On September 23, 1938, a Bexar County deputy hunting doves near Elmendorf, Texas, was told about a foul-smelling barrel left at a barn. The next morning he and a colleague went to a tavern owned by a man named Joe Ball, behind which, in a concrete pool fenced with wire about ten feet high, Ball kept alligators. Before the day was out Ball was dead by his own hand, and a legend had begun that would outlive everyone in the room.
Ask people to name an unusual murder weapon and they will reach for something like it: a pit of alligators, a drum of acid, a crossbow. The court files tell a quieter story. In case after case the exotic detail turns out to be something done after a death, or a story told about it, while the instrument that killed was close to hand: a pistol, a cosh, a drugstore bottle of ant poison, a syringe on a hospital ward.
Ball was born in Elmendorf in 1896 into one of the town’s leading families. He served in Europe in the First World War, bootlegged whiskey during Prohibition and afterward ran a tavern with a player piano and a card room, staffed by young women hired from the dance halls, Texas Monthly reported in a 2002 investigation of the case. The alligators were the attraction. Elton Cude Sr., a Bexar County deputy who knew Ball, described Saturday-night parties at which customers threw animals into the pool to watch the reptiles feed.
On September 24, 1938, two deputies, John Gray and John Klevenhagen, told Ball they were taking him to San Antonio to answer questions about women who had gone missing. He asked to close the bar first, took a pistol from under the counter and shot himself. He was never charged with any crime.
His handyman, Clifton Wheeler, then gave deputies an account of two killings and led them to the body of Hazel Brown, a 22-year-old woman from McDade. By Wheeler’s account Ball had shot her, and had earlier shot Minnie Gotthardt, the woman who ran his bar, near Ingleside on the coast; she was found there on October 14, 1938. Wheeler served two years in jail as an accessory, according to Texas Monthly and KSAT.
The alligators did none of it. Deputies drained the pool in 1938 and found no human remains. Ball’s widow said in 1957 that he had never put anyone in the tank and that there had been only two murders, and Cude said in 1988 that he did not believe the alligators had eaten any human body. The pulp magazines and later books that put Ball’s victims at anywhere from five to twenty-five or more built on rumor; the San Antonio papers' talk of a dozen missing barmaids produced no third body, and the two women who were traced turned out to be alive. The alligators themselves went to the San Antonio Zoo.
John George Haigh is remembered for sulphuric acid, and he wanted it that way. Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1909 and raised by Plymouth Brethren parents near Wakefield, he was a grammar-school scholar and cathedral chorister who drifted into fraud and prison. While held at Lincoln Prison in 1941, according to a 2015 account in Lincolnshire Life, he took acid from a prison workshop and experimented with it on mice brought in by prisoners who worked on the farm. His theory, as the historian Gordon Lowe puts it, was that with no body there could be no crime.
The acid was never the weapon. Olive Durand-Deacon, a 69-year-old widow who lived at the same South Kensington hotel, wanted to manufacture artificial fingernails and talked to Haigh, who presented himself as an engineer and inventor, about the idea. On February 18, 1949, he drove her to his workshop in Crawley, Sussex, shot her and put her body into a drum of acid. He sold her jewelry and had her fur coat cleaned. Police searching the workshop found containers of acid, a revolver and an acid-stained apron and gloves, Lowe writes, and a dry cleaner’s receipt for her coat helped lead to his arrest, the Sussex Express later recalled.
Questioned in February 1949, Haigh admitted her killing and five others: William McSwan, a young businessman who had employed him, and William’s parents, Donald and Amy, in 1944 and 1945, and Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie in 1948. By his own account he had struck William McSwan with a cosh and shot the Hendersons. He also said he had drunk his victims' blood. None of the five deaths was ever charged.
His theory failed in the yard at Crawley, where the waste from the drums had been tipped. Enough survived there for the Home Office pathologist Keith Simpson and a dentist to identify Mrs. Durand-Deacon, according to Lowe and the Law Society Gazette’s review of his book. At Lewes Assizes in July 1949 the defense argued insanity under the M’Naghten Rules, but the case collapsed, in Lowe’s words, once the defense psychiatrist admitted that Haigh knew he was doing wrong. The jury convicted him of her murder, and he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on August 10, 1949, by Albert Pierrepoint.
Leonarda Cianciulli, a fortune teller and secondhand-clothes dealer from Montella in Irpinia, had settled in Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia, by 1930. Between December 1939 and November 1940 three women who trusted her disappeared: Faustina Setti, 73, a widow who hoped to remarry; Francesca Clementina Soavi, 55, a former kindergarten teacher; and Virginia Cacioppo, 59, once an opera soprano. Each had been promised a new life elsewhere, a husband in Pola or a post in another city, and each was persuaded to sell her belongings and leave word that she was going, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano and Geopop. Postcards in their names told friends all was well.
The Italian press called her "la saponificatrice di Correggio," the soap-maker of Correggio, after what she said she had done with the bodies. The killings themselves were by blows. The trail that caught her ran through a state bond Cacioppo had owned, cashed through a parish priest and a local cheesemaker, and it closed when police detained her eldest son and she confessed to clear him, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported.
She told the court she had sacrificed the women to keep her son alive through the war. Prosecutors said she killed for money. On July 20, 1946, the Corte d’Assise of Reggio Emilia convicted her of three murders, theft and desecration of corpses, found her partly of unsound mind and sentenced her to 30 years in prison and three in a criminal asylum. Her son, tried as an accomplice, was acquitted. She died of a stroke at the women’s judicial asylum at Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. The historian Barbara Bracco, who worked through the police, psychiatric and trial papers for a 2018 book, has argued that much of what is repeated about the case is inaccurate, as the review of her book in Doppiozero describes it.
In December 1999 a letter reached the Lahore police and the Urdu daily Jang in which a man named Javed Iqbal said he had killed 100 boys. By his own written confession he had strangled them and disposed of their bodies with acid. At the house he rented in Lahore, police found photographs of boys and bags of children’s clothing, and by late December families had recognized the clothing or photographs of 72 of the boys his records named, Time reported. The boys were mostly from poor families, according to the Associated Press.
Iqbal surrendered on December 30, 1999, not at a police station but at Jang’s Lahore office, Dawn reported. He later retracted his confession and told reporters he had killed no one. On March 16, 2000, an additional sessions judge in Lahore convicted him on 100 counts of murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to death 100 times and to 700 years' rigorous imprisonment. The judge also directed how the execution was to be carried out, in terms so extreme that the government said it would challenge them and the Council of Islamic Ideology said they violated Islam, CBS News reported.
The sentence was never carried out. On October 9, 2001, with his appeal still pending, Iqbal was found dead in his cell at Kot Lakhpat jail, together with a co-accused. The death was officially ruled a suicide, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, though Dawn and Gulf News reported that mortuary doctors found signs of strangulation. In April 2007 the Federal Shariat Court recorded his appeal as having lapsed with his death. The acid, which gives the case its reputation, was by his own account a means of disposal; the conviction rested on his confession, the evidence in the house and the families who recognized their sons' clothes.
One case on any such list does turn on the weapon. Stephen Griffiths was 40, a psychology graduate who had spent years as a part-time research student at the University of Bradford, working on a history of homicide in the city between 1847 and 1899, the Yorkshire Post reported. He lived in a flat in Bradford, in a building whose corridors were watched by security cameras.
Between June 2009 and May 2010 three women disappeared in Bradford. Susan Rushworth, 43, was a mother of three and a grandmother who was getting to know her grandchildren. Shelley Armitage was 31. Suzanne Blamires, 36, had gone to college and trained as a nurse; her mother described a bright, articulate young woman who always knew the door at home was open.
On May 24, 2010, the building’s caretaker went through the weekend’s recordings and called the police. Prosecutors later told Leeds Crown Court that the footage showed Suzanne Blamires and Griffiths, and that she was shot with a crossbow. Asked his name at Bradford Magistrates' Court four days later, Griffiths answered, "The crossbow cannibal." The press used the name from then on.
The crossbow appears in the evidence for one of the three deaths, not all of them. On December 21, 2010, Griffiths pleaded guilty to all three murders, and Mr Justice Openshaw gave him life with a whole life order on each count, telling him he had never apologized "in even the most perfunctory way." Susan Rushworth’s body has not been found. In November 2024 the Yorkshire Post reported that he was still serving the whole life order.
Most poisoners never had a weapon at all, only access to a kitchen. Nannie Doss, born Nancy Hazle at Blue Mountain, Calhoun County, Alabama, married five times. Her first husband divorced her; the next four died. By her own testimony, as the Encyclopedia of Alabama records it, she put rat poison in Frank Harrelson’s moonshine in 1945, and her later husbands Arlie Lanning and Richard L. Morton died after poison was put in their food or coffee. Her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, a Tulsa man, died after arsenic was put in his coffee, an earlier attempt having put him in the hospital for a month.
It was Doss’s physician who grew suspicious and persuaded her to allow an autopsy, telling her it might help save lives. It found arsenic. Arrested and questioned in Tulsa, she confessed to poisoning her husbands, and exhumations elsewhere found poison in other bodies. North Carolina, Kansas and Alabama filed murder charges, but she was tried only in Oklahoma, where, after psychiatrists declared her sane, she pleaded guilty to murder, Alabama Heritage reported. She was sentenced to life in 1955. The judge later said he had not wanted to set what the Encyclopedia of Alabama quotes as a "poor precedent" by executing a woman. Officials have speculated that her victims, including relatives, may have numbered as many as 12; none of those deaths beyond her husband’s was tried. She died of leukemia in prison custody on June 2, 1965, and was buried in McAlester.
Velma Barfield, a grandmother from Robeson County, North Carolina, with a long dependence on prescription drugs, worked as a live-in caregiver for elderly people around Lumberton. In early 1978 her fiance, Stewart Taylor, a St. Pauls farmer, discovered that checks had been forged on his account. She bought a bottle of Terro, an ant killer containing arsenic, at a drugstore and put it in his food and drink, including his tea and his beer. She later testified that she had meant only to make him ill, a claim the North Carolina Supreme Court noted did not square with what she had told officers. Taylor died in February 1978, and an autopsy found arsenic.
In statements to sheriff’s officers in March 1978 she said she had also poisoned her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, in 1974, and two elderly people in whose homes she had worked, Dolly Taylor Edwards and John Henry Lee, in 1977. The jury heard that evidence to show intent, but she was charged only with Taylor’s death. Convicted of first-degree murder in 1978, she lost her appeals in the state and federal courts, and Governor Jim Hunt refused clemency in September 1984 despite pleas that included support from Billy and Ruth Graham. Her death sentence had been pronounced as asphyxiation; she chose lethal injection instead. On November 2, 1984, at Central Prison in Raleigh, she became the first woman executed in the United States since 1962 and the first woman put to death by lethal injection, according to NCpedia and United Press International.
The hospital cases are the hardest to see, because the weapon is the medicine itself. Beverley Allitt was a 22-year-old enrolled nurse on Ward 4, the children’s ward of Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital in Lincolnshire, in the spring of 1991. Over roughly two months, beginning with the death of seven-week-old Liam Taylor in February, children on the ward collapsed one after another.
The break came from a laboratory. Tests at University Hospital in Cardiff showed an extremely high level of insulin in the blood of a five-month-old boy, VICE reported in 2019, and the case became a murder inquiry; one infant’s collapses were later attributed to overdoses of insulin and potassium, and lignocaine, a drug used on adults in cardiac arrest, was found in the blood of Claire Peck, one of the four children who died, after exhumation. Investigators also learned that Allitt had reported the key to the insulin cupboard missing.
She was arrested in November 1991. At Nottingham Crown Court in May 1993 she was convicted of four murders, three attempted murders and six counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and Mr Justice Latham gave her 13 life sentences, telling her she was cunning and manipulative and had shown no remorse, United Press International reported. An independent inquiry chaired by Sir Cecil Clothier reported in February 1994 that the hospital’s response to the first evidence of foul play had been slow, though it concluded, as the Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley told the Commons, that "a determined and secret criminal may defeat the best regulated organisation." In October 2023 Allitt was held at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, according to the Grantham Journal and LBC.
At Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, Indiana, deaths in a four-bed intensive care unit rose sharply in 1994. A registered nurse compared staff attendance charts with patient deaths and found that one licensed practical nurse, Orville Lynn Majors, had been present at far more of them than anyone else, the Indiana Supreme Court later recorded. Search warrants turned up bottles of potassium chloride at the house where he had lived and in a van he drove.
Potassium chloride is an ordinary hospital salt. In the wrong dose it stops the heart and leaves little to find. At his trial, moved to Brazil, Indiana, medical witnesses established that six patients had died unnatural deaths from potassium chloride poisoning and that Majors was the only common link, the court wrote. A jury convicted him of six murders on October 17, 1999, and deadlocked on a seventh count. Judge Ernest Yelton imposed six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years in all, the Associated Press reported through CBS News. Majors never admitted the killings. He died in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City on September 24, 2017, of natural causes, the Department of Correction said.
Charles Cullen worked as a registered nurse for 16 years in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and he moved from one to the next as employers let him resign or dismissed him without telling the next hospital why. His instrument was most often digoxin, a heart drug, and sometimes insulin, injected into patients or into their IV bags. Eleanor Stoecker, 60, was recovering and in no pain in February 2003 when he gave her a fatal overdose of digoxin, CBS News reported. Digoxin, he later explained in a 60 Minutes interview, can cause "complete heart block" in larger amounts.
Somerset Medical Center fired him on October 31, 2003, and investigators from the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office traced the overdoses to him through the hospital’s drug-cabinet records; he was arrested on December 12, 2003. Between 2004 and 2006 he pleaded guilty to 29 murders and six attempted murders in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in exchange for being spared the death penalty, and in March 2006 he was sentenced to consecutive life terms. He told detectives he had killed 30 to 40 people in all; the deaths beyond the 29 were never charged. In December 2025 News 12 New Jersey reported on a detective’s effort to identify more of his victims and described him as still serving life.
Set side by side, the cases sort themselves. In three of the most famous, the strange detail belongs to what happened after a death: Haigh’s acid, Iqbal’s acid by his own account, Cianciulli’s soap by hers. In one, the strange detail did not happen at all; no evidence ever showed that the alligators behind Joe Ball’s tavern ate anyone. Only Stephen Griffiths chose an unusual weapon and then claimed it as a name, and even in his case the crossbow belongs to one death of three.
The rest used what lay within reach. Rat poison in a kitchen cupboard, ant killer from a drugstore, insulin and potassium chloride and digoxin on a hospital trolley. What made these weapons dangerous was not their strangeness but the trust that put the killer beside the victim: a wife, a caregiver, a nurse on the night shift. The pit of alligators makes the better story. The cupboard is where the evidence was.
• January 7, 1896: Joe Ball born in Elmendorf, Texas.
• 1937 and 1938: Minnie Gotthardt and Hazel Brown disappear from Ball’s tavern.
• September 24, 1938: Ball shoots himself as deputies prepare to take him to San Antonio; the alligator pool is later drained and found to hold no human remains.
• October 14, 1938: Minnie Gotthardt’s remains are found near Ingleside.
• December 1939 to November 30, 1940: Faustina Setti, Francesca Soavi and Virginia Cacioppo disappear in Correggio.
• September 1944 to 1948: the five deaths John George Haigh later admitted, in London and Crawley.
• 1945: Frank Harrelson dies, the first of the husbands Nannie Doss later said she poisoned.
• July 20, 1946: Leonarda Cianciulli convicted at Reggio Emilia.
• February 18, 1949: Haigh kills Olive Durand-Deacon at Crawley.
• August 10, 1949: Haigh hanged at Wandsworth Prison.
• 1955: Nannie Doss pleads guilty in Tulsa and is sentenced to life.
• June 2, 1965: Doss dies in prison custody.
• October 15, 1970: Cianciulli dies at Pozzuoli.
• December 1974 to February 1978: the four poisoning deaths Velma Barfield confessed to, ending with Stewart Taylor’s.
• 1978: Barfield convicted of first-degree murder.
• November 2, 1984: Barfield executed at Central Prison, Raleigh.
• February to April 1991: Ward 4 attacks at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.
• 1993 to 1995: the intensive care deaths at Clinton, Indiana.
• May 1993: Beverley Allitt receives 13 life sentences at Nottingham.
• February 1994: the Clothier inquiry reports.
• December 29, 1997: Orville Lynn Majors arrested.
• October 17, 1999: Majors convicted of six murders.
• December 30, 1999: Javed Iqbal surrenders at the offices of Jang in Lahore.
• March 16, 2000: Iqbal convicted and sentenced to death.
• October 9, 2001: Iqbal found dead in Kot Lakhpat jail.
• December 12, 2003: Charles Cullen arrested in New Jersey.
• March 2006: Cullen sentenced to consecutive life terms.
• June 2009 to May 2010: the three Bradford murders.
• May 24, 2010: Stephen Griffiths arrested after a caretaker reviews the building’s camera footage.
• December 21, 2010: Griffiths pleads guilty and receives whole life orders.
• September 24, 2017: Majors dies in prison.