On September 23, 1938, an old man approached Deputy Sheriff John Gray of Bexar County while he was hunting doves near Elmendorf, southeast of San Antonio, and told him about a barrel that smelled of rot. The next day two deputies went to the Sociable Inn, the roadhouse Joe Ball ran on the highway through town, to question him about women who had gone missing. Ball opened the cash register, took out a revolver and shot himself. He was forty-two.
His handyman, Clifford Wheeler, then told the deputies what he knew, and led them to two bodies. Minnie Gotthardt, known as Big Minnie, from Seguin, had run the bar with Ball and Wheeler for years and had no fear of the drunks. By Wheeler's account, in the summer of 1937 Ball drove her to the coast near Ingleside, outside Corpus Christi, waited until she was distracted after a night of drinking, shot her in the head and buried her in the sand, because she was pregnant and in the way of his relationship with another barmaid, Dolores Goodwin, known as Buddy. Wheeler said he had helped. Police began digging four miles southeast of Ingleside on September 27 with laborers and heavy machinery while hundreds of people watched, and a merchant sold cold drinks. On October 14 they found her.
The second was Hazel Brown, known as Schatzie, a young barmaid Ball had been seeing, who disappeared in 1938 after, by Wheeler's account, she fell for a regular customer and wanted to stop working for him. Wheeler first said the two men had put her body in a barrel and dropped it from a bridge into the San Antonio River, then led officers to her remains near the river. He was sentenced to two years as an accessory.
Ball had been born in Elmendorf in January 1896, most sources say on the seventh, the son of a prosperous local businessman. He served in the Army in the First World War, ran liquor during Prohibition, and afterward opened the Sociable Inn, whose attraction was a fenced concrete pond behind the bar holding five alligators, which he fed meat, and sometimes live animals, in front of customers. He had married Buddy Goodwin in September 1937 and, according to later accounts, told her he had killed Minnie. In January 1938 she lost her left arm in a car accident, and the town decided the alligators had torn it off. In April she vanished, which was part of what drew the deputies in; she turned out to be alive, visiting relatives in San Diego.
Everything else grew afterward. Investigators found a scrapbook of photographs of dozens of women, and the San Antonio papers wrote of more than a dozen missing barmaids, one of them a woman named Stella who had quarreled with Ball over Minnie. The story that he fed women to the alligators, alive or dead, dates from those weeks and from decades of retelling, and no evidence of it was ever found; Wheeler described burials, not alligators. In a 1957 interview Buddy Goodwin said no women had been thrown into the pit and that there had only ever been two murders. Estimates of his victims have run from five to more than twenty. The alligators were given to the San Antonio Zoo.