Two Barmaids, Five Alligators, and the Butcher of Elmendorf
"The squawling [sic] kitten flopped into the pool. A big alligator lifted its jaws, closed like a vice, and the screaming cat was bitten in half. 'There's more to come, my pets!' Big Joe Ball shouted, as the drunk-crazed crowd roared in appreciation. And he next tossed a puppy into the bloody pool!!"
—from a vertical file in the San Antonio Public Library
(Page 2 of 3)
FRANK X. BALL BUILT ELMENDORF, which had been established in 1885 by Henry Elmendorf, who would later become the mayor of San Antonio. This was cotton country, and Ball borrowed some money and built a gin to process the crop. The railroad put a depot in town, and Elmendorf cotton—as well as pottery, bricks, and tile made at a local factory—were exported to the rest of the world. A school opened in 1902. By the late twenties the town was thriving, with general stores, a hotel, a doctor's office, meat markets, a confectionery, and a couple of cotton gins. "My daddy said there'd be cotton wagons two miles up the old highway," remembered Bucky, whose father, Richard, was Joe's brother. "Elmendorf was a jumping town way back then."
And Frank Ball was rich. He began buying and selling farms, especially when they got cheap during the Depression. He opened a general store, from which he sold everything from caskets to shoes. He built the first stone home in the area, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had eight children, many of whom became pillars of the community. Frank Junior became a school trustee in 1914. Raymond opened a new grocery store, which also held the post office; his wife, Jane, would become the postmaster.
Their second child, Joe, was no politician. He was, however, good with guns. "My uncle could shoot a bird off a telephone line with a pistol from the bumper of his Model A Ford," Bucky said. Ball joined the Army in 1917 to fight in the Great War. In his official Army photo he looks pale and innocent, as a lot of Americans did who went off to fight for democracy. Ball saw action in Europe, according to Bucky, received his honorable discharge in 1919, and returned to Elmendorf.
Joe may not have followed in his father's footsteps, but he learned something from him about business. Just as people needed a gin to process their cotton, they needed, well, gin. And whiskey and beer. As Prohibition settled in during the twenties, Ball became a bootlegger. "He drove all around the area," said Liedecke, "selling whiskey to people out of a big fifty-gallon barrel." Ball was about six feet tall and 160 pounds, according to Elton Cude, Jr., whose father, a Bexar County deputy sheriff, helped investigate Ball and later wrote about him in a book titled The Wild and Free Dukedom of Bexar. "He wasn't near as good-looking as they describe in those detective magazines," said Cude, Jr. "He could be dangerous." In the mid-twenties Ball began hiring, off and on, a young black man named Clifton Wheeler to help around the house and the business. Wheeler was a handyman, but he did a lot of Ball's manual labor and dirty work. According to many, Wheeler lived in fear of Ball. Liedecke says that Ball would shoot at Wheeler's feet to make him dance the jitterbug. As expected, Ball's nephew has a different image of Joe based on the stories his father told him. "He was always kindhearted," Bucky told me, remembering a tale about his uncle paying for a poor Mexican American couple to go to the doctor to have their baby. "He did things like that a lot of times."
After Prohibition, Ball opened a tavern. In the back were two bedrooms and up front was a bar, a player piano, and a room with tables, where the men drank and played cards. Sometimes Ball hosted cockfights. At some point he went to one of the nearby low-water areas where alligators were occasionally seen, caught some, and put them in a concrete pool behind the tavern. He strung wire ten feet high around the pool. Perhaps he loved alligators, or perhaps he just knew how to bring in customers. "It was common knowledge that every Saturday night a drunken orgy occurred. . . ." wrote Cude in his book. "Any wild animal, possum, cat, dog, or any other animal without an owner helped make the show a little better. Get drunk, throw an animal in and watch the alligators." Ball hired women, dance-hall girls, to wait tables. It was the Depression, hard times, and women came through Elmendorf, looking for work. Some stayed, and some just seemed to disappear.
HAZEL BROWN STARES STRAIGHT into your eyes. She is all confidence and dangerous beauty and looks like one of those hard-bitten starlets in Hollywood in the forties, like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, whose gruesome 1947 murder was never solved. Maybe it's just the age of the photo or the era in which it was shot. It's easy to see how Joe Ball fell in love with her.
Before her, Ball had fallen for other waitresses. In 1934 or so he met a woman from Seguin named Minnie Gotthardt, also known as Big Minnie. Big Minnie was, according to Cude, "a bossy, displeasing, and obnoxious person." But Ball liked her—she ran the bar with him and Wheeler and had no fear of the drunks. At some point, though, Ball began seeing barmaid Dolores "Buddy" Goodwin, who was fifteen years his junior. She fell in love with him, even after one night in the spring of 1937 when he threw a bottle and hit her in the face, giving her a scar that ran from her eye to her neck. By then Brown, who was from McDade and known as Schatzie, was working at Ball's. She was also young, only 22, and popular with the customers. She and Buddy became friends. Big Minnie, though, didn't like Buddy one bit and wasn't afraid to show it.
That summer, Big Minnie disappeared. Ball told people that she was pregnant in a Corpus Christi hospital; Wheeler heard Ball tell someone she was going to have a "nigger" baby. She must have skipped town in a big hurry, though, because she left all of her clothes behind. In September Ball married Buddy, and he revealed to her his secret, that he had taken Minnie to the beach and killed her. She wouldn't make any more trouble for them. Buddy told Schatzie about Minnie's demise. She told her a couple of times. In January 1938 Buddy's left arm was cut off and stories flew around Elmendorf that Ball's crazed alligators had torn it off or that Ball had cut it off and fed it to them. (In fact Buddy had lost the arm in a car wreck.) In April Buddy disappeared. By then Joe was seeing Schatzie. And then she disappeared too.
On September 23, 1938, an old Mexican American man approached Bexar County deputy sheriff John Gray, who was dove hunting in Elmendorf, and told him about a foul-smelling barrel covered in flies that Joe Ball had left behind his sister's barn. It smelled, he said, like something dead was inside. Enough women in Ball's world had disappeared that the next day Gray and deputy John Klevenhagen drove out to talk to him. Klevenhagen, who would later become a Texas Ranger, was a hunting buddy of Ball's; he was as good a shot too. They went to the barn, but the stinky barrel was gone. They drove to the bar about noon and talked to Ball, who denied knowing anything about it. But when they all returned to the barn, his sister corroborated the old man's story. That was enough for the deputies, who told Ball they were taking him to San Antonio for questioning. Ball asked if he could first be allowed to have a beer and close down his place. The sheriffs agreed, and the trio returned to the bar. Ball got a beer, took a few sips, went to his register, opened it, and then pulled out a .45 from under the counter. He waved it at Gray and Klevenhagen, who yelled, "Don't!" and went for his own pistol just as Ball turned his and pointed it at his heart. He pulled the trigger and fell dead on the barroom floor.
FOUR OTHER DEPUTIES, including Cude, descended on the tavern. They checked the five gators (one large and four small) in their pond, which was surrounded by rotting meat. They found an ax matted with blood and hair. Their first theory was an obvious one, that the fearsome drunk had killed and mutilated his wife and other victims and fed them to the alligators. The cops talked about other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a sixteen-year-old boy who hung out at Joe's. Perhaps the Saturday night feeding frenzies had just been a cover for Sunday night murders. Maybe the old bootlegging barrels now held alligator food.
But then Wheeler, who had been taken by sheriffs to San Antonio, spilled the beans. Schatzie had fallen for someone else, he said, one of the bar's customers, a guy with a home and a good job. She wanted out, but Ball wouldn't hear of it. When she threatened to tell the police about Big Minnie, he killed her. And now the handyman knew exactly where Schatzie was. He took the sheriffs back to Elmendorf, about three miles from town, on a bluff some three hundred feet from the San Antonio River. By the light of a campfire, he began to dig. Blood bubbled up in the dirt, and the odor became unbearable. Wheeler pulled up two arms and two legs and finally a torso. The sight and smell were so bad, wrote Cude, "the sightseers ran in all directions and started heaving and up-chuking [sic]." Wheeler was asked where the head was, and he pointed to the remains of another campfire. After careful sifting, cops found a jawbone, some teeth, and finally some pieces of the skull that had once held the pretty face of HazelBrown.
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