Joe Ball ran a tavern in Elmendorf, a small town in southeastern Bexar County, Texas, in the 1930s. Behind it he kept alligators in a concrete pool. On September 24, 1938, two Bexar County deputies told him they were taking him to San Antonio to answer questions about women who had gone missing. He pulled a pistol from under the bar and shot himself. He was never charged with any crime.
His handyman, Clifton Wheeler, then told deputies what he knew and led them to the remains of two women who had worked at the tavern: Minnie Gotthardt, who had run the bar, and Hazel Brown, a barmaid of 22. By Wheeler's account Ball had shot both of them. Wheeler was jailed for two years as an accessory.
Everything else in the story is less certain. The San Antonio papers wrote of more than a dozen missing barmaids. Pulp magazines, books and later websites added more, and the count of victims credited to Ball has run from five to twenty-five or more. The best known claim, that he fed women to his alligators, was never established. Deputies drained the pool and found no human remains, and one of the deputies who worked the case said decades later that he did not believe the alligators had eaten any human body. The writer Michael Hall, who went to Elmendorf for Texas Monthly in 2002, set out to separate the record from the legend.
Elmendorf lies some seventeen miles southeast of downtown San Antonio, according to the Handbook of Texas, which records its population as 300 until the 1950s; Texas Monthly puts it about fifteen miles from downtown. The city's own history says the town was established in 1885 by Henry Elmendorf, who was later mayor of San Antonio, and that it was not incorporated until 1963.
The Balls were one of the town's leading families. Joe was the second of eight children, according to Texas Monthly. The family was wealthy. It owned the first stone house in the area and ran a general store. One of Joe's brothers became a school trustee in 1914, and another ran a grocery and the post office. That brother, Raymond, became the first mayor when the town incorporated in 1963; the City of Elmendorf's history names its first elected mayor as Raymond X. Ball.
Joe Ball was born on January 7, 1896, the date on his headstone, and he grew up in Elmendorf, according to KSAT. In 1917 he joined the Army. He saw action in Europe in the First World War and was honorably discharged in 1919, a nephew told Texas Monthly. The nephew kept his uncle's wartime portrait and a 48-star flag at home and believed the war had changed him.
Ball came home to Prohibition. He became a bootlegger, Texas Monthly reports, selling whiskey out of a fifty-gallon barrel, and he gained a name around Elmendorf as a gambler and a ladies' man. A man whose father knew him described him as about six feet tall and 160 pounds.
After Prohibition ended he opened a tavern. KSAT dates the opening to the early 1930s and says the place became a popular weekend spot. Texas Monthly describes a bar with a player piano, a card room and two bedrooms in the back; Ball sometimes held cockfights there. He hired young women from the dance halls to wait tables and tend bar. Some of the women who worked for him during the Depression later disappeared, Texas Monthly says, though it does not name most of them and does not say what became of them.
The tavern's best known feature was outside. Ball caught alligators in a low-water area nearby and kept them in a concrete pool behind the building, fenced with wire about ten feet high. His nephew told Texas Monthly that alligators were common in the area and that he thought his uncle had taken his from near the community of Graytown. Elton Cude Sr., a Bexar County deputy sheriff who later wrote a book about the county, described Saturday-night parties at which customers threw animals into the pool, cats and dogs among them, to watch the alligators feed. A file kept at the San Antonio Public Library, quoted by Texas Monthly, preserves a 1938 description of a kitten and a puppy thrown to an alligator. Texas Monthly notes that the pulp magazines later embellished these scenes and that the individual incidents cannot be checked.
People who knew him remembered a hard man. A resident who was fourteen in 1938, and who sneaked into Ball's yard as a boy to see the alligators, told Texas Monthly that Ball was a good shot and mean. A woman of 88 told the magazine that people were afraid of him and that he treated Black people cruelly.
From the mid-1920s Ball employed a young Black handyman, Clifton Wheeler. Texas Monthly calls Wheeler the only eyewitness to the killings and says Ball gave him the dirty work and that Wheeler lived in fear of him. The resident who was a boy in 1938 said Ball would fire shots at Wheeler's feet to make him dance. KSAT, in a 2021 report, describes Wheeler as Ball's right-hand man.
Some later accounts give his first name as Clifford. Texas Monthly and KSAT both call him Clifton.
Minnie Gotthardt came from Seguin. She met Ball around 1934, according to Texas Monthly, and ran the bar for him. Customers called her "Big Minnie."
She disappeared in the summer of 1937. Ball told people that she was pregnant and in a hospital in Corpus Christi. A year later, Wheeler gave investigators another account. He said Ball had driven her to the coast near Ingleside and shot her there. Wheeler said Ball had told him Minnie was pregnant and that he was by then seeing another woman who worked at the tavern.
A 1938 article in a sheriffs' association magazine quoted a letter said to be from Minnie, threatening to break up Ball and the other woman and to testify against him. Texas Monthly reports the letter but questions what it meant, and it was never shown to be genuine.
In September 1937, a few months after Minnie vanished, Ball married that other woman, a barmaid about fifteen years younger than he was. According to Texas Monthly she later said that after the wedding he told her he had killed Minnie.
In January 1938 his wife lost her left arm after a car accident. The town decided that the alligators had taken it, a rumor Texas Monthly reports as a rumor. In April 1938 she left Elmendorf and went to San Diego, where her sister lived. Her disappearance was one of the absences that later drew deputies to the tavern. She turned out to be alive. After Ball's death, deputies traced her to San Diego, and she gave investigators a statement.
Hazel Brown, known as "Schatzie," came from McDade, Texas. She was 22, Texas Monthly reports, and popular with the tavern's customers; the magazine says she looked like a Hollywood starlet of the next decade. She went to work for Ball, and by Wheeler's account the two became involved. KSAT, drawing on Wheeler's statements, says they had a romantic relationship.
She disappeared in 1938, after his wife left in April. Wheeler later gave deputies his account of why. He said she had fallen for a customer and wanted to leave and start a new life, and that she had threatened to tell the police what had happened to Minnie. KSAT reports that Wheeler said Ball was jealous of the other man. By Wheeler's account Ball shot her. Ball's wife gave a slightly different version: she said Hazel had accused Ball of killing Minnie, and that Ball then shot her.
Wheeler said he had been made to help conceal her body. Rumors circulated afterward that her remains had been disposed of in other ways, including in the alligator pool; no investigator ever established any of them.
On September 23, 1938, Deputy John Gray of the Bexar County sheriff's office was hunting doves at Elmendorf when an elderly Mexican American man approached him, according to Texas Monthly. The man told him about a foul-smelling barrel left at a barn belonging to Ball's sister. Texas Monthly does not name the man, and his name has never been reported.
The next day Gray went to the tavern with a second deputy, John Klevenhagen, who was one of Ball's hunting companions and known as a good shot. Ball told them he knew nothing about any barrel. When they went to the barn the barrel was gone, but Ball's sister confirmed what the old man had said.
The deputies told Ball they would take him to San Antonio. He asked if he could have a beer and close the bar first. Then he took a pistol from under the counter and, as the deputies drew their own weapons, shot himself. He died in the tavern. KSAT's account agrees that he asked to lock up the tavern and then shot himself.
Klevenhagen went on to a long career in law enforcement. The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum records that Johnny Klevenhagen, born in 1912, served in Bexar County law enforcement before he was commissioned as a Texas Ranger in 1941. He was promoted to captain in September 1957 and died on November 26, 1958, at 46.
Other deputies, among them Elton Cude Sr., searched the tavern after Ball's death. They found five alligators in the pool, one large and four small. Investigators also suspected Ball of dealing in narcotics, Texas Monthly reports; they drained the pool and found no drugs, and no human remains.
Deputies took Clifton Wheeler to San Antonio, and there, Texas Monthly says, he told them what he knew. He said that Ball had killed both Minnie Gotthardt and Hazel Brown, and that Ball had forced him at gunpoint to help with Hazel's burial.
Wheeler then led the deputies to a place near Elmendorf, where they recovered remains that investigators identified as Hazel Brown's. Texas Monthly does not give the exact date of the find, only that it came shortly after Ball's death.
KSAT's 2021 report adds that days after Ball's death, authorities found more bodies buried nearby; it does not say how many, whose they were, or what became of the finding. Texas Monthly reports no further bodies near Elmendorf, and no third victim was ever named.
Wheeler's account of Minnie Gotthardt's death sent officers to the coast. Three days after Ball's suicide, police began searching near Ingleside, where Wheeler said Ball had shot her. Hundreds of people came to watch, Texas Monthly reports, and a local merchant sold them cold drinks.
On October 14, 1938, the diggers found her remains.
About two weeks after the find at Ingleside, Klevenhagen and Gray brought Ball's widow back to San Antonio from San Diego. On the way they stopped in Phoenix to look for another barmaid who had been reported missing; they found her alive. Texas Monthly does not name her.
In the tavern the deputies found a packet of letters and a scrapbook holding photographs of dozens of women. The sheriff's spokesman, Chief Deputy J. W. Davis, said it might lead to more murders. The San Antonio papers reported that more than a dozen barmaids who had worked for Ball were missing. One of them was a woman named only as Stella, who was said to have quarreled with Ball about Minnie.
None of these reports led to a third case. The women who were traced, Ball's wife in San Diego and the barmaid in Phoenix, were alive. The San Antonio Light, Texas Monthly notes, printed rumors of burial mounds and figures seen at night around Elmendorf, none of which was confirmed. No charge was ever brought against anyone for the death of any woman other than Minnie Gotthardt and Hazel Brown.
Clifton Wheeler was the only person punished in the case. He received two years in jail as an accessory, according to Texas Monthly; KSAT describes the sentence as two years as an accomplice in Hazel Brown's death. The court, the date and the exact charge have never been reported. After his release Wheeler opened a bar of his own in Elmendorf, Texas Monthly says. Later he left town and was never heard from again.
After the case the alligators were taken to the San Antonio Zoo, according to both Texas Monthly and KSAT.
The story that Ball fed women to them began in the weeks after his death and grew for decades. Neither of the two people closest to him supported it. Wheeler's account to deputies, as Texas Monthly reports it, described burials, not the alligator pool. Ball's widow, in an interview in 1957, said that Ball had never put anyone in the tank and that there had been only two murders. Elton Cude Sr., the deputy who searched the tavern, said in a 1988 interview that he did not think the alligators had eaten a human body of any kind.
KSAT's 2021 report says that Wheeler claimed Ball fed some of his victims to the alligators, and that no evidence supported the claim. Texas Monthly's fuller account of Wheeler's statements does not contain that claim. Either way, the record is the same: the pool was drained in 1938 and no human remains were found in it.
Local lore added more. One story, told in Elmendorf and repeated to Texas Monthly, held that an old man saw Ball put a woman's body in the pool in 1932, was threatened and fled to California, and came back only after Ball died. The man is not named, and the magazine treats the story as unproven. A rumor that Ball's wife lost her arm to the alligators was false; she lost it after a car accident.
Texas Monthly traces the larger story to True Detective and other pulp magazines, which covered the case and embellished it, and then to books such as The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers and America's Most Vicious Criminals, and later to websites. Some of these accounts added victims whose names appear in no record of the time. Cude Sr., his son told Texas Monthly, questioned where the magazines got their material. Ball's sister sued True Detective several times.
The nicknames came with the stories. Ball was called the "Bluebeard of Texas," the "Butcher of Elmendorf" and the "Alligator Man." In 1959 his nephew, then training with the Army's Special Forces, was sent a comic book about his uncle by the mother of a friend in New Jersey. The case has also been linked to Tobe Hooper's 1976 horror film Eaten Alive, about a Texas hotel owner who feeds his guests to an alligator; Texas Monthly cites the link as an example of how far the legend traveled.
Ball was buried in the St. Anthony cemetery in Elmendorf, beside his father; his headstone gives the dates January 7, 1896, and September 24, 1938. His family stayed in the town and in its public life. A brother became Elmendorf's first mayor when it incorporated in 1963. A nephew told Texas Monthly in 2002 that he now joked about the family name.
When Hall visited in 2002, Elmendorf had 664 residents and was about two-thirds Hispanic. Older residents still argued about the case. The man who had sneaked in to see the alligators as a boy doubted the high counts and said there were really two bodies. Others repeated the old story that Ball fed women to the alligators.
The number of victims. Two deaths, those of Minnie Gotthardt and Hazel Brown, rest on Clifton Wheeler's statements and on the remains he led officers to in 1938. No court ever ruled on them, because Ball died before he could be charged. Every higher figure, from five to twenty-five or more, comes from press speculation, pulp magazines, later books or local lore. Ball's widow said in 1957 that there were only two murders.
The alligators. That Ball kept alligators and that customers threw animals to them is reported by a deputy who knew him. That he fed people to them was never established: the pool was drained in 1938 and held no human remains.
The other missing women. The San Antonio papers wrote of more than a dozen missing barmaids. The two who were traced were alive; no other was ever shown to be dead.
Bodies near Elmendorf. KSAT's 2021 report says more bodies were found buried nearby after Ball's death. Texas Monthly does not report this, and no third victim was ever named.
Minnie's letter. A letter quoted in a 1938 sheriffs' association magazine as Minnie's threat to testify against Ball was never shown to be genuine.
Wheeler's first name. Some later accounts call him Clifford. Texas Monthly and KSAT use Clifton.
January 7, 1896: Joseph Ball born; he grows up in Elmendorf, Bexar County, Texas.
1917 to 1919: serves in the Army, with service in Europe; honorably discharged in 1919.
During Prohibition: bootlegs whiskey; from the mid-1920s employs Clifton Wheeler as a handyman.
Early 1930s (KSAT) or after Prohibition (Texas Monthly): opens a tavern in Elmendorf, with an alligator pool behind it.
About 1934: meets Minnie Gotthardt of Seguin, who comes to run his bar.
Summer 1937: Minnie Gotthardt disappears.
September 1937: Ball marries a barmaid from the tavern.
January 1938: his wife loses her left arm after a car accident.
April 1938: his wife leaves for San Diego.
1938, after April: Hazel Brown disappears.
September 23, 1938: an elderly man tells Deputy John Gray about a foul-smelling barrel at a barn belonging to Ball's sister.
September 24, 1938: Deputies Gray and John Klevenhagen tell Ball they will take him to San Antonio; he shoots himself in the tavern.
Shortly after Ball's death: Clifton Wheeler gives his account and leads deputies to Hazel Brown's remains near Elmendorf; the alligator pool is drained and found to hold no human remains.
Three days after Ball's death: digging begins near Ingleside.
October 14, 1938: Minnie Gotthardt's remains are found near Ingleside.
About two weeks after the Ingleside find: deputies bring Ball's widow back from San Diego and find a missing barmaid alive in Phoenix.
After 1938: Wheeler serves two years in jail as an accessory; the alligators go to the San Antonio Zoo.
1957: Ball's widow says there were only two murders and that no one was put in the alligator tank.
1963: Elmendorf incorporates; Raymond X. Ball is its first elected mayor.
1976: Tobe Hooper's film Eaten Alive is released.
1988: Elton Cude Sr. says he does not believe the alligators ate any human body.
July 2002: Texas Monthly publishes Michael Hall's account of the case.