concrete and clearly illegal, that law enforcement would not or could not be able to normalize or turn away from. And speaking out against someone like Joe is risky, which we highlighted, because we know what he's capable of, and now so does this man, or at least he suspects. People who do

eventually speak out against powerful figures in their own communities typically have to reach a tipping point to do so. Finding a potentially dead body that he witnessed Joe putting there himself was this moment for this man. And I think it's also worth noting that he approached a deputy sheriff who happened to be present in the community rather than formally walking into a police station. And I think he did that because it likely made this disclosure feel more manageable to him. He's not likely to feel exposed. It feels more anonymous. He's not waiting in a police station where he can be seen by other members in the community, where it can be gossiped about, or he can be questioned. And so I think this made it feel safer for him to actually report this. Gray knew of the whispers about Joe. So the next day, he and a fellow deputy, John Clevenhagen, went to check it out. But the barrel wasn't there. And when they went to the tavern to talk to Joe, he denied knowing anything about it. The deputies could sense something was off. So they went back to the barn. This time Joe's sister was there,

and she confirmed that, yes, he had left a barrel there. So the deputies drove out to the tavern to speak to Joe again, and the conversation went much differently than it had before. When deputies Gray and Clevenhagen entered the tavern, Joe was standing behind the bar alone, having a beer. He waved them over with a smile and asked if they'd like a drink. They shook their heads no, and they said they were there to talk about something serious. Joe asked them if this was about his wife, Buddy. He knew there were rumors going around that something bad happened to her. Joe promised the deputies that Buddy was completely fine.

She was just visiting some family in San Diego. Deputy Gray told him to drop the act. They knew the barrel was at the barn. Joe's own sister confirmed it. He told Joe they were taking him down to the station in San Antonio for questioning. Joe shook his head and laughed. He promised this was all just a big misunderstanding. He asked the deputies if he could finish his beer first and lock up the tavern.

They said, sure. Joe was acting so casually they thought maybe he was telling the truth. So they stood back while Joe enjoyed his beer and counted the money in the cash register. He rifled through the cash for a moment. Before pulling out his pistol, he waved the gun back and forth of the deputies. They reached for their own weapons, but Joe didn't want to fight. Instead, he turned the pistol on himself. Clevenhagen had time to yell one word,

Don't, but it was too late. Joe pulled the trigger, ending his own life. There were a few reasons why Joe did what he did in this moment, and he didn't even truly know what they were there for. They were there about the barrel, but Joe pivoted to Buddy, and because of that, of the reasons he may have taken his life as a practical one. There are two confirmed murders we know of. Then his wife, buddy, whom many witnessed him throw a bottle at and disfigure, is missing.

Multiple employees of his have disappeared. His handy man witnessed him murder two women, and a man who witnessed him dump a suspicious barrel and subsequently reported it to police. He may have done a risk appraisal and realized they could be here for any one of those reasons or multiple or all, and knew the evidence was against him. He can't control the narrative, and his charm and casual demeanor with the officers wasn't causing them to backtrack in any way. So a second possible reason is ego.

Being led out of his own bar and handcuffs in front of his community by the very system he had spent years operating around may have been genuinely unimaginable to him. Choosing his own death was the last act of control available to him. No one was going to decide what happened to Joe except Joe. The third thing worth noting is how he did it. He asked to close up the tavern. He finished his beer. He counted the register. Those aren't the actions of someone in a blind

panic. Those are the actions of someone who had already made a decision and was tidying up before carrying it out. Even at the very end, Joe is acting methodical and composed. He was in control of the staging of his own death. That means, at least to me, this wasn't impulsive. It was him deciding how his story was going to end. Can you tell us about any other cases you know of where a violent offender took their own life instead of facing the consequences? And maybe going all the way back to our second case ever, Charlie Brandt. Are there any parallels between those cases and Joe Ball's story? Oh, wow, Charlie Brandt. What a throwback.

Actually, he is probably the most personal example because we covered him. Both maintained public identities, their communities accepted without, question, both targeted women in their immediate personal circles, and both operated for years without any meaningful accountability, and when consequences were closing in, both made the same choice. But the difference is how they made it. Charlie's final act was a murder suicide. He took others with him. Charlie's choice suggests his violence was still directed outward mostly at others, whereas Joe's was controlling his own narrative. And they're not alone in this. Research suggests that roughly 4 to 6% of serial killers die by suicide, a relatively small number. But among those

who do, avoiding arrest appears to be one of the more common motivations. But Joe fits the pattern almost exactly. Herb Baummeister fled his home the moment police prepared to search it and he killed himself before they could interrogate him. Leonard Lake swallowed a cyanide pill after being taken into custody. I mean, those are really some examples and it comes down to their individual psychology and what motivated them in the first place. So there are a lot of parallel cases. Well, after their shock wore off, the deputies felt sure that Joe died by suicide

so he wouldn't face the consequences of his crimes. But they still needed to figure out exactly what he'd done. And as their investigation heated up, detectives would come face to face with Joe's horrifying atrocities. In September of 1938, Bear, County deputies John Gray and John Clevenhagen confronted Joe Ball at his tavern. They told him they had witness testimony, claiming he'd disposed of a barrel full of human remains and that they wanted to bring him in for questioning. But before they could do that, Joe took his own

life right before their eyes. Now the deputies knew they'd never get all the answers to whatever gruesome mysteries they were about to uncover, but they still had to try. So later that day, more officers joined Gray and Clevenhagen at the tavern. They searched the property, including the gator pit, which was surrounded by rotting meat. They couldn't tell what kind of meat it was, but they had a sinking suspicion that some of it may have been human, because they also found an axe with matted blood and hair next to the pit. This made them wonder if the rumors were true, that Joe dismembered his victims and fed them to the alligators. So they decided to talk to the person who knew Joe,

best, his assistant, 32-year-old Clifton Wheeler. Shortly after Joe died, Clifton was brought to the station in San Antonio. First, they wanted to know if Joe's wife, Buddy, was really in San Diego, or if it was her body in the whiskey barrel. Clifton didn't know where Buddy was, but he knew it hadn't been her in the barrel because that was Hazel Brown. Clifton admitted that he'd helped Joe bury Hazel's body, and in early October, 1938, about two weeks after police first received the tip about the barrel, Clifton led a group of officers to the spot near the San Antonio River where he and Joe had brought it. When Clifton took them to the shallow grave, they knew what they were about to find. Still, nothing could prepare them for the

horrifying scene they were about to uncover. Along with Hazel's dismembered limbs, Clifton showed them the remains of her head that they burned in a campfire, the ashes of which were still there on the bluff. Then the officers dug out Hazel's jawbone, a few teeth and shards of skull. Clifton has been carrying this secret alone since it happened. And as far as we know, he's had no safe outlet, no one to tell, and no support. And now he's standing at that same spot with law enforcement, physically excavating it. The reality of that has to be really setting in and reactivating the events of that night. And this would be like trauma re-exposure. Every site, every site, every smell, every physical detail is likely pulling him directly back into the worst moment or moments of his

life. But underneath that is possible moral injury. This is different from trauma. Trauma is about what happened to you, whereas moral injury is about what you were forced to do, the specific psychological wound that comes from being complicit in something that fundamentally violates your own sense of who you are or what you feel is right. It attacks identity at its core. And unlike trauma, which can sometimes be processed through time and support, moral injury tends to linger. Now the authorities knew exactly what Joe Ball had been capable of, and they wondered how many others he'd killed.

So they kept talking to Clifton, and eventually he admitted that he'd also helped Joe bury Minnie Gotthard. On October 14, 1938, two days after they recovered Hazel's remains, Clifton led authorities to the secluded spot on the bay where Joe had shot Minnie. By the time investigators had started digging, a crowd had formed around them.

News had spread about Hazel's murder and the discovery of her remains. It sent shockwaves all over town. Now, people wanted to experience the terror for themselves. They'd been there all day watching, as officers dug holes all along the bay. Someone even sold refreshments to the onlookers. Morbic Curiosity is an innate drive

to seek out information or experience. is related to things like death, danger, or dark topics. And before anyone feels judged by that, it's worth knowing that researchers believe it serves an evolutionary purpose. Understanding how death happens, what it looks like, and how close it might be to someone, was genuinely useful information for survival, and in some ways it still is. What's happening in Elmendorf is something called terror management. When we witness death or its aftermath from a safe distance,

It allows us to psychologically process our own mortality without being directly threatened by it. On some level, watching officers dig for someone else's remains is a way of confirming that we're still safe. There's also a social aspect that's worth acknowledging. Crowds are self-reinforcing. Once enough people gather around something, the gathering itself becomes the event. The person that's selling refreshments tells us the crowd had already transformed this tragedy into a spectacle. And we already talked about how spectacles are something that attracts people, like the way Joe did with the tavern. The true crime genre exists for exactly these

reasons. And the fact that you're listening to this right now is the same impulse, but it's channeled into something ideally that also educates, provides more context, and builds genuine understanding. How might this psychology be further influenced by the fact that this was happening in a smaller community during a time when extreme economic downturn left people with few forms of entertainment? That certainly amplifies everything we just discussed because there was no internet, no television, there was limited radio and no disposable income for most types of entertainment, which was why the sociable tavern was so successful and escapism was sought after for this very reason. in. This community had been struggling economically as many had been during that time. So when something this disturbing and dramatic and sensational unfolds right in front of them, it can become another form of entertainment or escapism in itself. It takes them away from their own hardships briefly and places them in someone else's. And that hardship just so happened to be a tragedy that did

affect everyone there in one way or another. The authorities hadn't found anything yet and were still hard at work. Then all of a sudden, one of the officers stopped digging. He looked up at all the people standing around him with his eyes wide. Then he shouted at them to get back. The officer climbed out of the hole and shouted to another, quote, I found her. The onlookers didn't know what to expect.

But they probably never forgot what they saw that day because when they peered down into the hole, they spotted a human hand sticking out of the sand. Authorities dug deeper and soon recovered more remains. There was a single bullet hole in Minnie's skull, confirming Clifton's story. Meanwhile, another group of officers tried to solve the lingering mystery of what happened to Joe's wife, Buddy. According to Joe, she was still alive, living with family in San Diego.

He'd said she went there to get away from him and start fresh. But Joe cast a long shadow, and the authorities wanted to find out just how much Buddy knew about his crimes. So a couple weeks after Joe died, Bear County deputies called around to see if Buddy really was in California, and it turned out Joe had been telling the truth. So they traveled there and brought Buddy back with them to San Antonio. At the station, Buddy confessed that Joe had told her he killed Minnie. However, other than that, it doesn't seem like she was able to provide any useful information. Buddy was allowed to go free, but the investigators were pretty sure Joe hadn't only killed Minnie and Hazel.

By now, there were rumors that he'd murdered about a dozen women. Desperate for leads, officers kept searching the tavern for clues. Eventually, they uncovered a stash of love letters and a scrapbook containing photos of dozens of women. One of them was Stella, the waitress who disappeared after she complained to Joe about Minnie. Unfortunately, this discovery didn't generate new leads. Since so many women passed through town, officers had no official records or way of tracking them down. To this day, it's still unclear how many people Joe Ball actually harmed and how many of them got out of town just in time. And then there was the biggest question, one that's made Joe into a terrifying urban legend.

Did he feed people to his alligators? The police did search. the gator pool, but they never found any human remains there, so the meat they found and that matted hair on the axe most likely belonged to an animal. Not only that, but it turns out alligators probably won't even fully consume human remains, so if Joe had ever tried, there likely would have been evidence left behind. That didn't stop the rumors, though. One story that gets passed around a lot is one from a few years before Joe died, when an old man supposedly saw him throwing a body into the gator pool. Apparently, Joe threatened to throw him in, too, if he said anything. The man skipped town and didn't come back until after Joe was dead.

Pulp crime magazines had a field day with a story, including claims that Joe had fed countless people to his monstrous, flesh-eating alligators. They gave him nicknames like The Butcher of Elmendorf and Alligator Man. When someone in a small town turns out to be capable of something this horrifying, people genuinely struggle to make sense of it. They ask questions like, how did nobody know? How did we all sit at that bar? How did we cheer at those alligator feedings? Those are uncomfortable questions to ask, and hindsight bias is a very real phenomenon. And one of the ways people have always dealt with uncomfortable questions is by reaching for a story that feels big enough to explain them. So here,

the alligators become perfect for that. Feeding victims to alligators is terrifying, and it's dramatic, and it makes Joe feel like the kind of evil that nobody could have reasonably spotted or stopped. So that makes it easier for a community to forgive itself for not noticing him. Pulp magazines understand that instinct and they run with it. Sensational stories sell because they tap into our need for narratives that match the size of our fear. Fear sells, and it always has. And it's something that magazines and newspapers and even media organizations sell to us to this day. Do you think it was easier for people to spread or believe these rumors once Joe was dead? And similar to our previous discussion, do wild rumors tend to spread more when people are experiencing widespread financial hardship?

On the first point, absolutely. Joe being dead removed the single biggest barrier to people talking freely, which was their fear. While Joe was alive repeating the wrong thing. to the wrong person carried real risk, and that risk was now gone. And on the second point, yes, and I think there's a really straightforward reason for it. When people are under sustained financial stress, they have more idle time, more anxiety, and a much stronger need for distraction and connection. So sharing dramatic stories serves all three of those needs at once. It fills time. It channels anxiety into something external, and it creates a sense of community around a shared narrative.

Whatever drove the wild theories about Joe, the claim that he fed people to his gaiters was just one of the many stories that couldn't be proven about him. And soon, the community started to move on from Joe Ball. The gaiters were freed from their backyard prison. All five of them lived out their days at the San Antonio Zoo. At the same time, Clifton Wheeler made his way to prison. He served two years in jail for acting as an accessory to murder. After his release, Clifton opened his own bar in Elmendorf. We don't know how long he ran the bar, but one day, Clifton vanished and was never heard from again.

His disappearance added to all the mystery and folklore that built up around Joe's story, and the story morphed into urban legend, something kids talk about to scare each other, making up new details along the way. To this day, these myths still cast a chill across South Texas, and the name Joe Ball has become synonymous with Monster. Thanks so much for listening. Come back next time for a deep dive into the mind of another murderer. Serial killers and murderous minds is a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios.

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This episode was brought to life by the serial killers and murderous minds team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pertsovsky, Sarah Kemp, Alyssa Fox, Sarah Batchelor, Kaylee Pine, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.