Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Alligator Man of Elmendorf

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

In Prohibition-era Texas, Joe Ball ran a saloon in the small town of Elmendorf, where he kept a pit of live alligators out back as a grisly attraction for his customers. Charming and well-liked, Ball had a steady rotation of young women working as barmaids and passing through his life, until they began to disappear. When authorities finally started asking questions in 1938, what they uncovered turned Ball into one of Texas's most enduring crime legends, a bootlegger and suspected serial killer said to have fed his victims to his alligators. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the dark story behind the so-called Alligator Man, the women whose disappearances went unnoticed for far too long, and the grim question of how many victims Joe Ball truly claimed before his crimes came to light.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories 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 at once 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. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. On a Saturday night in the 1930s in South Texas, the best show for Miles was in a little town called Elmendorf.

People from all over drove to a small roadside tavern, paid their way around back, and crattered up against Jellman. a concrete pool ringed by a 10-foot fence. Inside that pool were live alligators. Joe Ball, the man who owned them, fed them every Saturday night while the audience clapped and cheered. But the crowd never saw what happened after the show, in the back rooms and out on the road. More than 80 years later, people are still trying to piece it together. But one thing is clear. Those alligators weren't the scariest thing about Joe Ball.

Not even close. This is the alligator man of Elmendorf. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy.

And this is murder, true crime stories. a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come in every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus.

You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com. or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story Show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that, I cannot get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions,

and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crimehouse Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe. A heads up before we start. This story includes descriptions of animal cruelty, murder, dismemberment, and suicide. Please listen with care. Today, I am talking about Joe Ball.

For a few years in the 1930s, he was one of the best-known men in the country. The man behind, The Alligator Show Everybody Came to See. To most people, he was a local character with a mean streak and a good head for business. But the women who worked for him had a way of disappearing. One of them would be there for months, and then one day she was gone. Joe always had an explanation ready, and people believed him. Or they decided it wasn't their business, and the years rolled on. It would take a chance conversation with an old man and a barrel that reeked behind a barn

before anyone finally started to add it all up. And even then, the legend grew so wild that no one can say how many people Joe ball killed or how many of the story just pinned on him. All that and more coming up. If you drove through Elmendorf, Texas in the 1930s, you probably wouldn't have thought much of it. It was about 15 miles southeast of San Antonio and consisted of a few buildings in the middle of cotton fields and wheat farms. There was a rail depot, a church, and a few stores, the kind of place you'd pass on the highway without slowing down. But in its heyday, Elmendorf was a real working town.

By the late 1920s, it had general stores, a hotel, a doctor's office, and a couple of cotton gins. One old-timer remembered cotton wagons lined up for two miles along the old highway at harvest time. It was all thanks to the Ball family. Frank X. Ball had built the first cotton gin in Elmendorf back, the town was brand new. He did well, bought and sold land, opened a general store that sold everything from shoes to caskets, and put up the first stone house in the area. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had eight children, and a lot of them grew up to be pillars of the community. One son became a school trustee, another opened a grocery store that also held the post office.

Their second child was named Joe, and he wasn't like to like the rest of them. How much of what we know now about him was pieced together by journalist Michael Hall for the Texas Monthly. According to Hall, Joe wasn't much for politics or business or church. What Joe was good at was shooting. People in town used to say he could hit a bird off a telephone wire with a pistol firing from the bumper of his Model A4. He could be charming when he wanted to be and frightening. He didn't. In other words, people liked him, but they also steered clear of him. In 1917, Joe joined the army and shipped off to fight in the First World War. He saw combat in Europe and came home to Elmendorf with an honorable discharge in 1919.

According to his family, the war changed him. The relative who knew him best said that after Joe came back, he was different. Whatever he'd seen over there, he carried it home with him. But eventually, Joe found his calling, and it wasn't exactly, well, respectable. This was the start of prohibition. Alcohol was illegal, but of course, people still wanted to drink. So Joe became a bootleger. He drove all over the San Antonio area selling whiskey and beer out of a 50-gallon barrel he kept in his car. Somewhere in the mid-1920s, Joe hired someone to help him, a young black man named Clifton Wheeler. Officially, Clifton was a handyman. In reality, he did Joe's manual labor and a lot of his

dirty work, and by most accounts, he was terrified of his boss. One neighbor remembered Joe shooting at Clifton's feet to make him dance. Before I keep going, we need to talk about the world Clifton Wheeler was living in. He was a black man working for a violent white man in 1930s, Texas. And that context shaped everything he did next. In those years, black Texans were barred from voting in the Democratic primary, the only election that counted in one-party state, and it stayed that way until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1944.

racial violence was a constant threat. By one count, there were at least 468 lynchings in Texas between 1885 and 1942. So for a man in Clifton's position, crossing Joe Ball was like signing his own death warrant. So Clifton Wheeler stayed, and he would stay at Joe Ball's side for years. Now when Prohibition ended in 1933, Joe needed a new way to make a living. He'd built a reputation and a customer base, so he did the obvious thing.

He opened a bar, a tavern at the edge of town that came to be known as the sociable inn. Up front, there was a bar, a player piano, and a room with tables where men drank and played cards. Sometimes Joe hosted cockfights. in the back were two small bedrooms, where Joe slept and where employees sometimes stayed. And then Joe added the thing that made him a legend.

At some point, he went out to the nearby marshes, where alligators sometimes turned up, caught a few and brought them home. I don't know how he managed to catch them, but knowing Joe Ball, it probably wasn't very sophisticated or very humane. Then he built a concrete pool behind the tavern and strung a wire fence 10 feet high around it. In the end, he had five gators back there, one big one, and four smaller ones. Maybe he loved alligators, or maybe he just understood that they'd bring in customers. Because every Saturday night, Joe would take his crowd out back for a show. He would toss live animals into the pool and let people watch the gators tear into them. Possums, raccoons, stray cats and dogs.

A deputy sheriff named Elton Kude, who later wrote about Joe, described those Saturday nights at the pool as, quote, a drunken orgy. The show's worked. They packed the place, people drank, they came back, and soon Joe Ball had become the main attraction. in a town that didn't have many. It also earned him the nickname that stuck to him for the rest of his life and long after.

The alligator man. To be fair, over the years, the story of those feedings grew into something much bigger and much bloodier. In the most famous version, Joe holds up a squealing puppy in front of the crowds, shouts, quote, there's more to come, my pets, and throws it in the world. into the water. Well, that line shows up over and over in the retellings, but it comes from an old pulp magazine version of the story, the kind of thing that got filed away in a library folder, not from anything anyone documented at the time. Either way, the tavern was bustling, and Joe needed people to help run it. So he hired waitresses, and what were called dance hall girls, women you could

pay to dance with. It was the depression, times were hard, and Elmendorf had that rail depot, so people drifted through town looking for work. A lot of them were young women on their own, far from family, with no one keeping track of where they went next. Some of them stayed a while, some of them just seemed to move on. And in a town used to people coming and going, nobody counted too carefully. One woman who stayed was Minnie Gotthart. She came from Sagan, a town about 30 miles east of San Antonio, and she started working for Joe around 1934. People called her Big Minnie. Well, she wasn't warm and she wasn't especially popular. Cued, the deputy described her as bossy and hard to get along with, but boy, could that run a bar. She wasn't afraid of the drunks and she kept the place from coming apart on a Saturday

night. Joe liked her for it and the two of them became a couple in an on and off kind of way. Then a younger woman caught Joe's eye. Her name was Dolores Goodwin, although most people just called her buddy. She was about 15 years younger than Joe and she fell for him hard. She stayed with him even after night in the spring of 1937 when the two of them fought and Joe threw a bottle at It hit her in the face and left a scar that ran from her eye all the way down to her neck. Around the same time, one more young woman started working at the sociable inn. Her name was Hazel Brown. She'd come from a little town called McDade, and the customers loved her.

She was 22 years old, striking, and full of confidence. Some people knew her by a nickname Shotsie, a German word that means something like sweetheart, Hazel and Buddy became friends. So, picture the sociable inn in 1937. Joe's the showman out back with his alligators. Big Minis running the bar. Buddies, the young girlfriend with a scar she keeps forgiving him for. And Hazel Brown is the new arrival everybody likes.

There was just one problem. Big Minnie couldn't stand Buddy and didn't keep her feelings a secret. That was an issue for Joe. He'd fallen for Buddy, but Big Minnie had been his partner for years, and she wasn't the kind of woman to just step aside. So Joe made a decision. And that summer in 1937, Big Minnie disappeared. Joe had an explanation ready. He told people she was pregnant that she'd gone to a hospital down in Corpus Christi and wasn't coming.

coming back. Everyone understood what he meant. The baby was his. Joe's on and off thing with Minnie had never quite ended even after he started dating buddy. In a town where waitresses drifted in and out all the time, a woman leaving to have a child somewhere else was easy enough to believe, except for one thing. When Minnie left, she left everything behind. All of her, her clothes, her belongings. Everything she owned was still sitting in her room at the back of the tavern right where she'd left it. People who pack up to start over somewhere new don't usually leave every single thing they own, but nobody pushed on it. Big Minnie was gone, the bar kept running, and Joe never seemed the least bit worried about it. But the truth about Big Minnie was coming,

and it was worse than anyone in Elmendorf wanted to believe. Family blood runs deep. It binds, but getting along is an easy when jealousy and hunger for power take over. Killer Kin from ID explores real cases about family members who turn against one another, unleashing betrayal and violence from the inside. Here investigators, experts, and family members try to understand what actually happened and how kinship can unravel into terror. Does evil run in the family?

Listen to killer kin wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer, 1937, big mini Goddard vanished from the sociable inn, and Joe Ball told everyone she'd moved on. Two months later in September, Joe married his young girlfriend, Buddy. Not long after the wedding, Joe told his new wife a secret, and it was a bombshell. he told her the truth about Big Minnie. He said he'd taken her out of town and killed her so she couldn't cause any more trouble for the two of them.

It put Buddy in an impossible position. She had just married this man. Now she knew he was a murderer and she knew she was part of the reason he'd done it. But what was she going to do? Walk into the sheriff's office in Elmendorf, where Joe knew everyone and turn in her own husband on nothing but his word, a husband who had already scarred her face,

and who kept a pool full of alligators behind the bar. So, like Clifton Wheeler, Buddy stayed, and she kept his secret. But she didn't keep it entirely to herself. At some point, Buddy told her friend Hazel Brown what Joe had said about Minnie. Well, she told her more than once. So now, two women knew Joe Ball was a killer, and neither of them said a word to anyone who could do anything about it. For a while, life of the tavern went back to normal, or what passed for normal.

Joe ran his Saturday shows, the gators drew their crowds, and then at the start of 1938, something happened that got the whole town whispering again. Buddy lost her left arm. Now, the truth was, in the context of this whole story, almost boring. She lost it in a car wreck, but that's not the version that spread around Elmendor. People said Joe's alligators had torn her arm off, or that Joe had cut it off himself and fed it to the gators. None of that was true, but by 1938, the people of Elmendorf were ready to believe that Joe Ball. would feed a piece of his own wife to his alligators. That was the reputation he had. Still,

nobody did a thing. And pretty soon, Joe lost interest in Buddy anyway. Her friend Hazel had caught his eye. In that spring, they started an affair. Not long after, Buddy vanished. According to Joe, she'd gone off to family in California. but given everything, you can understand why people wondered if that was a lie. Whatever had really happened to Buddy, Joe is now free to be with Hazel, and for a little while, he was. But Hazel Brown had bigger plans. She was young. She was popular, and she started to see a way out.

She'd met someone else, one of the customers at the bar, a man with a steady job, and a house of his own. own. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life in the back room of a tavern. She wanted a real life with him. So she told Joe she was leaving. Joe didn't take it well. Now we have a rough idea of how their argument went from what came out later. Hazel said she was leaving. Joe told her she wasn't going anywhere. And when he wouldn't back down, Hazel reached for the one weapon she had. She told Joe she knew what he'd done to Big Minnie, and if he tried to stop her from leaving, she'd go to the police. It was the worst thing she could have said. After that, Hazel went missing too. By the middle of 1938, the disappearances were piling up in a way that was getting hard to

ignore. Big Minnie, gone, buddy, gone. Now Hazel, gone. Now Hazel, gone. and those were just the ones people knew by name. There was talk of other barmaids who'd worked at Joe's and simply weren't around anymore. There was even a 16-year-old boy used to hang around the tavern who'd allegedly vanished. By now, the rumor had a shape to it. People said that when Joe Ball got angry with someone,

they ended up in the alligator pool. Well, he was the alligator man, after all. and maybe that reputation is exactly why so many people kept their mouths shut. If the stories were true, well, you did not want to be the person who crossed him. So folks did one of two things. They kept their distance, or they kept right on coming to the Saturday shows, laughing and drinking like nothing was wrong. Then in September of 1938, one person finally spoke.

up. It wasn't a detective or a grieving family. It was an old man who happened to notice something he couldn't unnotice. On September 23rd, 1938, a Bayer County deputy sheriff named John Gray was out dove hunting near Elmendorf when an older man walked up to him with something to report. The man said there was a barrel behind Joe Ball's sister's barn. It was big, smelled like death and was covered in flies. And the man had seen Joe Ball put it there. Now, John Gray knew the stories about Joe. Everybody did.

He might have written it off as one more piece of Elmendor gossip. But by the fall of 1938, enough women connected to Joe Ball had gone missing that a barrel behind a barn, reeking of something dead, was not a thing a deputy could try. just walk away from. So the next day, he and another deputy, John Cleven Hagan, drove out to take a look. And these weren't strangers closing in on Joe Ball. Remember, this was a small place. They knew Joe.

Cleven Hagan was one of his hunting buddies. But when they got to the barn, the barrel was gone. So they drove over to the tavern and asked Joe about it. Joe said he didn't know anything about any barrel. The deputies weren't satisfied. satisfied. So they went back to the barn one more time, and this time Joe's sister was there, and she told them the truth. Yes, Joe had left a barrel behind her barn. That was enough. The deputies drove back to the sociable inn to bring Joe in for questioning. When Gray and Clevenhagen

walked into the tavern, Joe was behind the bar. He was calm, friendly even. He asked if this was about his wife and insisted, buddy, was fine, just off visiting family. The deputies told him they were taking him to San Antonio to answer some questions. In response, Joe asked if he could finish his beer and close up his place first. And the deputies, standing in the bar of a man they'd known for years, said, sure. So, Joe drank his beer. He walked over to the cash register. he rang it open and reached inside.

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On September 24th, 1938, two Bear County deputies stood in Joe Ball's Tavern, waiting for him to close up so they could take him to San Antonio. Joe finished his beer, opened his cash register, and reached inside. What he pulled out was a 45 pistol. He waved it at the two deputies. They went for their own guns and one of them shouted, Don't! But Joe didn't point the gun at them. He turned it on himself and fired into his own chest. He fell dead on the floor of his bar. In an instant, the only man who knew the full truth was gone. More deputies came out to the tavern that day and they finally got a good look at the place

everyone had been whispering about. The alligator pool was ringed with rotting meat, and near it, they found an axe, its blade matted with blood and hair. Their minds went straight to the darkest version of the story. The rumors, the missing women, the gaiters, the bloody axe. Their first theory was the one the whole town had been telling for years. The Joe Ball had been killing. people and feeding them to his alligators. To find out, they needed the one man still alive who'd been

at Joe's side through all of it. So they brought in Clifton Wheeler. And Clifton told them everything, starting with the barrel. He told the deputies that after Hazel threatened to go to the police, Joe had killed her and stuffed her body into a 55-gallon barrel. For a while, he hid it behind his sister's barn, but a barrel like that doesn't stay hidden. So one night after the two men had been drinking heavily, Joe made Clifton help him move it. They drove it out about three miles from town to a bluff a few hundred feet above the San Antonio River. And Joe had brought a saw, an axe, and a post hole digger. He forced Clifton at gunpoint to help him dig.

What came next is hard to hear, so I'll keep it brief, but skip ahead about 30 seconds if you'd rather not hear it. Hazel's body wouldn't fit in the grave they dug, so Joe took it apart. Clifton didn't want any part of that, but Joe made him help. Then to make sure no one could ever identify her, they burned her head and her clothes in a campfire on that bluff. when Clifton led the deputies back to the spot they dug by the light of a fire and the smell told them they were close they recovered what was left of Hazel Brown

pieces of her body and from the ashes of that campfire a jawbone some teeth and fragments of her skull then Clifton solved the other mystery big mini He told the deputies that the summer before Joe had loaded up his Model A with whiskey and beer and driven Minnie down to the coast to a spot near Engelside on the bay near Corpus Christi. Clifton was with them. They swam, they drank, and at some point, Joe pointed off into the distance to get Minnie to turn her head.

When she did, he shot her. He told Clifton that he'd had to do it. that Minnie was pregnant and he wanted to be with Buddy. Then the two of them buried her right there in the sand and drove home. A few days after Joe's death, police went out to the dunes near Ingleside and started to dig. And this is one of the details about this case, I can't shake. Word got around about what they were doing and people came to watch. And not just a few people, crowds of them.

A local merchant set up a stand and sold. cold drinks to the onlookers, families stood at the edge of the holes while officers dug for a murdered woman's body. And the papers wrote about how exciting it was and all the rumors that were swirling. Other dunes started to look suspiciously like burial mounds, and people swore they saw strange shapes moving around out there at night. The digging went on for days, and on October 14, 1938, They found her. Big, mini Goddard, preserved in the cool, deep sand, right where Clifton said she'd be. Now, that left Buddy, Joe's one-armed wife, who disappeared that spring and who half the town assumed was dead. But she wasn't. Turned out, Buddy was maybe the only woman Joe didn't lie about.

Investigators tracked her down in San Diego, California. She'd fled there to get away from Joe and stay with her sister. And she actually wasn't the only one. On the drive back to San Antonio, the deputies stopped in Phoenix, Arizona, and turned up yet another woman who'd been listed as missing from the tavern. She was alive, too.

Deputies brought Buddy back to San Antonio, where she confirmed that Joe had confessed Minnie's murder to her, and she gave the fullest account anyone ever would of Hazels last night. According to Buddy, Hazel kept pushing Joe, throwing Minnie's murder in his face, until Joe flew into a rage. He beat her with his pistol, then shot her to be sure she was dead. So that was it. Buddy had kept a killer secret, but she had no hand in the murders. After hearing her account, the police let her go.

But Buddy's survival cut both ways. if she could vanish from Elmendorf and turn up alive across the country, then some of those other missing women might have done the same. No one could say for sure. Because as investigators kept searching Joe's Tavern, they found something that left them with a question no one has ever been able to answer. They found a packet of letters and a scrapbook full of photographs of dozens of different women. a chief deputy said the discovery might turn up one more murder or a dozen one of the women in that collection was known only as stella a waitress who'd had a fight with joe about big minnie and then wasn't seen again there was also a letter in there from big minnie herself written before she died in it she warned joe that she was going to break up him and buddy if it was the last thing she did she also said

she was going to take him to jail and testify about what she knew. We don't know for sure what she meant by that, but we can guess it means she wasn't the first person he killed. So how many people did Joe Ball actually murder? Depending on who was telling the story, the answer ranged from at least five to seven or eight to a dozen to 20 to 25. But the legend leaves something out. Most of the women who were reported missing were eventually accounted for,

alive, usually in San Antonio. And the trouble was the handful who weren't. So many women had passed through Elmendorf over the years that there was no real records to work from, no way to run them all down, no way to sort the ones who'd simply left from the ones who never got the chance. Because of that, nearly a century later,

we still don't know how many people Joe Ball killed, which brings us back to the Alligators and the single most famous claim in the whole story. Did Joe Ball feed people to his gaiters? Now, there's one piece of local lore that people always point to. The story goes that back in 1932, an old man stumbled onto Joe throwing a woman's body into the pool. Supposedly, Joe threatened him into leaving town.

The man ran away to California and only came back after Joe was dead. It's a great campfire story, but that is all that's ever been. A story with no body, no name, and no way to check it. And the physical evidence does point the other way. When the deputies searched the pool, they drained it looking for drugs and human remains. They found neither. Clifton Wheeler, the one I witnessed to Joe's crimes, described a shooting on a beach and a barrel by a river. He never said a single word about the alligators eating anyone.

There's also the plain biology of it. Alligators don't eat everything. They leave bones, teeth, the hard parts behind. The pool held none of that. Years later in 1957, Buddy gave an interview and put it plainly, quote, Joe never put no people in that alligator tank. She insisted there had been just two murders. Elton queued, the deputy who helped investigate, agreed.

So did his son. Two killings, no people fed to the gators. So, the most famous thing about the alligator man almost certainly never happened. The gators were real, the shows were real, but the flesh-eating monster. Well, it was just that, a story. In the end, the alligators went to the San Antonio Zoo, where they lived out their days as an attraction. As for Clifton Wheeler, he pleaded Gilles. as an accessory and served two years. But that sentence doesn't come close to describing the

position he'd been in for over a decade. Clifton was the one Joe would shoot at, aiming at his feet to make him dance, the one Joe forced at gunpoint to dig a grave and help take a body apart. Whatever Clifton did, he did it in the shadow of a violent white man who could have gotten him killed with nothing more than an accusation in a time in place where the law would not have protected him. After he got out, Clifton opened a bar of his own in town, but he didn't last long there. And then at some point, Clifton Wheeler left Elmendorf and was never heard from again. Of all the people who disappeared from this story, he's the one who stays with me, because his disappearance is the one nobody even tried to explain.

No one seemed to care. What happened next to Joe Ball's story is almost its own kind of crime. The pulp magazines got hold of it. True Detective, the big True Crime Monthly of the Day, went back to Joe again and again, and every time the tale got wilder, dozens of victims, unborn children, alligators starved for human flesh.

Joe's sister sued the magazine more than once over the versions they printed about her brother, but still, the mistakes hardened into fact. People said his handyman had a different name and had confessed to cutting up 20 victims. People said chunks of human flesh had been found floating in the pool. People said Joe had shot himself in the head when he actually shot himself in the chest. Along the way, Joe got filed in the true crime canon

right next to genuine monsters like Ed Gein, the Wisconsin killer who inspired Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the magazines, the story spread to books and eventually to the internet where anyone could add a new detail and call it history. By 1976, the legend had grown so much that it made it to the movies. A director named Toby Hooper, fresh off the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, made a film loosely based on Joe Ball called Eaton Alawful, lied. It's about a deranged hotel owner in the Texas backwoods who feeds his guests to a reptile

outback. Now, the real Joe Ball had become a monster in a horror movie, and every version from the pulps to the film told the same lie in the same direction. It made the alligator's the story. It made Joe Ball larger, scarier, and more legendary than he ever was. So after everything, this is what I keep coming back to. There were rumors about Joe Ball for years. Women kept disappearing from his tavern one after another. His own wife lost an arm. And the whole town was ready to believe he'd fed it to his gaiters.

People sensed exactly what kind of a man he was. Buddy and Hazel both knew he was a killer. And plenty of others in Elmendorf had a pretty good idea. and still for years almost no one said anything in the end it took an old man in a barrel that smelled like death and him finally walking up to a deputy and telling him now i get it people were terrified of joe but there's another part of the story i can't explain away as easily joe ball gave that town a show and everyone was so busy watching the water that they stopped seeing the way as easily joe ball gave that town a show and everyone was so busy watching the water that they stopped seeing the women walking in and out of the tavern doors. That was the trick while he was alive. When he was gone, the legend picked up right where he left off, turning two murdered women into 20 imaginary ones and burying the real people a second time under the myth. So I want to end with the victims. Minnie Goddard, who ran that

bar without fear was driven to a beach and shot for getting in the way hazel brown who was 22 wanted nothing more than an ordinary life somewhere else and died for saying so out loud then there are all those others whose names we don't have the faces in that scrapbook the women who came through elmendorf and were never seen again whose families may never have known there was even a crime to grieve. Every one of them was a real person. A woman who came to a small Texas town to find work, took a job at the tavern, and vanished.

And no one noticed she was gone. The most haunting thing about the alligator man isn't the monster in the story. It's how many people looked right at him and chose to watch the gators instead. Before we get out of here, I've got a new segment I'll bring you at the end of every murder mystery Friday episode. This is Carter Calls It, the part where I tell you which one I believe. Joe Ball has been blamed for anywhere from five murders to 25, but we know for certain that two women were killed, Big Minnie and Hazel Brown. And when it comes to the rest, the evidence gets a whole lot murkier. So, do I believe Joe Ball was responsible for more disappearances

than we can prove, or do I think the alligator man legend turned a very real killer into something much bigger? Here's what I think. I think that the myth outgrew the truth. And I also think there's a real danger with that, that we can get caught up

with the graphic nature of a crime. In this case, the alligator is sloshing in the pit, the possibility of bum. body parts being in there, the sensationalized version of the crime, the myth of the crime, begins to outweigh the truth of the crime. And when we do that, we lose something else. Because in the specificity of Big Minnie and Hazel Brown's murder is the possibility that they could have been prevented or the possibility that they could have been found

sooner and maybe kept Joe from killing somebody else. he did. We get caught up in this idea of this mythical monster when the truth is there was a real monster, Joe Ball. And people did know he was doing monstrous things, just not what the legend said. So when we can focus on the truth and look at the fact that all sorts of people knew that something was not right. But they didn't know who to tell, they didn't know how to say it, they didn't know what to do. and because of that, innocent women were put in danger. Well, to me, that's the bigger story. We don't need to be walking around imagining killer alligators.

What we do need to be doing is imagining that we could be a little more diligent than what we do watch out for, that maybe somewhere out there is something we could spot. and that maybe this time we could speak out, that we could stand up, that we could be the difference makers. So I think that's why it's important to not only look at the possible myth, but to understand the truth. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. A Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month.

To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Page Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Sarah Camp, Mara Delarosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter.

to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours, well, you'll love crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this,

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