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 3 of 3)
Wheeler told how, after a night of heavy drinking, Ball had asked him to load up the car with blankets and beer; Joe had a saw, an ax, and a posthole digger with him, as well as his pistol. They went to his sister's barn, stopping along the way to drink, and then picked up the fetid 55-gallon iron barrel, which they took to the river. Ball forced Wheeler at gunpoint to dig a grave, and they opened the barrel. Out came Brown's body. Wheeler refused to help Ball dismember the corpse, so he tried to do it himself. But he got so enraged when one of her hands got in the way of sawing off her head that Wheeler reached over and held Brown's hand, and then helped further, holding her arms and legs while his boss sawed. They each got sick to their stomachs, so they drank some more beer and then buried the corpse, though they threw the head, as well as her clothes, on a campfire. As dawn broke, they sat around and drank beer and then drove back to the bar.
Wheeler also solved the mystery of Big Minnie. The previous June, Ball told Wheeler to pack the Model A Coupe and be sure to stow plenty of whiskey and beer. Then he took Minnie and Wheeler to Ingleside, near Corpus Christi. Ball found a secluded area and, after a little swimming and a lot of drinking, asked the doomed Minnie to take her clothes off. Wheeler made himself scarce, but when Ball called for more whiskey, Wheeler noticed that his boss had his pistol by his side. Ball pointed off in the distance, and when Minnie turned her head to look, he shot her in the temple. Wheeler was shocked, but Ball told him he had no choice—she was pregnant and he was seeing Buddy. The two buried her in the sand and drove back to Elmendorf.
Police officers questioned Wheeler about other women, and they found a packet of letters as well as a scrapbook with photos of dozens of women. This, said chief deputy sheriff J. W. Davis, "might lead to the discovery of one or a dozen more murders." The San Antonio papers wrote of the disappearance of more than a dozen barmaids, including "Stella," who had had a fight with Ball about Big Minnie. The sheriffs also had a theory that Ball was dealing narcotics and that it would have been a "simple matter" to put the dope in bottles and store it in the gators' lair. They drained the pool but found no drugs.
Three days after Ball's suicide, the police began digging in the sand four miles southeast of Ingleside. They took heavy machinery and hired local laborers, and people with nothing better to do—sometimes hundreds of them—came and watched. A local merchant set up a stand and began selling cold drinks. The crowds swelled. "Excitement and rumors ran high," reported the San Antonio Light: Other dunes looked suspiciously like burial mounds and mysterious shapes were seen walking around at night. Finally, on October 14, they found the remains of Big Minnie, well-preserved in the deep, cold sand.
Meanwhile, the police had located Buddy in San Diego, where she had fled from her husband and gone to be with her sister. Two weeks later Klevenhagen and Gray brought her to San Antonio. On the way they stopped in Phoenix and found one of the women listed as "missing" from the tavern. Buddy later said that Wheeler told her that on her last night on earth, Schatzie, who didn't know Buddy was in San Diego, had accused Ball of killing her, just as he had killed Big Minnie. Schatzie badgered Ball until he flew into a rage. "After a while," said Buddy, "Joe hit her with his pistol, and I reckon that killed her." He shot her too, just to make sure.
IN THE AFTERMATH, THE ALLIGATORS went to the San Antonio Zoo, and Wheeler received two years in jail as an accessory. He got out and opened his own bar in town but soon left and was never heard from again. And Joe Ball's legend bloomed. The pulp press had a lot to do with it. True Detective, the monthly bible of sordid true crime, found his story irresistible and wouldn't let it go, returning often to the sensational tale of the murderous ladies' man, dozens of hapless ladies, unborn children, mutilation, kitties and puppies, and of course, alligators starved for human flesh. Hungry gators sold magazines, just as Ball had used them to sell beer, but the facts in the stories sometimes came from the writer's imagination. Elton Cude, Jr., said, "My father called them once and asked, 'Where'd you get those stories?' According to one story, my dad was the roughest, toughest manhandling deputy sheriff in Bexar County history. Well, he wasn't like that, though he did throw some drunks out of a bar occasionally." Bucky told me about his aunt Madeline, Joe's sister, who sued True Detective several times for their imaginative versions of Uncle Joe. "I don't know if she ever collected," he said. "She didn't need the money."
Other pulp magazines picked up the distorted story and so did books like The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers and America's Most Vicious Criminals. Eventually the tale made its way to Web sites, where anyone can write history. So the hype kept building and the mistakes repeating: how Ball shot himself in the head, how his handyman was named Wilfred Sneed, how Sneed said that he had cut up twenty women, how chunks of human flesh were found in the pool. In retrospect, it's hard to tell whom to trust. For example, according to a 1938 article in something called the Sheriff's Association Magazine, that mysterious packet of letters found by the police contained one from Big Minnie telling Ball, "I am still willing to break up you and Buddy, if it is the last thing I do . . . Uncle Henry and I are going to take you to jail as soon as he gets here. I am going to testify as to what I know . . ." About what? Bodies? Gators?
There were plenty of other tales too, including the oft-told one of an old man who, in 1932, had stumbled onto Ball pitching a woman's body into the pool. According to local lore, Ball threatened the man into leaving town; he fled to California and returned only after Ball was dead. Others claimed to have seen Ball throwing pieces of human flesh into the pit. Ultimately, of course, it's impossible to prove he didn't. Even though most of the "missing" women were accounted for (usually in San Antonio), some never were. And even though no human remains were found in the alligator pond, that didn't mean Ball didn't clean them up. And even though Wheeler, the only eyewitness to Ball's crimes, never said anything about the alligators, that didn't mean he didn't know how to keep his mouth shut when he had to. With Ball, it was easy to believe the worst. It still is. Take one violent, sadistic drunk known for throwing stray pets to his alligators, add a one-armed missing wife, one hacked-up girlfriend and another buried in the sand, who knows how many stray women coming and going—you do the math. Six, ten, a dozen, two dozen barmaids hacked up. Gator food.
Buddy tried to set the record straight in a 1957 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." Referring to the scar on her face, she said, "He didn't even mean to cut me. He was throwing the bottle at another guy." There were just two murders, she said. Elton Cude, Jr., agrees, as did his father, who in a 1988 interview said, "I don't think those alligators ate a human body of any kind."
Bucky, of course, agrees too. Contrary to expectations, he has a sense of humor about the tale that has blackened his family name. Truthfully, he has no choice. When Bucky was training with the Green Berets in North Carolina in 1959, a friend's mother, who lived in New Jersey and knew his last name, sent her son a comic book that told the horrifying tale of Joe Ball and the alligators. Bucky, who at seventy wears a jet-black pompadour and looks like an old rockabilly, chuckled as he remembered their shock when he said, "That was my uncle." In April Bucky and his wife, who barrel race in their spare time, were in Giddings. "This friend of mine saw me and said, 'Hey, Ball, did you bring your alligator with you?'" In truth, alligators aren't that unusual in this part of South Texas, said Bucky, who remembers a stuffed one in the Floresville courthouse when he was a kid. "They get in the San Antonio River," he told me. "I saw four over in Braunig Lake recently. They like that still water." Bucky said his uncle probably got his from around Graytown, about three miles from Elmendorf, in the lowlands, where they go to lay eggs.
Bucky has his uncle's World War I portrait and a 48-star flag given to the family after his death. He keeps them in a glass case in his living room. The 24-year veteran goes to counseling at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston and thinks his uncle's experience in the war had something to do with his actions afterward. "My dad told me that after my uncle came back from the war, he was different. I guess what you see and do comes back to you. My counselor tells me your brain's like a tape, and this stuff is on your brain. It'll never go away."
There wasn't much Army counseling during the Depression, and Joe Ball probably wouldn't have taken it anyway. He didn't seem to be the type to talk about his feelings. Or maybe that's just the myth talking.
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