Bethany Israel (30) went to her brother Jack Joseph Ball’s (23) house to have dinner together. But she never returned home. He killed and dismembered her because he believed she was “no longer innocent,” since she was pregnant. He left the crime scene and was arrested later by the police with a wound on his neck that could have been self-inflicted.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Dakota County Attorney’s Office reported the bloody scene after her family’s alarm. One of them went to Ball’s residence and saw the brother leaving the place without his sister. Looking inside the house, they found a “significant amount of blood” and called the police, according to the DCAO release.
When police officers arrived at the crime scene, they froze as they noticed dismembered body parts scattered around, alongside bloody knives, allegedly used by Ball to kill his sister. He was found later in Rosemount, a Minnesota suburb–after he left the stump of a limb at a neighbor’s front door.
The police reported that he when arrested, he explained that he committed the murder because he was angry with her: pregnant at the age of 17, she was “no longer innocent,” as he wrote in one of the journals reviewed by the police DCAO and shared with PEOPLE.
Ball is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, including one for the death of the unborn child.
“The allegations in this case are deeply disturbing and horrific–words can’t describe what our law enforcement partners encountered during the investigation,” County Attorney Kathy Keena says in a statement.
