Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck 59: The Alligator Man aka The Butcher of Elmendorf

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Long before serial killers became podcast and true crime doc celebrities in the US, there was Joe Ball: a bootlegger, bar owner, womanizer, and suspected murderer who kept a pit full of hungry alligators behind his Texas tavern. In the late 1930s, as women connected to Ball began disappearing one after another, rumors spread that "The Alligator Man" wasn't just feeding stray animals to his reptiles—he might have been feeding them people... For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins, and today I'll be sharing the story of The Alligator Man, a.k.a. The butcher of Elmendorf. Did you ever see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Most horror buffs have seen director Toby Hooper's masterpiece, the story of an idyllic Saturday afternoon drive to the Texas Hill country that becomes a blood-soaked nightmare for five teenagers when they fall prey to a cannibalistic family. The film was marketed as being based on true events to attract a wider audience. and though many critics would draw connections between the film's villain, Leather Face, and the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, nearly all the aspects of that movie were 100% made up, as most horror movies are.

And it would seem at first glance like Toby Hooper's second movie, the less known 1976's Eaton Alive, was basically entirely fictional as well. The low budget, pretty fucking ridiculous and over-the-top grind-housey film centers on a man named Judd, a psychologist. a psychotic hotel proprietor in a southern bayou who feeds people to a large gnail crocodile that lives in a swamp beside the hotel pretty unrealistic right sounds like just the kind of plot for a good 70s or 80s campy slasher flick a psychotic killer in eerie setting idiot victims a vicious monster that helps the killer remain undetected to those in his community as he kills and kills and kills but eaten alive was not as fictional as most would believe it was based on a very true story, or at least a real story told and retold in maybe a pretty sensationalized way that person after person claimed to be true. The story of a Texas man who didn't just happen to have an alligator in his backyard, he had trapped several and put them in a concrete pool behind his bar, welcoming crowds to watch as the alligators devoured small animals.

A story that Austin, Texas native Toby Hooper, had certainly heard of growing up. And when the crowds weren't watching, real-life alligator men. Joe Ball may have actually been feeding his alligators a very different kind of food, a human kind of food. At the very least, he did have alligators, he did feed them, and he did kill people. The story of a man, many have purported as being one of America's first modern serial killers and his unique possible body disposal method that made him into a real-life horror movie right now. Words and ideas can change the world. hated her, but I wanted to love my mother.

I have a dream. I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. Elmendorf, Texas is not a bustling city. Far from it. Located in four and a half square miles of southeastern Bayer County, about 17 miles east of downtown San Antonio, Elmendorf has a population of only 1,862 as of the 2020 census.

And that's a lot more than it's had even as recently as the year two, when only 664 people live there. It's growing. It's been settled for a long, long time, but it's never been more than sparsely settled. Long before colonization, South Central Texas, including the Elmendorf area, was home to various indigenous peoples, including a number of Coahuiltecan-speaking groups who lived across much of South Texas. They were generally hunter-gatherer societies moving seasonally along the area's rivers as they gathered plants like mesquite beans and prickly pear cactus and hunted for game. Beginning in 1718, Spain established a chain of Catholic missions along the San Antonio River,

including Mission San Antonio de Valero. These missions were designed to convert indigenous populations, which would help solidify Spain's ambitious territorial claims. Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and Canary Island settlers formed the backbone of this colonial system, though much of the surrounding land, including the future Elmendorf area, remained sparsely populated ranchland throughout the 18th century. In 1821, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, and the region became part of the newly established Mexican states. During this period, Anglo-American settlers began arriving under impresario grants,

these large tracts of land allocated by the Mexican government in the early 19th century to settlement promoters, aka Empress, who agreed to recruit and settle a specific number of families in the sparsely populated Texas region. And these new populations brought rising tensions. Tensions it would eventually erupt into the Texas Republic, Revolution in 1835. Still, even as the war raged on, the Elmendorf area remained rural and largely quiet ranchland, a place where most people had to go to San Antonio to sell their cattle or find other kinds of work. Similarly, following the area's annexation by the U.S. in 1845, agriculture and cattle raising would expand, and then the region would be lucky enough to not be hit heavily by the

American Civil War where fighting was primarily concentrated further east. And so for decades, the area remained what it had always been. Open land on the edge of a growing city, shaped by slow, incremental change, a few more families in the area every half decade or so, a little more business, but not much else. Nobody had any reason to think that anything exciting or anything particularly gruesome would ever happen in this backwaterberg, but that would change. The first domino to topple in today's chain of events came in 1885 with the founding of Elmendorf itself, though established by a German Texan man named Henry Elmendorf, who would later become the mayor of San Antonio.

The town of Elmendorf would really be built by another dude. Frank Xavier Ball. Mr. Ball, recognizing that the land was perfect for cotton. Frank borrowed some money, built gin to process the crop. He predicted that the railroad would soon come through to transport the goods to other parts of the country, and it did. And he cashed in.

His vision would make him a fortune. Based on this economic backbone, other institutions sprung up to meet the needs of the town's residents, such as a school opening in 1902. By the late 20s, there were general stores, a hotel, a doctor's office, some butcher shops, you know, for the area of cattle, chickens and hogs, and a confectionery. Even making candy. And the more the area grew, the more cotton was exported and the more money Frank Ball made.

Not content to rest on the gains of a successful cotton experiment, he took a lot of his cotton money and began buying and selling farms. buying him up cheap, selling him for a profit. Then he opened a general store, which featured everything from caskets to shoes. That store also made him a lot of coin. Papa Frank, one industrious motherfucker, I respect to grind. With his newfound wealth, he built the first stone home in the area, and he and his wife Elizabeth had eight children,

many of whom would become pillars of the community. Frank Jr., for instance, worked for the school district, became a trustee in 1914. Another son, Raymond Ball, opened his own grocery store. and in 1926 married a local teacher Jane Terrell who would be appointed postmaster by none other than illustrious US President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself in 1940. Going to serve the community, Raymond Ballwood, for 27 years. And then there was Frank and Elizabeth's second child, Joe,

making a big name for himself by doing good deeds for the community, would not be in his destiny. Now, at some point he chose to become a real piece of shit instead. But early on, no one really saw that coming, probably not even Joe. Born on January 7, 1896, Joe was a quiet kid. Kept to himself, stayed out of trouble, a bit of a loner, but not bad. Instead of group activities, he preferred to spend his time outdoors, alone, fishing, and exploring. As he got older, these qualities naturally aligned with an activity.

Many young Texan men were expected to embrace hunting. Joe loved guns. Spent hours every week, practicing his shots, cleaning his equipment, A nephew of his would later remember how Joe could shoot a bird off of a telephone line with a pistol, not standing up to line this shot, but just fucking casually. Shooting the bird while sitting on the bumper of his Model A. Ford having a beer. With a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, old school Texas cool. His shooting proficiency came in handy in 1917 when Ball joined the Army to fight in what was then called the Great War, World War I.

In his official army photo, he looks pale and innocent and young as hell. as a lot of Americans did, who went on to fight for democracy. Historical research is not specific on what he got up to during his time and the service, but we do know that Ball saw combat action in Europe received an honorable discharge in 1919 and then returned home to Elmendorf. And there, a unique opportunity awaited him. Joe spent a little bit of time working for his dad, but with the passage of the 18th Amendment on January 16th, 1919,

plunging the country into prohibition after a year-long waiting period, Joe thought, fuck this working man grind. He recognized there was more money, a lot more, that he didn't have to work as hard for in a new kind of crime. He knew that gin, whiskey, and beer would be in a lot higher demand than they usually were, and that anyone willing to risk prison time to make and or sell it could make a hell of a lot of money,

especially since it wasn't like they'd be paying taxes on that undeclared income. And it would be a hell of a lot more fun than working at a dad's general store or managing any kind of agricultural operation for his father. You know, he could run in a lot looser, harder partying, more fun crowd. Throughout the 1920s, Joe would work as a bootleger, starting off by driving around the area,

selling whiskey to folks from a 50-gallon barrel. After a few years of that, his booming business needed more manpower. And in the mid-20s, Ball began hiring off and on young black man named Clifton Wheeler. To both help him around the house, help him with his business, Wheeler was a handyman by trade. but he would end up doing a lot of Ball's dirty work. And that meant Wheeler had a front row seat

to witness Ball's growing propensity for violence. Indeed, apparently one of Ball's favorite pastimes was shooting his pistol at Wheeler's feet to make him dance the jitterbug. Yeah, by the mid-20s, if not before, Joe Ball was that guy, a real cock sucker. But to many around town, Joe seemed like a kind, if maybe a little rough around the edges, figure.

And helping shape this perception was the fact that he was still a bull. Ball, Frank's boy, a veteran, a member of the town's most noteworth family, Elmendorf royalty. Also, one time he paid for a poor Mexican-American couple to have their baby delivered in a hospital, could a guy who did that be that bad? When Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, Ball used some of the money he'd made bootlegging over the years to buy a small parcel of land outside of town by what's now Highway 181, where he built a tavern and named it the sociable inn, a juke joint of sorts.

party spot where you can find some physical comfort for the night, maybe get your ass beat in a fist fight. Either way, you were coming home with a story. He set up the space with two bedrooms in the back, a bar in the front, play your piano up front, dispensed tunes for patrons, sit in some illegal card tables, and of course, there were plenty of cold drinks. The place had enough, with all that to keep people plenty entertained, but Joe wanted more. So he started to host in cock fights. And when he got tired of that, he started hosting rooster fights. and suddenly made a bunch of local boys who'd made good money for a few months,

swinging their limp and or hard cocks into each other in a metal cage behind the bar while crowd cheered them on out of a job. No, but he did stop hosting an actual cockfight, though. Instead of roosters, he helped the ante, went to a nearby swamp, known for harbor and alligators. Alligators were easy to find in the area. They're native to the San Antonio little area there,

making their homes even today along the San Antonio River. While rare in the urban core, they're frequently spotted in local lakes, like Calaveras Lake, Bronid Lake, occasioned to the Mission Reach paddling trail. Google says that they are generally shy and avoid humans,

and that is technically true. But they also look like dinosaurs slash monsters. And they're fucking scary. With all those big ass teeth, you know, mouth full of them. Body looks like it's built out of armor. Alligator forerunners and relatives have been around and terrifying for a very long time,

almost 200 million years for their most distant ancestors. The largest was dino-sucas, 40-foot alligatoroid that lurked in coastal habitats all over North America around 70 million years ago. 40-foot-long alligator-like beast is wild. That's a sci-fi original movie come to life. Damaged bones suggest that smaller dinosaurs were a regular part of this prehistoric crocodile's diet. Dinosaur bones, yeah, we want to see them. Dinosaur bones, yeah, where can we see them?

Sorry, hard not to play that after having the word bones and dinosaur show up in the same sense. Today's alligators emerged around seven, or excuse me, around seven, 37 million years ago. Either seven or 37. You know, you pick. It's whatever you want it to be. No, they emerged around 37 million years ago, average around 11.2 feet long for a male, 8.2 feet long for a female, which is not 40 feet, of course, but still enough to fuck your day up. You know, to leave you down a finger or a few fingers, maybe a whole hand, maybe even an entire arm. Their jaws are very strong, and they can bite four times harder than a lion's, hard enough to crack turtle shells.

The hardest jawbreaker you could ever find would be like a fucking M&M to these bad boys. And not even an M&M with a peanut inside. In the wild, they eat fish, snails, birds, frogs, hopes, dreams, any small mammal, mammal, dumb enough? Manimal, small mammals. I'm all over the place today. Small mammals, dumb enough to approach the water's edge when they're hungry and lurking near. For smaller prey, they'll simply swallow it whole. But if the prey is large, they can often shake it apart, which sounds horrific into smaller, manageable pieces.

Imagine doing that yourself at a meal. Shake apart that turkey lake. Shake apart some meatloaf. To help them get prey, these finely tuned survival machines can hold their breath underwater for up to 45 minutes, and they're happy to wait a while for the right meal. Some larger specimens can even go a year without food, apparently. I cannot imagine how fucking hangary I would be If I was somehow still alive

After not eating anything for an entire year I'm guessing I would be hangary enough For most, if not every person around me To just hope that I would just die Just get it all with so they didn't have to put up my shit anymore When they do get their hands on some tasty food They become natural garbage disposals Thanks to a special blood vessel

Second aorta They're able to shunt blood away from their lungs And toward their stomachs Stimulating the production Of the strong stomach acid to break down their meals, you know, a lot faster. Juvenile alligators are capable of eating over 20% of their body weight and a single sitting, which is equivalent to a 180-pound human

eating almost 40 pounds of steak at one meal. Whoever fucking is doing that is winning a lot of free meals, a lot of free t-shirts and trophies. They're pictured in a lot of restaurants. Their stomachs can also help them digest quickly. Alligator's stomachs, they have a pH of less than two in the range of other acidic liquids like lemon juice and vinegar, and most soft-bodied prey is totally digested in two to three days.

If you wound up in a gator's stomach, however, you'd stick around a bit longer. Bone and other hard parts can take anywhere from about 13 to 100 days to disappear completely. Joe Ball thought that these predators would be a perfect addition to his bar. And before I tell you what he did with those gaiters, time for today's first to two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space or on Patreon. Get the catalog ad free.

Get these episodes early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads, and now let's hear about how Joe Ball chose to you his bar gaiters. It's incredibly fucked up. Joe caught five gaiters, put him in a concrete pool behind the tavern, strung up a 10-foot wire fence around the pool, and then invited people to come and watch these sponsors chow down. Or, you know, even better for what his customers wanted,

to feed the alligators themselves. On Saturday nights, customers would head out back with whatever creature they had managed to find, a possum, a dog, a cat, Throw it over the fence These hungry gators. Dear God, just fucking bring your own dogs and cats to the bar to feed a gator night.

That's pretty dark. The fuck was wrong with those people. How it's sad to know that if your pet had went missing in this area and you hadn't seen it in a few hours, there's a pretty decent chance. It had gotten fed to Joe Ball's alligators. One document from the archives

at the San Antonio Public Library would describe the fate of some of these poor creatures. Quote, the squalling kitten flopped into the pool a big alligator lifted his jaws, closed like a vice, and the screaming cat was bitten in half. There's more to come, my pets, Big Joe Ball shouted,

as the drink-crazed crowd roared in appreciation. And he next tossed a puppy into the bloody pool. Jesus! So many people at any point in time in the world are just pieces of shit. I mean, if you think it would be fun to watch alligators eat puppies and kittens, I mean, you're for sure a piece of shit, right?

Like, what the fuck? Like has there been At any point in time Could you do that and not be a piece of shit? Like I don't care if it was fairly normalized You know that like there was at least some people No matter when this was like somewhat normalized They were like, no, what? Why are you doing that?

Alligators eating kittens and puppies Only part of the bar is dark appeal Ball also hired attractive young women So-called dance hall girls To be barmaids To wait tables, poor drinks, etc. And you got lucky with timing when it came to finding them,

given that it was in the middle of the Great Depression, and women who might have been housewives in previous decades were now regularly coming through Elmendorf in search of work. Some of them stayed for a couple months, maybe a couple of years, grateful for a steady paycheck in uncertain times, and then some of them moved on to the next town.

Or at least it seemed like they moved on to the next town. Maybe in reality, some of them moved on out of an alligator's asshole, you know, after being eaten at Joe Ball's bar. One mainstay at the bar was mini, Godheart, better known as Big Minnie. Joe had met Minnie back in 1934. When he opened the bar, he brought her on to run it with him,

despite the fact that most people who knew Big Minnie considered her to be really fucking annoying and aggressive. Joe's opinion of her was biased, though. He was sleeping with her. Sex, especially good sex. It does tend to lead one to work hard to overlook somebody else's less desirable qualities. And then at some point, Ball began to sleep with another employee,

Dolores Buddy Goodwin. everybody had nicknames back then who was 15 years of junior buddy fell in love with him continued to want to be with him even after one night in the spring of 1937 when he threw a bottle and hit her in the face

where it shattered giving her a scar that ran from her eye all the way down to her neck and that is some next level domestic abuse but did you really expect anything less from a guy who encouraged customers to feed puppies and kittens to alligators

also in the spring of 37 another girl Hazel Brown who was from McDade, known around the bar as Shotsie. Okay, fucking Big Minnie, Shotsie and Buddy. Shotsie also working on balls. She was also young, only 22, popular with the customers. She and Dolores became friends, her and buddy. Big Minnie, though, well, Big Minnie didn't like Dolores one bit.

Wasn't afraid to show it. Why Big Many didn't care for Shotsie seems to be lost to history. Perhaps she was also sleeping with Joe. He was said to be a real womanizer in an article about all this, in Texas Monthly, which is one of my favorite journalism sources in the U.S. A man who frequently had his way with the waitresses at the bar, also said to be a very unattractive motherfucker. Sounds like a pretty date-rapey combo, maybe.

When his conquest got pregnant, the rumor was that he would get rid of them via alligator. Start with Big Minnie. That was the initial rumor. Over the summer, 1937, Big Minnie disappeared. Ball told people that she was pregnant in a Corpus Christi Hospital, but Clifton Wheeler, his handyman, aka Henchman, heard the ball. told somebody else that she was having a mixed race child. What nobody put together at the time was that she had left all her clothes behind when she had vanished.

A suspicious way to go, obviously, especially combined with him telling different stories about what went down. After Big Minnie left got murdered in September of 37, Ball married Dolores slash Buddy, also told her quite a secret, fucked up wedding present sorts. Joe allegedly told her that the previous June he'd instructed his handyman, Clifton Wheeler, to pack Joe's model A coop with plenty of whiskey and beer. Then he drove Wheeler and Big Minnie, 140 miles southeast to Ingleside, near Corpus Christi, a place where Texans often went to enjoy the beach,

get a little fresh air, have some fun. But for this trip, Joe had something else in mind entirely. He found a secluded area, and after a little bit of swimming and a lot of drinking, he asked money to take her clothes off, do a little skinny dip with him. Wheeler decided, okay, this is probably a good time for me to head out, since it seemed like these two were about to hook up.

And Joe and Big Minnie probably weren't hankering to have him watch him fuck. But then Joe called for more whiskey, and now Wheeler noticed that his boss had his pistol by his side. A moment later, Joe pointed to a place off in the distance, and when Big Minnie turned her head to look, he shot her right in the temple. Just fucking of mice and mender. She died in silly. Wheel later reported that he was shocked. He started yelling at Joe, asked him why the hell he had done that. Joe told him that he had no choice.

Big Minnie was pregnant with a child he did not want. child and he was seeing Dolores again buddy whom he did want so he did have a choice he had a lot of choices actually and he made the darkest most selfish one like these guys always do Clifton Wheel later reported that he and Joe buried her in the sand and then drove back to Elmendorf that was what Joe told Dolores but she didn't believe him to her it seemed like another one of the tall tales that seemed to circulate constantly in these small communities my god this exact scenario has come up several times before for in true crime tales. When some serial killer, you know, otherwise, otherwise some kind of murderer, straight up tells his girlfriend or fiancee or wife, et cetera, that he has done, you know, X, something very, very terrible. And then later, after the truth publicly comes out about them actually being a killer,

this person that they have told reveals that, yeah, the killer did confess that to them, but they stayed with the killer because they didn't believe them. They thought that they were lying about having done this, you know, terribly nasty thing. And I always think, that doesn't make you sound better. That's still so fucking gross. That's still so ridiculous to have stayed with them

even if you did think truly that they were lying. Because what kind of person lies in that way? Why would you stay with somebody who thinks it's fucking cool to tell you a story that they shot some innocent woman in the head when they weren't looking because they didn't want to deal with her pregnancy? That's a fucking psychopath who thinks that story is good. The person claiming to do that,

trying to get you to believe that they did do that, is still a wildly fucked up individual that you should never stay with. No way I'm just brushing that off and tossing it in the... Ah, that's just a tall tail. Tossed it in that folder. Dolores repeated the story to Hazel,

her co-worker and a good friend, and Hazel did not write this off. She believed Joe. It seemed to her like exactly the kind of thing this dude would do. Then while this unsteady trio kept working together, Shotsie and Buddy and fucking alligator man,

on January of 1938, Dolores his left arm went missing. It got cut off. It didn't go missing. That'd be a funny way to put it, though. What happened to your left arm? I don't know. Just fucking went missing. Nobody knows what happened. It's just gone now. No, got cut off. And the rumor in Elmendorf was that Ball's alligator's had either torn it off or that Joe had cut it off himself and then fed it to the alligators. Nope. She actually lost it in a car wreck, which is also kind of funny phrasing. And that's the way it was written in sources. But it wasn't like, you know, she's driving around

and one second it was there and she dropped on the floor. And then she just couldn't find it. It rolled under the seat. It got tore off in a car wreck. Joe was not responsible for that bit of evil, but some of Joe's evil would be coming and coming soon for Dolores. In April of 1938, Dolores disappears now. And by the time anybody knew that she was gone, Joe was already openly seen Hazel. What? This is the same woman who believed Joe's story about Big Minnie, that he had in fact shot her fucking dead rather than let her have his baby. So Shotsie knew better, but she got mixed up with Joe Ball anyway. No, Hazel.

And shortly after she did, she ended up getting disappeared as well. Three of Joe's romantic interest, just boom, boom, boom, vanished without a trace, one after another over roughly a year's time. All of this, of course, is starting to look a little bit suspicious.

But Joe didn't seem to be overly concerned about anybody's suspicions. He pointed out whenever the subject came up that all three of these women were barmaids, girls who lived life a little closer to the edge than your typical housewife. He acted like they probably just run off to find a better life or at least try to find a better life somewhere.

You know, maybe they met some new guy swept him off their feet. Happens all the time. Seemed possible enough for most. Apparently, it's not dig any further into this, at least not right away. And maybe if he wasn't from the town's most influential family, they would have looked into things more quickly. But Joe was a ball, and no one was real eager to piss off the ball clan. There were some troubling signs that Joe knew a lot more than he let on, though, like the constant rotting meat smell,

drifting around the neighborhood near the bar. When a man who lived next to the bar complained about this order, Joe pulled a gun on him, said it was the alligator's food, and that this neighbor should mind his own goddamn business if he didn't want to end up in the alligator pit. And the neighbor did mind their own business after that. But a short time later, some others did start to get concerned as well.

In the summer of 1938, Minnie's family approached the police about her disappearance at summer before. Again, this was not the first time that actually went to the police for help, but it was the first time the police. police would do something about it. And since Joe was Minnie's last known lover and employer,

you know, they had a few questions for him. Joe simply told them that he had no idea what had happened, and they let him go. So they didn't ask many questions. Maybe they asked one question. Joe, do you know what happened to Minnie? He's like, I don't, actually. I don't know what the fuck went on.

They were like, thank you for your time. Once again, probably helped to be a ball in Elmendorf. A few months later, another family goes to the police about their missing daughter, 23-year-old Julia Turner, another barmaid, one we have not met yet. She had also worked at the sociable inn for Joe, the fourth woman we have met who either dated Joe worked for Joe

or both who has gone missing in the past 18 months. When deputies visited the tavern, they got the same story. Joe had no idea what happened to her. He said she'd had some personal problems. You know, wanted to move on. And one day, you know, you know, guess it looks like she did.

What do you do? Sometimes these girls show up begging for work. Other times, you know, they don't show up for a shift and they never see him again. break to the game. The deputies would later search the home that Julia shared with the roommate and discovered that like many, she had not packed up any of her belongings before skipping town. Just left her clothes behind, left her jewelry, some identification documents, just everything,

left in a way that very few people ever do voluntarily. So now they talk to Joe again. And this time, the third time now, he's been interviewed by law enforcement officers regarding the disappearances of women associated with him in some way. He conveniently remembered that she had said that she was having, problems with a roommate to the point that she didn't even want to go home to get her stuff now that he thinks about it uh she just wanted to bolt so being the nice guy that he is he had left her five hundred bucks to buy some new things what a fucking sweetheart that was a lot of money back then

very generous dude well the police uh they bought that bullshit they were like okay all right well thanks thanks for your time again or maybe more likely they accepted that even if he was almost certainly lying they didn't have enough evidence to make an arrest yet but a few weeks later somebody else would come forward and before we hear about this next bit of suspicion thrown against joe ball time for today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks thank you for listening to those sponsors i do appreciate it very much uh now as to turn to the story of joe ball find out what another man told the police about this son of a bitch on september 23rd 1938 an older mexican-american man unnamed in sources,

approached Bear County Deputy Sheriff John Gray, who was dove hunting and Elmendorf. Why does that sound like the most Texas thing to do ever? And told him about a foul smell in barrel, covered in flies, that Joe Ball had left behind Joe's sister's bar. It smelled he said like something dead was inside.

Next morning, Deputy John Clevenhagen. It's a great last name. Mr. Clevelandhagen drove out with Sheriff Gray to have a look. Maybe it's Cleveland Hogan. Cleveland Hogan. The two men wandered out behind the barn, excuse me, but the supposed stinky barrel nowhere to be found.

They drove to the bar around noon to have a sit down and chat with Joe about it, but once again, he denied no anything about it. So they left. However, this time when they got back to the station, Joe's sister was waiting there with new information for them. There had been a stinky barrel in her barn, she said, and she too was worried about what kind of rotting corpse might have been inside of it. That was enough for the officers to look further into Joe, right?

Even his own sister, suspicious. and the two men went back to the tavern, told Joe they were taking him to San Antonio for further question. And Joe did not protest. Not much. He asked if he could shut down his place first. And the officers were like, yeah, no problem. Then he grabbed a cold beer, took a few sips, walked over to the cash register. He opened it.

But then, instead of grabbing some cash, he pulled out a 45 revolver from under the counter. He waved it at Sheriff Gray and Deputy Cleveland Hogan. The latter yelling, don't. as he grabbed for his own pistol, but they didn't have to worry about him about getting shot. Joe Ball quickly turned the gun towards his own chest, pulled the trigger, fell dead on the barroom floor. Dramatic.

I always find it interesting when somebody shoots themselves in the chest instead of the head. But there are some who think that you're more likely to die with a shot towards your heart than a shot towards the head. Skulls pretty thick. Soon four other deputies would gather at the tavern. They'd check the five gaiters, one large, four small, in their pond, which was surrounded by rotting meat, also found an axe matted with blood and hair,

with the evidence recorded as hair, not fur. Uh-oh. The first theory was the obvious one, that Joe Ball had killed and mutilated his wife and other victims, and then fed them to the alligators. And here the legend of the alligator man begins. Now it's more than local rumor, right? It's working law enforcement theory.

The cops talked about other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a 16-year-old boy who had hung out of Joe's and had not been seen in months. Perhaps they wondered that Saturday night feeding frenzies full of cats and dogs had just been a cover

for the murders of humans that had taken place during the week. And then Clifton Wheeler, Joe Ball's henchman, who'd been picked up and taken by sheriffs at San Antonio for question about all this

spilled the beans. Hazel, he said, had fallen for someone else, one of the bar's customers, a guy with a home and a good job, a decent man, she wanted out,

but Ball would not hear of it. He was too jealous, too possessive, too selfish, Too much of a piece of shit. When she threatened to tell the police about Big Minnie and the still missing Dolores, if he just wouldn't let her leave him, Ball hit her with his gun and knocked her out. And then before she had the chance to come to, he shot her to death,

then stashed her body in that barrel, and then put it behind his sister's barn and left it to rot. A few months later, he called up Wheeler, asked him to load up the car with some blankets and some beer, as Wheeler packed the car, the handyman glimpsed an axe, a hand saw a post-hold digger and Joe's pistol. They then went to Joe's sister's barm, stopped along the way for a drink, picked up the feted 55-gallon iron barrel, and then took the barrel to the river. Joe allegedly now forced Wheeler at gunpoint to dig a grave, and afterwards they opened the barrel. Wheeler claimed he now refused to help Joe dismember the corpse. I guess he was willing to get shot now. But when Joe couldn't figure out how to saw off her head without her other body parts getting in the way, Wheeler reached over and held Hazel's hand, or excuse me, her head.

he would end up holding her arms and legs while his boss saw it as well He said that they each got sick to their stomachs So they drank some more beer Buried the corpse most of it They threw her head as well as her clothes Into a campfire Just nasty shit

When dawn broke they sat around Drink some more beer Probably had a super fucked up conversation About what they'd just done And then they drove back to the bar And after this tale Clifton Wheeler Within show investigators

Exactly where all this had went down He took the sheriff to a location About three miles from town on a bluff some 300 feet from the San Antonio River, and by the light of another campfire, Wheeler started to dig again. Before long, some blood bubbled up from the loose dirt, and soon the smell of decay was overpowering. Weir pulled up two arms, two legs, and finally a torso,

which constituted the majority of Hazel's remains. And then investigators moved on to locating Big Minis remains. Three days after Joe Ball's sudden suicide, following a different tip, the police began to dig in the sand four miles southeast of Ingleside, down by Corpus Christi. They took heavy machinery, hired local laborers,

and also a bunch of people with nothing better to do, hundreds and hundreds of them came just to sit around and watch. I mean, to be fair, almost no one had a TV at this point in time. And even if they did,

it's not like that there was, you know, shit to watch on it. Entertainment options, yeah, pretty Spartan. This dig was such a popular show of sorts. We've been obsessed with true crimes since long before a podcast, that a local merchant even set up a stand

and began to sell cold drinks. and the crowd swelled even further. Excitement and rumors ran high, reported the San Antonio Light. Finally, on October 14th, they found the remains of Big Mini, well preserved in the deep cold sand. But what about Dolores Buddy Goodwin?

Joe's wife, who had lost her arm. Seemed likely that they would find her body next. However, she'd actually made it out alive, which surprised everybody. Realizing correctly that her new husband was a complete fucking psychopath, Dolores had fled to San Diego to stay with her sister, and late April she had met with investigators there about Joe Ball. She told them that

Hazel Brown, who did not know Dolores was in San Diego, had accused Joe of murdering her, just like he had murdered Big Minnie. And now investigators were wondering, just how far had this gone? What other women might Joe have murdered? In his bar, the sociable inn, they would find packets of letters in a scrapbook with photos of dozens of women. One of them, they thought, might be a woman known as Stella. She had worked for Ball, again as a barmaid, rumored to have been sleeping. with him, had a fight with him about Big Minnie before she also disappeared. Despite the concerning evidence of other victims, though, the police could not find any credible leads to pursue. They searched the Gator Pit, found no evidence of human remains there, just

rumors of women being killed, women who had disappeared, and women who could have been buried anywhere in South Texas, or women who weren't buried at all, but had been fed to gators. Meanwhile, the alligators went to the San Antonio Zoo, and Clifton Wheeler received two years in jail as an accessory. When he got out, he opened his own, bar in town, but it didn't last long. And after he left, he was seemingly never heard from again by any locals, which doesn't necessarily indicate anything nefarious. It was a hell of a lot easier.

Disappeared back then before we had, you know, all this digital stuff out there about all of us leaving these digital footprints every where we go. Meanwhile, Joe Ball's legend bloomed thanks in no small part to a thriving industry of true crime magazines popular at the time. The kinds we've discussed in episodes about many other serial killers who were inspired and turned on by the Sorted Stories, these magazines printed heavily in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and even early 60s. In fact, true detective, considered one of the era's most popular true crime rags, found his story irresistible and would not let it go, returning often to the sensational tale of

the murderous ladies' man, dozens of hapless female victims, supposed unborn children, neighborhood pets, and, of course, alligators, star for human flesh. The more stories about Joe Ball they printed, the more sort of the details of his story became. And the legend grew and grew and grew. Indeed, the editor soon found out that hungry gators eating murder victims really sold the shit out of magazines,

just as Joe Ball had used those gators to sell a lot of beer. And also, they already knew before Joe came along that exceptionally shocking stories sold a lot better than the ones that sucked to what police considered to be the facts. I would have my life that director Toby Hooper read at least one of these magazine stories about Joe Ball. The townspeople of Elmendorf would soon learn that legend sold better than truth as well,

finding themselves as the center of one of the most shocking stories to come out of the 1930s, a time defined by hardship, poverty, and sacrifice. Local people quickly started to tell their own versions of what Joe Ball had really gotten up to and that devilish end of his. One man claimed that back in 1932 he had stumbled on the ball pitching a woman's body into the alligator pool, saw it with his own eyes. Others too said that they had seen Ball throwing pieces of and flesh into that pit, chopped up bodies. So was Joe Ball really an alligator feeding serial killer? Probably not.

Quite possibly, if not probably a serial killer, but likely one who made his victim disappear, you know, thanks to, you know, shallow graves rather than alligators. Again, no human remains ever found in the alligator pit. Now, Ball could have theoretically cleaned them up. We already know that alligators can digest a human body fully in about three months. We also know the forensic testing for human remains was, you know, terrible back in the 1930s compared to now. And there were all those women, you know,

he'd kept that scrapbook about, which is, you know, plenty suspicious. While several of the women who had worked at the tavern were later found living in other cities, they just packed up, moved on like he said they did, it is possible that many others who were not found, indeed, wound up in that alligator pit.

It's not like he was going to broadly advertise that, if that was the case. He clearly was not interested in getting caught and going to prison, considering how quickly he shot himself in the chest when law enforcement questioning looked like it was going to uncover at least one of the murders. And also, you know, would a man and a murderer who eagerly fed neighborhood pets to his

alligators, puppies, and kittens, no less, really draw the line of human bodies? No, probably not. But he did seem to go out of his way to bury the bodies, a victim's big mini and hazel. Why would he do that if he was, you know, already feeding people to alligators? Because he loved them, you know, or was it because he had only committed two murders and didn't actually feed any bodies to his reptiles? Wooden Wheeler, the handyman who spilled the beans, have simply told the cops if Ball had fed corpses to alligators. Or was he worried that the more bodies he had known about, the more trouble he was going to get in?

Or did Clitzen Wheeler actually not know about the other bodies for whatever reason? The ones who allegedly did get tossed in the pool. So many questions. Dolores tried to set the record straight in a 1957 interview. Joe never put no people in that alligator tank, she said. Joe wouldn't do a thing like that. He wasn't no horrible monster. Joe was a sweet, kind, good man, and he never hurt nobody unless he was driven to it.

Seriously, Dolores? Buddy. The sweet, kind, good man who shattered a bottle against your face, slicing you from eye to neck? The sweet, kind, good man, you fled to San Diego to go stay with your sister and hide from because you were fucking scared of him. Scared enough to leave all your shit behind when you left? Scared because you thought he had already killed? After she said that, the interviewer asked her about the scar on her face. and Dolores told him he didn't even mean to cut me

He was throwing the bottle at another guy Well I don't know I mean maybe he was But that still comes across like a sad rationalization Meanwhile Joe Ball faded into history Mostly the truth of his story morphed into legend A real life killer became more of a comic book villain A horror movie character

Judd from 1976 is Eaton Alive And speaking of eating alive This topic sent me to a real rabbit hole About that weird ass movie I need to take a D-2 real quick and just share a trailer with you. This is the trailer for it from, again, 1926, 70s,

Eaton Alive. If you were one of the millions of moviegoers who were electrified by the unbearable suspense and sheer terror of Jaws, get ready for eaten alive. It's such a movie than Jaws. It's a terrible comparison. Oh, no, Robert England.

Freddie Coopers getting eaten. Created by Toby Hooper, maker of the screen sensation that Texas chainsaw massacre. Marty Rushden presents a new horror classic, Eaton Alive. A lot of scantily clad women running around. Into this house of terror comes a handful of unsuspecting innocence. Hello? What happens to these people and Eaton Alive will give you the most chilling, terrifying 90 minutes you ever spent on a theater. No, no.

These movies are so fucking... ridiculous. I'm going to pause the trailer to say it's just like this inn that these people are going to that has the alligator pit or the crocodile pit I guess in the movie it is the most preposterously haunted looking in with the creepiest

looking fucking front desk clerk in history. Like no one in their right mind would ever go to this inn. You have to like walk through a fucking swamp these characters are walking through a swamp with covered and mist and these creepy tree. It's preposterously dark. It doesn't even look like a road leads up to

in and then you get there and it's fucking beyond dilapidated. Doesn't look like anybody has cleaned it in 40 fucking years. And then some Creighton emerges from behind the desk, you know, I mean, looks like a guy from a horror movie, from a bad horror movie. Anybody in their right mind would just leave right then. Just like, nope, I'd rather sleep in the fucking swamp. Also, we don't need to listen to the rest of it. Also, horror living legend Robert England, mentioned him, Freddie Krueger himself,

dude who was a classically trained actor, actually, who had studied at the Michigan branch of London's storied Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at Oakland University, a dude who auditioned to play Luke Skywalker, actually, in the first Star Wars film. One of his very first film roles was to play Creep in this movie, who desperately wanted a sex worker to give him anal sex in a very poorly written scene, the opening scene of Eat and Alive. I was actually going to play it, but it's not quite bad enough to be so bad.

It's funny. It's just uncomfortable in a way that made me think, I don't ever need to see this movie. He just starts shouting a lot about just get on your knees. Come on, get on, get on your knees. Get on your knee, give me what I want. I paid for this. But like it goes on way too fucking long. Refocusing out.

I wish I knew more about the truth of Joe Ball's story and how his family weathered the scandal and the aftermath of his death in this tiny-ass town. And they did say. successfully weather it in the long run. A few decades later when the town of Elmendorf was finally properly incorporated in 1963, its first mayor was Raymond Ball, Joe's brother. Clearly, the town's folk did not think that the entire family was fucked up. And Mrs. Michael Ball, presumably the wife of one of Joe's other brothers, would start a free lunch program for seniors at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. Another few decades later, 1973. By the early 2000s,

only a few of the seniors who gathered there still had faint memories. of Joe Ball, like Lawrence Ledecki, who was 14 years old when he snuck into the sociable inn to watch Joe feed those gaiters. Today, no one is still alive, whoever knew Joe Ball and spent time at his bar. His name is still somewhat prominent in town, though. In a large graveyard behind the church, Joe Ball's headstone is the first one visible, Joseph D. Ball, January 7th, 1896 to September 24th, 1938. Not a lot has happened since Joe Ball and Elmendorf to give the town any added notoriety. biggest news since Joe Paul's scandal of stories that the town developed reputation

as a speed trap in the 1970s. And in 1983, the mayor resigned, as did two successive police chiefs who were accused of submitting false documents to a state agency. Just four years later, 1987, the mayor and a council member walked out of a meeting because of a disagreement.

They resigned and later tried to come back and then the council wouldn't let them. In 2000, the mayor and four council members, including Richard Bucky Ball, Jr., yet another ball, a dick ball, no less, which is fantastic. This dick ball and four others were indicted for violating the Texas Open Meetings Act. The law passed to ensure transparency and accountability by making governmental meetings open to the public. Big news in Elmendorf, but not really news at all in most places.

The town only got water lines like working water for pipes in the mid-90s. And by the mid-2000s sewage lines were still, quote, in the works. A lot of septic tanks. Most of the commerce, restaurants, gas stations, anti-19. stores, etc., moved out along U.S. 181, that highway, which led the rest of the world to pass Elmendorf by. Also, as the decades have passed, our relationship to alligators has changed. Though they were once seen in the U.S. and most other places as commodities, valuable for their leather, meat, and entertainment, even for disposing bodies of bodies. We have now come around to recognizing the value of the Keystone Predator and Swamp ecosystems.

In 1972, Texas' neighbor, the alligator infested Louisiana would start collecting alligator eggs from privately owned marshes incubating them, raising hatchlings to increase the species numbers, as baby alligators often succumb to predation in the wild. State releases a certain percentage of the larger hatchlings back into the swamp, processes the rest for their hide and meat. By 2023, the estate would count some 2.2 million gators. In Texas, the American alligator would be protected as an endangered species in 1969. Successful conservation efforts would lead to the species being delisted as endangered in 1985. Today, states estimated there are about 400,000 to 500,000 American

alligators in Texas alone. And they're just not seen as as scary. But just because we mostly leave them alone, don't have the same somewhat irrational fear of them. That doesn't mean that some people have not tried to repeat Joe Ball's methods with them in some way. On November 6, 1998, single Miami, Florida mom, Shandelle Maycock called Harold Braddy to see if he could pick up her five-year-old daughter, Quatisha, from a caretaker. He agreed, in the five-year-old to Shandale's apartment,

staying to chat for a few minutes, which was normal, but today Shandelle was not having it. She was stressed out. She snapped at him to leave, and that infuriated Herald. He felt disrespected. Enraged, she shouted, you used me, and then he choked her until she passed out. When Shandale came to, she was still in her apartment, but then Herald would choke her again.

And when she woke up next, now she was in the back of a Harold's Lincoln town car rental. So was Little Quatisha. Shandell correctly figured out that nothing good would come to the situation. was getting ready to leap out of the moving car with Quatisha when Harel sped up around a tight corner. They then fell out of the car and he stopped.

Now he put them back in the trunk and drove for another 30 to 45 minutes, then went back, choked Shandale yet again before leaving her on the side of U.S. Route 27. But he still had five-year-old Quatisha with him. Harel Bratty dumped Quatisha off along Interstate 75 in the Florida Everglades area known as Alligator Alley. He told detectives that she was still allowed. when he saw her last, but that he, quote, knew she would probably die.

And he admitted that he figured she would die thanks to being eaten by alligators. And then that did happen. Quatisha's body was found November 8th floating in a Broward County canal. Her left arm was entirely missing. There were bite marks on her head and stomach, which the medical examiner testified were indeed alligator bites. This would initially get herald the death penalty. But after decades back and forth, through the legal system, he would be sentenced to life

in prison. just recently. Why even bring this sad shit up? Because it suggests that disposed of a body using alligators may not be as simple or as foolproof as many of Joe's contemporaries believed. After all, there's no guarantee that an alligator will eat whatever you throw into its habitat

or that it will eat all of it. You know, cleanly, neatly. Could Joe have risked somebody coming into the bar seeing a human arm floating in the pool? A foot? Doubtful. Or did he actually keep his alligators hungry on purpose, manipulated one kind of predator so he could be another? again doubtful but it makes for a sinister compelling story doesn't it and like famed storyteller mark twain

didn't actually ever say never let the truth get in the way of a good story or a historical quote and that's it for this edition of time suck short sucks if you enjoyed this story check out the rest of the bad magic productions catalog beef your episodes of time suck mondays noon pacific time new episode to the now long running paranormal podcast scared to death tuesdays at midnight and two episodes of nightmare fuel, some fictional horror written by myself thrown into the mix each month. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her initial research. Thanks to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode. Thank you for listening, you fucking beautiful bastard. Please go to bad magic productions.com for all your bad magic needs. And how about you have yourself a great weekend?