Joe Metheny: A Gruesome Saga of Murder, Cannibalism, and a Twisted Quest for Revenge
Updated: Aug 6
Joe Metheny's case remains one of the most horrifying examples of unchecked rage and calculated cruelty in modern crime history. Arrested in December 1996, Metheny confessed in detail to a series of murders that shocked even seasoned investigators. While serial killing itself was not new, the method Metheny used to dispose of at least some of his victims placed his case among the most grotesque ever recorded.
According to his own account, Metheny butchered at least one victim, mixed the flesh with pork and beef, and sold the resulting meat from a roadside barbecue stand near a Baltimore, Maryland pallet company.
The case has since become one of the most frequently cited examples of extreme violence intersecting with public trust, anonymity, and urban vulnerability.
A Difficult, Disputed Childhood
Joseph Roy Metheny was born on 2 March 1955 in Baltimore, Maryland, one of six children. His attorneys later described a childhood marked by neglect: an alcoholic father who died in a car accident when Metheny was six, and a mother forced to work double shifts to support the family, leaving him feeling abandoned. Metheny claimed his parents had sometimes sent him to live in "foster-like" arrangements with other families.
His mother told a very different story. She disputed the neglect claims entirely, describing Metheny as an above-average, polite student, and insisting the family, while financially poor, always had a normal home life. "He was smart and had a good childhood," she said. She did note that he changed after leaving home. "He just kept drifting further and further away," she said. "I think the worst thing that ever happened to him was drugs."
Metheny joined the U.S. Army in 1973 at 18. He later claimed to have served in Vietnam and developed a heroin addiction there, a claim that doesn't line up with the actual withdrawal timeline of American forces and that his own mother disputed, saying he'd actually served in Germany. What is documented is that during his time in the Army, he struck a woman in the head with a bottle, an incident that led to a court-martial and his discharge. After leaving the military, he drifted through blue-collar jobs in lumberyards and as a truck driver, with alcohol and drug use becoming a constant undercurrent.
A Catalyst for Violence: Loss and Betrayal
By 1994, Metheny was living in South Baltimore with his girlfriend and their six-year-old son, working long stretches as a truck driver. The catalyst for his violence came that year when his girlfriend, who struggled with drug addiction, disappeared and took their son with her. Metheny later described this as a profound betrayal. He became consumed by rage and grief, convinced she had abandoned him deliberately and was being protected by others in Baltimore's drug-using community.
For several days, Metheny searched obsessively through shelters, abandoned buildings, drug houses, and areas known for sex work and addiction. When he failed to find her or his son, his frustration hardened into hostility. He later told investigators he believed people were deliberately hiding information from him.
The First Murders Under the Bridge
Metheny's search eventually led him to a homeless encampment beneath Baltimore's Hanover Street Bridge, an area his girlfriend was known to frequent. There, he encountered two homeless men, Randall Brewer and Randy Piker. Metheny believed they had information about her whereabouts, and when they couldn't provide answers, he attacked and killed both men with an axe.
According to his own later account, that same night he also killed two women he lured to the same area while searching for information, and a man fishing nearby who he believed had witnessed part of the attack. He disposed of the bodies in the river, weighting them down, a decision that would later make it impossible for prosecutors to build a case against him.
Arrest and Acquittal
Police arrested Metheny shortly afterward and charged him with the murders of Brewer and Piker. He spent approximately 18 months in custody awaiting trial. In July 1996, a jury found there wasn't enough physical evidence to convict him, since the bodies had never been recovered, and he was acquitted.
Rather than deterring him, this outcome appeared to reinforce his belief that he could kill without consequence. In later statements, Metheny indicated the acquittal made him more confident and methodical going forward.
Escalation and the Beginning of Cannibalistic Crimes
After his release, Metheny talked his old employer, a wooden pallet company, into rehiring him and letting him stay in a trailer on the isolated, dead-end property to keep an eye on things. It gave him exactly the privacy he wanted. His anger was no longer focused solely on his ex-partner. Instead, he began targeting people he considered expendable, choosing sex workers and people experiencing homelessness because he believed they wouldn't be missed or reported missing.
Metheny lured victims to his trailer with promises of drugs, money, or shelter. Once inside, he murdered them using blunt force or stabbing weapons, this time planning what came next with real deliberation rather than acting purely out of rage.
One of his identified victims from this period was Cathy Ann Magaziner, whom he strangled in 1994. He initially buried her body, then dug it up roughly six months later, removed her head, and disposed of it separately. When investigators eventually recovered the skull, much of it was missing, but dental records confirmed her identity.
Selling Human Flesh as Food
Metheny then began operating a roadside barbecue stand near the pallet company and nearby truck stops, selling what he described as roast beef and pork sandwiches to truck drivers and local customers. According to his own account, he mixed human flesh in with the ground meat. "The human body tastes very similar to pork," he told investigators. "If you mix it together, no one can tell the difference."
This detail is what pushed the case into a different category of public horror altogether. It meant unsuspecting members of the public had unknowingly consumed human remains, turning the murders into a broader violation of public trust that went well beyond the killings themselves.
Victims and a Contested Body Count
How many people Metheny actually killed remains genuinely unresolved, and it's worth being upfront about that rather than picking a single number and presenting it as settled. Only two murders, those of Magaziner and 23-year-old Kimberly Lynn Spicer, who was killed in November 1996 after leaving home following an argument with her mother, were ever proven with physical evidence and resulted in convictions. Investigators later said evidence tied him to roughly three additional deaths by matching his own confessions to what they found, including a search that expanded to seven shallow graves behind the pallet company. Metheny told some investigators he'd killed as many as 13 people. In a written account from prison, he put the number at seven: three men and four women. None of these figures fully agree with each other, and no single one has ever been definitively proven correct.
Capture and Final Arrest
Metheny's killing spree ended in December 1996 when a woman named Rita Kemper, who he'd kidnapped and attempted to sexually assault at the pallet company trailer, escaped over a perimeter fence and flagged down a passing driver who called police. Officers arrested Metheny shortly afterward. During questioning, he confessed not only to the recent killings but also to the earlier murders he'd previously avoided prosecution for, including the fisherman under the bridge.
Metheny later wrote his own account of events from prison, and it's revealing mainly for how little remorse it contains. He described the killings in flat, often boastful detail, expressed satisfaction that customers at his barbecue stand never complained about the meat, and closed by mockingly warning readers to think twice before eating at an unfamiliar roadside food stand. The one thing he said he regretted wasn't any of his victims. It was that he'd never managed to track down and kill the two people he blamed for his girlfriend's disappearance in the first place.
Trial, Sentence, and Death
Joe Metheny was convicted of multiple charges connected to the Magaziner and Spicer killings, as well as the kidnapping and attempted rape of Rita Kemper, for which he received a separate 50-year sentence. In November 1998, he was sentenced to death for Spicer's murder. Maryland's highest court overturned that sentence in 2000, and it was replaced with two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
While incarcerated, Metheny remained largely unrepentant, continuing to speak openly about his crimes, often with a detached or mocking tone. On 5 August 2017, a prison guard at Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland found him unresponsive in his cell. He was pronounced dead shortly after, at age 62. His cause of death was not made public.
A Disturbing Legacy
Joe Metheny's case remains a stark example of how extreme violence can exist within ordinary settings. His crimes exposed vulnerabilities in how society overlooks certain lives, and how easily anonymity can be exploited by someone determined to use it. More than a story of murder, it's a reminder of how easily trust can be abused, and how brutality can hide behind the most unremarkable facades, including, in this case, a folding table and a grill by the side of the road.
Sources
Joe Roy Metheny's Confession
"To start out I will tell you about myself at the present moment, which is locked up. I am 48 years old, I weigh about 450 pounds and it's not all fat. I've been locked up for almost 8 years now, but when one has been sentenced to a couple of life without parole sentences, time doesn't matter anymore.
I have no problem with being locked up, for no one put me here but myself. And I deserve to be right where I'm at, cause I had 12 law-abiding jurors that told me so, in a couple different cases. Ha! Ha! I was only convicted of two murders and one kidnapping for the one that got away. I got 50 years for her. The first murder I was sentenced to life without parole. The second one they gave me the death penalty. I sat on Maryland's death row for 3 years, and then they overturned my sentence and gave me another life without parole and sent me down here for the rest of my life.
I killed seven people, three men, and four women. Two men I chopped up with an axe under a bridge in South Baltimore. I was found not guilty for them cause they couldn't prove I did it. Under that same bridge I also killed two women and one man who was fishing, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I weighed their bodies down and put them in that river. I showed the police where I put them about 3 years later, but they couldn't find them. So they could not charge me for them.
My murder rampage started out as revenge but ended up as a passion for the taste of blood and the overwhelming sense of power one gets for taking the life of another.
My story
It all started back in July of 1994. I was at work, I was a truck driver. I was working overtime this one night. Then I got off and went home as I always did. But when I opened the door and turned on the light, I noticed there was nothing there. My ole lady had taken everything including my son and left me. Her leaving was not my problem. But she took my 6-year-old son with her. She was a crack addict and a worthless piece of shit. I would have paid her to get out of my life. All she had to do was take my son over to my mothers house and she could have had everything else and be gone.
I found out about 6 months later she had moved on the other side of town with some asshole that had her out selling her ass for drugs. They got busted for drugs and they took my son away from them for child neglect and child abuse.
I had no chance of going to social services and trying to get my son back do to my past criminal record. So I took it upon myself with the hatred I had for these 2 who lost my son, to go looking for them. I had found out from someone that they was going under that bridge and getting high with some homeless motherfuckers who lived under that bridge.
I went under there looking for them. They were not there, but the two homeless motherfuckers they got high with them were down there. They were passed out on some old stinking mattress and that's where they were when I left, except there were dead from being chopped up.
That same night I lured the first crackwhore down under that bridge. I got her high and was trying to get information out of her about my ole ladies whereabouts. She acted like she didn't know, so I beat the hell out of her and raped her ass then killed her. I put her in some bushes and went and lured the second bitch down there. I did the same to her as the last one, but as I was about to throw her in the bushes with the other one I noticed an old blackman down by the river fishing looking back up at me. I grabbed a steel pipe that was lying by and ran down on him and layed his head wide open. So I put the two girls and him in the river and weighed them down with rocks.
That was a very busy night for me 5 murders within about 7 hours. I washed up in that river and cleaned up the crime scene as much as I could, then left. 2 1/2 weeks later I was arrested and charged with the murders of the 2 men I chopped up. I spent close to 18 months in Baltimore City Jail waiting to go to trial. The trial lasted 1 week and it was thrown out of court cause of lack of evidence.
I was free again. I went back and talked my old boss into giving my job back to me at the pallet company. There was a little trailer on the property, so I told my boss to let me stay there and I could keep an eye on the place. He agreed to this and gave me the keys to the front gate and main building. The company was on a dead end road and was very isolated. It was perfect for what I wanted to do.
I lured 2 more crackwhores up there to my trailer. I killed and butchered their bodies up. I cut the meat up and put it in some Tupperware bowls then put it in a freezer. I buried the remains in several shallow graves in a little woods behind the company.
Over the next couple weeks on the weekends I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches and why not they were very good. The human body tastes was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.
Everything was going pretty good until I ran out of my special meat. So I lured another bitch up to my trailer. I got her in there and started to rip her clothes off and knocking the hell out of her. She was screaming, but there was no one around to hear her except me. And I just kept on laughing at her.
I turned around for a split second, and that was my mistake, for she ran out the door before I could get to her. There was an 8-foot chain link fence with barbwire on top of it around the front of the company. There was a stack of wooden pallets next to the fence about 10 feet high. That bitch scaled those pallets like a monkey and jumped the fence, and ran down to the main road where some guy in a pickup truck picked her up and took her to a nearby gas station where they called the cops.
Well I knew the cops were on the way, but I didn't run. I gathered up her clothing, grabbed the keys to the gate, and went out and opened it. Soon as I step out the gate a cop car pulled up. And the cop jumped out and pulled his gun on me and told me to get on the ground. And that is where it all came to an end.
They took me down and booked me. She had told them that I said I was going to kill her like the rest. Which was true. They had me sitting in a little room down at homicide drilling me and damn near kissing my ass. Trying to find out what I had done. They pulled me out of city jail everyday for 1 month taking me back and forth between the company and the bridge.
I had they going crazy over at the company digging up the remains of those 2 bitches there. Cause I had their remains buried in 7 different holes. The only thing I feel bad about in any of this, is I didn't get to murder the 2 motherfuckers I was really after. And that's my ex ole lady and the bastard she got hooked up with.
Well that's my story, horrible but true. So the next time you're riding down the road and you happen to see an open pit beef stand, that you've never seen before, make sure you think about this story before you take a bite of that sandwich. Sometimes you never know who you may be eating. Ha! Ha!"
