Joe Metheny stood 6 foot 1 and weighed 450 pounds. People called him “Tiny” as a joke. He worked as a forklift driver at a pallet company in Baltimore. He lived in a trailer on the factory grounds. Nothing about him screamed danger…
But in December 1996, when police arrested him, he didn’t resist. He didn’t lawyer up. He didn’t stay silent. Instead, he offered them a detailed confession that made even seasoned detectives go pale.
The Girlfriend Who Disappeared…
Bizarre But True! Metheny’s killing spree started with a simple trigger. His girlfriend left him and took their son.
He went looking for her. He searched the streets of Baltimore, asking sex workers and homeless people if they’d seen her. When they couldn’t help him, he killed them instead.
According to investigators, these victims were substitutes. He couldn’t find the one person he wanted to hurt, so he hurt everyone else. The rape, murder and dismemberment weren’t about them. They were about her.
The Roadside Business Model
But here’s where the story shifts from brutal to unthinkable. Metheny didn’t just kill people. He found a use for them too..
In his own courtroom testimony, he explained his process with disturbing clarity:
“I cut the meat up and put it in some Tupperware bowls then put it in a freezer. I opened up a little open-pit beef stand.” He sold sandwiches. Real roast beef. Real pork… And human flesh mixed in.
“The human body taste was very similar to pork,” he told police. “If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.” He later added that he received no complaints about the meat tasting odd.
People ate his sandwiches. They paid him. They came back for more.
The Woman Who Got Away…
Rita Kemper broke the pattern. On 8 December 1996, Metheny attacked her. But she managed to escape through a trailer window whilst he was distracted. Before she got away, he told her something that confirmed what police had suspected.
“I’m going to kill you and bury you in the woods with the other girls.”
She went straight to the police and his killing spree ended that night.
The Acquittal That Came First
This wasn’t Metheny’s first arrest. In summer 1996, he stood trial for the axe murders of two homeless men, Randall Brewer and Randy Piker. The jury found him not guilty due to a lack of evidence. He walked free after eighteen months in jail awaiting trial.
Five months later, police arrested him again. This time, the evidence stuck…
The Grave He Dug Twice
Metheny led investigators to a shallow grave. Inside, they found the decapitated remains of Cathy Ann Magaziner. He’d strangled her in 1994. Then, six months later, he dug her up.
He removed her head, put it in a box, and threw it in the rubbish.
When police recovered the skull, much of it was missing but dental records confirmed her identity.
The Courtroom Declaration
At his trial, Metheny had a chance to show remorse. To apologise. To explain.
He chose a different path.
“The words ‘I’m sorry’ will never come out, for they would be a lie,” he declared. “I am more than willing to give up my life for what I have done, to have God judge me and send me to hell for eternity.”
Then he added the part that silenced the courtroom. “I just enjoyed it.”
The Numbers That Don’t Add Up
Metheny claimed he killed 13 people. Police could only prove two murders: Cathy Ann Magaziner and Kimberly Lynn Spicer. He confessed to killing up to 10 people. But many bodies were allegedly dumped in the Patapsco River. They were never recovered.
The true number remains unknown…
The Sentence That Changed
A jury sentenced Metheny to death in November 1998. The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned it in 2000. They commuted his sentence to two consecutive life terms without parole. His convictions stood. But he wouldn’t face execution.
On 5 August 2017, prison guards found Metheny dead in his cell at Western Correctional Institution. He was 62 years old. The cause of death remained under investigation. Baltimore’s most disturbing case had reached its final chapter.
Bizarre But True! Somewhere in Maryland, people who bought sandwiches from a roadside stand in the mid-1990s still don’t know what they really ate…
‘Hungry’ For More..?!
Then check out The City That Looked away by Lorenzo D Voss and dig even deeper into the mind of Joe Metheny…
In the shadows of 1990s Baltimore, women disappeared without alarms, without headlines, without urgency. Not because no one cared—but because the system had already decided whose lives mattered. While society looked away, Joe Metheny lived, worked, and killed in plain sight.
This is not another sensational true crime book designed to shock you and move on.
This is a reckoning.
How does a predator operate openly in a major American city without being stopped?
Why are some victims searched for immediately—while others vanish into silence?
And what does it say about us when survival itself becomes invisible?
