Ball was born on January 6, 1896 in Elmendorf, Bexar County, Texas, and ran a saloon called the Sociable Inn. Behind it he kept a concrete pond with five alligators, which he fed in front of customers. Waitresses at the bar came and went frequently. He is remembered as the Butcher of Elmendorf.
Two deaths are established. Minnie Gotthardt, a waitress who was pregnant, disappeared in 1937; Hazel Brown, another waitress, disappeared in 1938. A handyman, Clifford Wheeler, later led officers to their remains and admitted helping to dispose of them, and served a sentence for it.
On September 24, 1938, when two deputies came to the bar to question him about the missing women, Ball opened the till, took out a revolver and shot himself in the heart.
Everything else about the case is accretion. The figure of fourteen or more, the account of women fed alive to the alligators, the barrel of body parts: these come from newspaper writing in the weeks afterwards and from decades of retelling, and there is no evidence for any of it. Wheeler's account was of burial, not of alligators. The alligators were real and were a bar attraction; they were confiscated and sent to a zoo.
The entry records two killings and says the rest is legend, because that is what the record supports. Ball is one of the clearest cases in this archive of a story growing in the telling, and the number in the roster is the size of the story rather than the size of the crime.