The Alligator Man

Joe Ball ran a roadside tavern called the Sociable Inn in Elmendorf, Texas, southeast of San Antonio. Behind the building he kept a pond with five alligators, and customers came out to watch them being fed. In the late 1930s, people in town began to notice that some of the young women who worked for him didn’t stay long.

On September 24, 1938, after a man reported a foul-smelling barrel Ball had left behind his sister’s barn, two Bexar County deputies came to question him. Ball took a pistol from his cash register and shot himself in the bar. His handyman, Clifford Wheeler, then told investigators what he had seen. In June 1937, Ball had shot barmaid Minnie Gotthardt near Ingleside on the Gulf Coast and buried her in the sand. He later killed another barmaid, Hazel “Schatzie” Brown, after she threatened to go to the authorities, and Wheeler helped him dismember her body. Wheeler led officers to both graves.

Wheeler was sentenced as an accessory and served two years, and the alligators were given to the San Antonio Zoo. Pulp magazines spread the story that Ball fed women to his alligators, but no human remains were found in the pond. No evidence ever backed those claims, and Ball’s wife, Dolores “Buddy” Goodwin, later insisted that no one had been fed to them. Only the two killings have been proven.