Free 100 Most Infamous Criminals by Jo Durden Smith

as he got his money.
    In the late 1920s, with Prohibition on the wane, Ball opened The Sociable Club and the stream of young women coming through his door and into his bed kept on flowing: this time waitresses and barkeepers. Sometimes he married them, sometimes he didn’t; but his reputation as a good ol’ boy kept spreading. He bought himself five alligators, which he kept in a cement pool behind the club; he took favoured customers out there to watch him toss them fresh meat, just to see them thrashing. He also had a pen by the pool which he filled with live stray dogs and cats. The very privileged were allowed to see the fun as he tossed them in too.
    Then in 1938, the relatives of one of his waitresses, twenty-two-year-old Hazel Brown, told local police that she’d disappeared. She’d previously been seen around town with Ball; they were obviously lovers. But no one had seen her leave Elmendorf and none of the money in a bank account she’d opened had been withdrawn. So on September 24th Texas Ranger Lee Miller went out to see Ball, and as a precaution took some other law-enforcement people with him.
    Ball seemed unfazed at first by their arrival and by the questions they asked. But then he went behind the bar, took a revolver out of the cash register and, as he stood in front of the cops, blew off the top of his own head. His terrified handyman was then interviewed at length, and led them to the remains of Hazel Brown in the rain barrel. There were still traces of blood in the alligator pool.
    The handyman later admitted that Ball had killed many young women, including two of his wives, one of whom he’d seen chopped up and fed to the alligators. Then came more witnesses: his third wife, found in California, admitted she too had witnessed a murder; the ranchowner from next door said he’d come across Ball cutting up another woman’s body and feeding it to the ’gators. Both had fled for their lives.
    Ball seems to have killed up to twenty young women, most of whom he’d made pregnant. They were disposed of simply because they became a nuisance with their constant nagging about marriage. The handyman, Clifford Wheeler – who also claimed to have been terrified of Ball – was sentenced to four years as an accessory to murder; and the alligators? They were sent to a zoo in San Antonio, where they entertained visitors for many years…
     

Ma Barker
    M a Barker and her boys were a crime wave on the hoof, a close-knit and mobile Murder Incorporated. With their chief partner-in-crime Alvin Karpis, they executed anyone who was suspected of betraying them or selling them short; they did mail-robberies, held up banks, organized kidnaps, and shot down anyone in uniform who happened to cross their path, including, on one occasion, employees of Northwest Airways. There’s no evidence that Ma herself had ever committed much in the way of crime before 1932 when the gang first hit the headlines. But with her sons along, she was a fast learner.
    She was born Arizona Donnie Clark in the Ozarks, the wild mountainous backwoods of Missouri, of Scots, Irish and Indian blood; and all her sons, one way and another, went to the bad. By the beginning of the ’30s, ‘Doc’ was in the Oklahoma State Pen for killing a nightwatchman; Hermann was doing twenty-five years in Leavenworth for mail-robbery; and Fred was just coming to the end of a stint digging coal in the State Penitentiary in Kansas, where he’d become friends with a killer called Alvin Karpis.
    It was Fred and Alvin Karpis, when they came out of jail together, who first set the ball rolling. A few days after a robbery, they killed a sheriff who was inspecting the De Soto they’d used for it. So they took it on the lam from Ma’s shack in Thayer, Missouri to a furnished house in St. Paul, taking Ma and her live-in lover, Arthur Dunlop, with them. Dunlop, though, wasn’t to last long. For after living quietly for a while, they narrowly escaped a police-raid on their