Modern Parallels and Final Thoughts

The Starbucks ice Trchadta shaken espresso was back for the summer crafted with cinnamon, vanilla, and nutty notes of toasted rice Hands shaking with smooth blonde espresso and finished with oat milk for a creamy touch madeade for summer Only at Starbucks Have you ever considered surrounding your house with a moat to keep it safe Would you hire a professional wrestler as a bodyguard for your car? Okay, maybe you wouldn't go that far But if you'd go to great lengths to avoid dealing with your insurance company You might have insoranoia And if you have insuranoia, you should have NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders Start relieving your insureanoia today. at njM. com Brian Reynolds here for MintMobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for fifteen dollars a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintMobile dot com slash switch. Upfront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required. intntro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra. Feful terms at mintMobile dot com d Welcome to another edition of Time Sck Short sucks. I'm Dan Cummins, and today I'll be sharing the story of the Alligator man, AKA the Butcher of Elmendorf Did you ever see the text chains out masker Most hor buuffs 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 is marketed as being based on true events to attract a wider audience And though many critics would draw connections between the film's villain, Leatherface crimes of serial killer Ed Gin. neearly all the aspects of that movie were one hundred percent made up as most horror movies are And it would seem at first glance like Toby Hooper's second movie The less known nineteen seventy six' Eaten Alive was basically entirely fictional as well the low budget Pretty fucking ridiculous. And over the top grind housy film centers on a man named Jud A psychotic hotel proprietor in a southern bayou who feeds people to a large nile crocodile that lives in a swamp beside the hotel Pret unrealistic, right It sounds like just a kind of plot for a good seventies or eighties, 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 Eating alive was not as fictional as most would believe 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, Toy Hooper had certainly heard of growing up. And when the crowds weren't watching Real life Alligator man Joe Ball may have actually been feeding his alligators very different kind of food 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 pported 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. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I'm plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave Elmendorf, Texas is not a bustling city Far from it Located in four and a half square miles of southeastern Bear County. About sevententy miles east of downtown San Antonio Elmondorf has a population of only one thousand eight hundred and sixty two as of the twenty twenty census. And that's a lot more than it's had even as recently as the year two thousand when only six hundred and sixty four people live there Gowing 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 Kuail Tan speaking groups who lived across much of South Texas. generally hunter gatherer societies moving seasonally along the area's rivers as they gather plants like mesquite beans and prickly par cactus and hunt for game. Beginning in seventeen eighteen, Spain established a chain of Catholic missions along the San Antonio River including Mission San Antonio Davealero These missions were designed to convert indigenous populations, which would help solidify Spain's ambitious territorial claims Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and canary island settlers form the backbone of this colonial system, though much of the surrounding land, including the future Elmendorf area, remain sparsely populated ranchand throughout the eighteenth century In eighteen twenty one, 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 emmpresario grants, these large tracts of land allocated by the Mexican government in the early nineteenth century to settlement promoters AKA and Presarios 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 would eventually erupt into the Texas Revolution in eighteen thirty five Still, even as the war raged on The Elmedorf area remained rural and largely quiet ranchland place for 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 US in eighteen forty five, 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 so for decades. The area remained what it had always been Open land on the edge of a growing city by slow incremental change, 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 whatever happened in this backwater bird That would change. Domino topple in today's chain of events came in eighteen eighty five with the founding of Elmondorf itself Though established by German Texan man named Henry Elmendorf, who would later become the mayor of San Antono, the town of Elmendorf would really be built by another dude Frank Xavier Ball Mr. Ball recognizing the land was perfect for cotton borrowed some money, built a 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. hisis 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 nineteen oh two By the late twenties, there were general stores, a hotel, a doctor's office, some butcher shops You know, for the area cattle, chickens and hogs and a confectionery even even making candy And the more the area grew, the more cotton was exported and the more money Frank Ball made intent to rest on the gains of a successful cotton experiment. He took a lot of his cotton money and began buying and selling farms buine them up cheap selling for a profit Th then he opened a general store which featured everything from caskets to shoes That store also made him a lot of coins. Pup Frank, one industrious motherfucker I respect to grind open his new foundound wealth, he built the first stone home in the area. and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had eight children manyany of whom would become pillars of the community Frank Junror, for instance, worked for the school district, became a trustee in nineteen fourteen Another son Raymball open his own grocery store And in nineteen twenty six, married a local teacher, Jane Tarerrell, who'd be appointed postmaster by none other than illustrious U.S presresident Franklin D. Roosevelt himself in nineteen forty. going to serve the community Raymond Ballwood for twenty seven years And then there was Frank and Elizabeths 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 seventh, eighteen ninety six, Joe was a quiet kid. kept to himself, stay out of trouble. bit of a ler. 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 align with an activity that many young Texan men were expected to embrace Joe love Guns. spent hours every week practing 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 the shot, but just fucking casually shooting the bird while sitting on the bumper of his model A Ford having a beer withith a litid cigarette dangling from his lips, oldld school Texas school. His shooting proficency came in handy in nineteen seventeen when Baall joined the arrmy. to fight in what was then called the Great War, World War O 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 in the service, but we do know that Ball saw combat action in Europe receive an honorable discharge in nineteen nineteen and then returned home to Elmendor there A unique opportunity awaited him Joe spent a little bit of time working for his dad But with the passage of the eighteenth Amendment on january sixteenth, nineteen nineteen plunging the country into prohibition after a year long waiting period Joe thought this working man grind He recognized there was more money, a lot more you 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 to make a hell a lot of m especially since it wasn't like they'd be paying taxes on that undeclared income And it would be a a lot more fun than working 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 party and more fun crowd Throughout the nineteen twenties, Joe would work as a bootlegger, startarting off by driving around the area, selling whiskey to folks from a fifty gallon barrel After a few years of that, his booming business needed more manpower And in the mid twenties, Ball began hiring off and on, young black man named Clifton Wheeler. to both help him around the house. Hing with his business Wheeler was a handyman by trade. but he would end up doing a lot of balls dirty work And that meant Wheeler had a front row seat Witness Ball's growing propensity for violence Indeed, apparently one of Baall's favorite pastimes was shooting his pistol at Wheeler's feet to make him dance the jitterbucks. Yeah by the mid twenties, if not before. Joe Ball was that guy Ro cockscker. 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 ball Frank's boy, a veteran A member of the town's most noteworthy and moneyed family Elmendorf Ryalty Also one time you paid for a poor Mexican American couple to have their baby delivered in a hospital. couldould a guy who did that be that bad The prorohibition ended on december fifth, nineteen thirty three. 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 one hundred eighty one Wh he built a tavern and named it the sociable Inn Local 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 bar in the front Player piano up front dispens tunes for patrons sitting 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 a host in cockfights And when he got tired of that, he started hosting rooster fights and Sddenly they made a bunch of local boys who made good money for a few months, swinging their lp andor hard cocks into each other in a metal cage behind the bar while crowd cheered them on out of job No, but he did stop hosting actual cockfights so. instead of roosters He up the antte 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 Calaveris Lake, Bronig Lake Occasion to the Mission Reach Paddling trarail. Jugle says that they are generally shy and avoid humans And that is technically true But they also 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 foreruners and relatives have been around and terrifying for a very long time almost two hundred million years for their most distant ancestors The largest was Dinosuchus forty footig alligatoroid that lurked in coastal habitats all over North America around seventy million years ago A forty foot long alligator like beast is wild. That's a sci fi original movie come to life The damag bonone suggest that smaller dinosaurs were a regular part of this prehistoric crocodile's diet. Dosuron We want to see them Duron Wh can we them? Sorry, hard not to play that After having the word bones and dinosaur show in the same sense Today's alleigators emerged around seven excuse me, around seven thirty seven million years ago, either seven or thirty seven. You know, you pick Whatever whatever you want it to be No they emerged around thirty seven million years ago, averageed around eleven point two feet long for a male, eight point two feet long for a female Which is not forty feet, of course, but still enough fuck your day up You know, to leave you down a fing A few fingers, mayaybe a whole hand Maybe even an entire arm. Their jaws are very strong. and they can bite four times harder than a lions, hard enough to crack turtle shells Jw breaker you could ever find would be like a fucking M and M to these bad boys and not even an M andem with a peanut inside In the wild they eat fish, snails, birds, frogs, hopes, dreams. Any small manimal mammal dumb enough. man manimal, small animals all over the place today. small mmals, dumb enough to approach the water' edge theyre hungry and lurking near For smaller prey, they'll simply swallow it whole preay 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 aparts of meil loaf. T help them to get prey, these finely tuned survival machines can hold their breath underw for up to forty five minutes, and they're happy to wait a while for the right meal Some larger specimens can even go a year out food apparely I cannot imagine how fucking hangry I would be If I was somehow still alive after not eating anything for an entire year I'm guessing I would be hgry enough for most, if not every person around me So just hope that I would just die et it all with so they don't have to put it over 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 tore 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 twenty percent of their body weight in a single sitting which is equivalent to a one hundred and eighty pound human eaten almost forty pounds of steak onene meal Whoever fucking' doing that is winning a lot of free meals, a lot of free t shirts and trophies They're pictured a lot of restaurants. Their stomachs can also help them digest quickly Alligator stomach, they have a pH of lesson 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 stomach, however You'd sick around a bit longer. bone and other hard parts can take anywhere from about thirteen to one hundred days to disappear completely Joe Ball thoughts that these predators would be a perfect addition to his bar And before I tell you what he did with those gators, Time for today's first of two Mid showhow sponsor breaks If you don't want to hear these ads, ple sign up to a S spacer on Patreon. get the catalog ad free, get these episodes early and more. Gigo presents a thirty second podcast between your podcast Today's story is shared by one of our listeners. It's called Betrayed by Bill It was in that moment I caught who was staring back at me in betrayal, or more like what My insurance bill And with trembling hands I grabbed my phone and switched to Geio, saving about nine hundred dollars in the process, and never to be betrayed again Now that was bloody riveting. It feels good when the story ends with savings. It feels good to Geiko The all new tropical butterfly refresher is now at Starbucks Dive into juicy guava and Pasha frruit flavors with mango pineapple popping pearls bursting in every sieve Ice cold, instantly refreshing and impossible to put down Made for summer, only at Starbucks. Ryan Reynolds here from MintMobile with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile d. com slash switch. Upront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required, introate for three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra, SfF terms at mintmobile. com. Thanks for listening to those ads. and now let's hear about how Joe Ball chose to use his bargators It's incredibly fucked. Joe caught five gators, put them in a concrete pool behind the tavern, strung up a ten foot wire fence around the pool, and then invited people to come and watch these sponsors Chow down Air 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 to fence, these hungry gaters. Dear God fucking bring your own dogs and cats to the bar to feed a gator night re pretty dark Fuck' 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 Squalling kitten flopped into the pool Big alligator lifted his jaws clothed 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 craze 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 pieces of shit I mean, if you think it wouldd be fun to watch alligators eat puppies and kittens. You're for sure a piece of shit, right the fuck Likecause they're going at any point in time. C you 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 eatating kittens and puppies, only part of the bar's dark appeal Ball also hired attractive young women, so called dance hall girls to be barmaids wait tables, poor drinks, etcer. And you got lucky with timing when it came to finding them, given that it was the middle of the Great Depression. And women who might have been housewives in previous decades were now regularly coming through Elmendorfin ins search of work Some of them stay 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 seems but 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 main state at the bar was Minnie Gotark Bet known as Big Mini Jale had met Minnie back in nineteen thirty four, when he opened the bar, he brought her on to run it with him, despite the fact that most people who knew Big Minni considered her to be really fucking annoying when 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 sleep with another employee Dolores, Buddy Goodwin Everybody had nicknames back then. whoo was fifteen years a junior. Buddy fell in love with him, continued to want to be with him even after one night in the spring of nineteen thirty seven 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 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 thirty seven, another girl Hazel Brown. who is from McDade, known around the bar as Shoti. Okay, fucking big mini shot tea and buddy Shoti also work in balls She was also young, only twenty two, popular with the customers. She and Dolores became friends, her and buddy. Big Mini though, well, Big Mini didn't like Dolores one bit wasn' afraid to show it Why Big Money didn't care for shots he seems to be lost to history Perhaps she was also sleep with Joe said to be a real womanizer in an article about all this in Texas Monthly, which is one of my favorite journalism sources 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 pretty date rate combo, maybe When his conquest got pregnant, the rumor was that he would get rid of them via Alligator Start with bigig mini That was the initial rumor Over the summer nineteen thirty seven, big many disappared Ball told peopleople that she was pregnant in a corpus Christie Hospital, but Clifton Wheeler, his handyman, aK Henchman, Uh Hardola told somebody else that she was having a mixed race child And 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 Mini left got murdered in September of thirty seven, Ball married Dolores slash buddy also told her quite a secret W up wedding president sort Joe allegedly told her that the previous June he'd instructed his handyan Clifton Wheeler Jo's model A Coop with plenty of whisky and beer. Then he drove Wheeler and Big Mini, one hundred and forty miles southeast to Inngleside near Corpus Christie, 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 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 skiny dipping with him Weer 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 M probably weren't hankering to have him watch him fuck. Th 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 offff in the distance And with Big Mi turned her head to look He shot her right in the temple Fucking of mice and mnder She died in Silly We 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 Mini was pregnant with the child he did not want his 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 Wheedel later reported that he and Joe buried her in the sand and then drove back to Elmondorf That was what Joe Tld Dolores But she didn't believe it And 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 in true crime Tales When some serial killer, you know, otherwise otherwise some kind of murderer straight up tells his girlfriend or fiance or wife, et ccetera, 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 their 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 in a wildly fucked up individual that you should never stay with No way I'm just brushing that off and tossing it in the That's just tall tle Ts in that folder Doloreis repeated the story Hazel coworker 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 shhotsy and buddy and fucking alligator man.n January of nineteen thirty eight, Dolores his left arm went missing it got cut out. didn't go missy That'd be a funny way to put it th Uh What happened to your left arm? I don't know, it' just fucking wentre missing. Nobbody knows what happened is gone now. No got cut off And the rumor in Elmendorf was that Ball's all Alligators had either torn it off or that Joe had cut it off himself and then fed it to the alligators She actually lost it in a car wreck. Uh 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 was there and and she drops on the floor and then she just couldn't find it and rolled under the seat U you got tore off And the 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 nineteen thirty eight, Dolores disappears now And by the time anybody knew that she was gone, Joe was already openly seing Hazel. This is the same woman who believed Joe's story about big manyoney that he had in fact, shot her fucking' deadt rather than let her have his baby So shots he knew better, but she got mixed up with Joe Ball anyway No Hazel And shortly after she did, she ended up getting disappeared as Three of Joe's romantic interest, just boom, boom, boom, vanished without a trace one after another over roughly a year's time. All 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 Yeah act feel 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 guys swept them off their feet. happappens all the time. seem possible enough for most. Apparently to 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 eager to piss off the ball clamp There were some troubling signs that Joe knew a lot more than he let all know. like the constant rotting meat smell drifting around the neighborhood near the b 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 godamn business if he didn't want to end up in the alligator pit And the neighbor did mine their own business after that But a short time later, some others did start to get concerned as well. In the summer of nineteen thirty eight, Minie's family approached the police about her disappearance the summer before g. This was not the first time that actually went to the police for help But it was the first time the police would do something about it Joe was Minni'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 me? He's like, I don't, actually. I don't know what the fuck went on. They were like Thankk you for your time onncece again, probably held to a ball in Elmendorf A few months later, another family goes to the police about their missing daughter, twenty three year old Julia Turner, another barmaid, one we have not met yet She'd also worked at the Social Inn for Joe, The fourth woman we have met who either dated Joe, worked for Joe, or both Wh has gone missing in the past eighteen 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 U, you know, it wanted to move on And one daygg Y. Gess 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 Bak to the game The deputies would later search the home that Julia shared with a 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 roommates point that she didn't even want to go home to get her stuff now that he thinks about it. She just wanted to boat So being the nice guy that he is He had left her five hundred bucks to buy some new things. What a fucking sweet heart That was a lot of money back then. Ver generous, dud Well, the police they bought that bullshit They're like, okay. All right. Well thans 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 himrest yet But a few weeks later, Somebody else would come forward And before we hear about this next bit of suspicion rown against Je Ball Time for today's second of two Midhow sponsor breaks So you know that uneasy, anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company Well, there's actually a term for that. It's called inureinoia And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders likeike providing dedicated reps whose priority is you And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insuranoia with NJM inssurance by visiting njM dot com for a quote today. At Nature's Bounty, the belief is simple. You already have a brilliant body. suppupplements just help support your journey. For over fifty years, Nature's Bounty has offered vitamins and supplements to help you eat, sleep, thrive, or peat. Fr magnesium glycinate for heart and muscle support to hair growth capsules for fuller, thicker hair And probiotics with twenty billion live cultures for digestion. Nature's Bounty. It's in your nature to thrive. Learn more at naturesbounty dot com dot These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease Ryan Reynolds here from MintMobile, with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile d. com slash switch. Upront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required, introate for three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra, SaF terms at mintmobile. com. Thank you for listening to those sponsors. I do appreciate it very much Now it's turn to the story of Joe Ball Find out what another man told the police about this sun of a bitch. On september twenty third, nineteen thirty eight, an older Mexican American man unnamed sources Approach Bear County Deputy Sheriff John Gray Dove Hunt, and Elmendorf Why that sound like the most Texas thing to do ever Uh and told him about a foul smelling barrel covered in flies that Joe Ball had left behind Joe's sister's bar to smell he said like something dead was inside. Next morning, Deputy John Clevelandhagen Great less team Cleand Hagen Drove out with Sher of great, haveave a look. Allight M maybe it's Cleveland Hogan. Cleveland Hogan The two men wandered out behind the bar, barn, excuse me but the supposed stinky barrel nowhere to be found They drove to the bar around noon to have a sit down, chat with Joe about it. but once again, he denied anything about it left. However, this time when they got back to the station, Joe's sister was waiting there with new information for them. They had 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 protest. Not much He asked if he could shut down his place first. And the officer' like, yeah, no problem then he grabbed a cold be A few sips over to the cash register. He opened it But then instead of grabbing some cash He pulled out a forty five revolver from under the counter He waved it at Sheriff Greay and Dputy Cleveland Hagen The latter yelling, donon't as he grabb his own pistol 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 a shot towards your heart, then a shot towards the head skkulls pretty thick Soon, four their deputies would gather at the tavern, they checked the five gators, one large, four small in their pond, which was surrounded by rotting meat, alsoso found an axe matted with blood and hair withith the evidence recorded as hair, not fur The first theory was the obvious one that Joe Ball had killed and mutilated his wife and other victims, then fed them to the alligators And here the legend of the Alligator Man begins. Now it's more than the local rumor, right? It's working law enforcement theory cops talked about other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a sixteen year old boy who had hun 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 Cliptson Wheel, Joe Ball's henchm who've been picked up and taken by sheriffs at San Antonio for question about all this, spilled the beans Hazel, he said H 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 too jealous too possessive to selfish T 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 putut it behind his sister's barn and left it to rock 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, hand saaw a post hoold digger in Joe's pistol. They then went to Joe Sitter's barm, stopped long the way for a drink the fetted fifty five gallon iron barrel and then took the barrel to the river Joe allegedly now forced Wheeler at gunpoint to dig a grape And afterwards they open the barrel Weiter claimed he now refused to help Joe dismember the corpse willing to get shock 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 Ecuse me, her head He would end up holding 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 nasty shit. Dawn broke, they sat around, drank 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 went down He took the sheriffs to a location about three miles from town on a bluff some three hundred 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 pulled up two arms, and two legs and finally a torso constituted the majority of Hazel's remains And then investigators moved on to locating bigig minini's 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 Christie. They took heavy machinery, hired local laborers And also a bunch of people with nothing better to do, hundreds and hundreds of them change is 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 a, you know, shit to watch on it Entertertainment options, ye, pretty sparton This dig was such a popular show of sorts. We've been obsessed with true crime since long before podcast The 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 L Finally, on october fourteenth, they found the remains of Big Mini preserved in the deep cold sand But what about Dolores, Buddy Goodwin Jo's wife who had lost her arm. Ite seemed likely that they would find her body next. however, she'd actually made it out of life surprised every Realizing correctly that her new husband was a complete fucking psychopath, Dolores had fled to San Diego to stay with her sister. and in late April, she had met with investigators there about Joe Ball She told him 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 are wondering just how far had this gone What other women might Joe have murdder bar the social in they would find packets of letters and 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 Minoney 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 womomen 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 alleigators 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 Hell of a lot easier disappear back then before we had a All this digital stuff out there about all of us leaving these digital footprints everyh we go Meanwhile, Joe Ball's legend Boom Thanks to no small part to a thriving industry of true crime magazines popular at the time. we've discussed in episodes about many other serial killers who were inspired and turned on by the sordid stories. theseese magazines printed heavily in the nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, and even early sixties. 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 turning off into the sensational tale of the murderous ladadyies manan. Dozens of hapless female victims, supposed unborn children neeighborhood 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 stuck to what police consider to be the facts I h 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 trruth as well. finding themselves as the center of one of the most shocking stories to come out of the nineteen thirties. 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 in of his. One man claimed that back in nineteen thirty two, he had stumbled onto ball pitching a woman's body into the alligator pool Sw his own eyes All right. Others too said that they had seen Ball throwing pieces of human flesh into that pit chopped up bodies So was Joe Ball really an alligator feeding serial killer? Probably not posossibly if not probably a serial killer, but likely one who made his victims 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 clean them up We already know that alligators can digest a human body fully in about three months. We also know that frennsy testing for human remains was, you know terrible back in the nineteen thirties compared to now. And there were all those women. You know, he'd get that scrapbook about, which is, you know, plenty suspicious Wh 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 pitch It's not like he was going broadly advertise that if that was the case He clearly was noted getting caught and going into 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, noolass really draw the line at human bodies, No, probably not But He did seem to go out of his way to bury the bodies, a victim's big mini in Hazel Why would he do that? If he was, you know, already feeding people to alligators because you love them You know, Or was it because he had only committed two murders and didn't actually feed any bodies to his reptiles. Wood't Wheeler, the handyman who spilled the beans have simply told the cops if Ball had fed corpses to alligators. Or was he wored that the more bodies he had known about, the more trouble he was going to get in Or did Clintton Wheeler actually not know about the other bodies for whatever reason are the ones who allegedly did get tossed in the pool. So many questions Dolores tried to set the record straight in an a nineteen fifty seven 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 in 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 fitted into history mostly The Truth of his story morphed legend Real L Killer became more of a comic book villain, horror movie character Jud from nineteen seventy six is Eaten alive. And spepeaking of eating alive, this topic sent me to a real rabbitole about that weird ass mov I need to take a duta real quick and just share a trailer with you This is the trailer for it from again, nineteenv six seventies Eaten alive If you were one of the millions of moviegoers who were electrified by the unbearable suspense and sheer terror of jaws et ready for Eaten alive. S such be the jaws. It's a terrible comparison Created by Toby Hooper, maker of the screen sensation The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mighty Rushon presents a new horror classic, Eaten alive. A of scantly clad women running this house of terror comes a handful of unsuspecting innocents. Hello happens to these people in Eaten alive will give you the most chilling, terrifying ninety minutes you ever spent in a theater. Th 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 and it's It is the most preposterously haunted looking inn 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 in mist And these creepy trees it's preposterously dark. There's it doesn't even look like a road leads up to the inn. and then you you get there and it's fucking beyond dilapidated Does't look like anybody has cleaned it in forty fucking years And then some Creton emerges from behind the desk Uh, you know,, I mean, looks like a guy from a hr movie from a bad horror movie. Anybody in the right mind would just leave right then Nope, I'd rather sleep in the fucking swamp Also we don't even listen to the rest of it. Also, horror Living legend Robert England, mentioned him Freddie Kroog himself, dude who is a classically trained actor actor, actually, who had studied at the Michigan brranch of London's storied Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 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 a very poorly written scene, the opening scene of Eaten Alive. I was actually going to play it But it's not quite bad enough be so bad it's funny. It's just uncomfortable in a way that made me think I don't never need to see this movie. He just starts shouting a lot about just getting get on your knees. comeome on, get out get on your knees. Get on your knees Ging what I want. I paid for this. like it goes on way too fucking long. reffoolks you know I wish I knew more about the truth of Joe Ball's story And how his family weathered the scandal in the aftermath of his death in this tiny ass town And they did successfully weather it in the long run. A few decades later, when the town of Elmondorf was finally properly incorporated in nineteen sixty three, its first mayor was Raymond Ball, Joe's brother Clearly, the towns folk did not think that the entire family was fucked up And Mrs. Michel 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. anotherother few decades later, nineteen seventy three By the early two thousands, only a few of the seniors who gathered there still had faint memories of Joe Ball like Lawce Le Decki who was fourteen years old when he snuck into the soable Inn to watch Joe feed those gators Today, no one is still alive, whoever knew Joe Bal and spent time at his bar His name is still somewhat prominent in town, No. In a large graveyard, behind the church, Joe Ball's headstone is the first one visible Joseph D. Ball january seventh, eighteen ninety six to september twenty fourth, nineteen thirty eight Not a lot has happened since Joe Ball and Elmendorf to give the town any added notoriety Biggest news since Joe Paul's you know scandalous stories that the town developed a reputation as a speed trap the nineteen seventies And in nineteen ninety three, the mayor resigned, as did two successive police chiefs who were accused of submitting false documents to a state agency Just four years later, nineteen eighty seven, 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 would let them. In two thousand, the mayor and four council members, including Richard Bucky Ball j Junior, yet another Ball Ball, no less, which is fantastic The Dick Ba 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 nineties. by the mid two thousands, sewage lines were still quote in the works A lot of septic tanks. Most of the commerce, restaurants, gas stations, antique stores, et cetera moved out along US one hundred andy one, 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 for disposing bodies of bodies. We have now come around to recognizing the value of the keeystone Predator and swamp ecosystems In nineteen seventy two, Texas's neighbor, the Alligator infested, Louisiana, would start collecting alligator eggs from privately owned marshes, incubating them raaising hatch liens to increase the species numbers as baby alligators often succumb to predation in the wild.