Nauseating Facts About Joe "The Cannibal" Metheny, Who Sold His Victims As Burgers

In 1996,  Joe "The Cannibal" Metheny joined the ranks of serial killers who decided to serve their victims' bodies to people in food. He claimed to have killed several women, dismembered their bodies, and then fed the human meat to his customers at his small BBQ pit stand, turning everyone into unintentional cannibals. Metheny also worked as a truck driver and confessed that his first murder was motivated by the actions of his girlfriend, who abandoned their child because she was a drug addict. He kept killing from that point onward, and ended up with around nine victims - or so he claims.

Joe Roy Metheny - an urban legend come to life - was born in 1955 and grew up to became one of several killers who sold human meat as food in the early 1990s. Now, however, he is serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison. 

It's hard to tell the fact from fiction in Metheny's confession. Some news reports state that his first killings took place in 1994, while he has claimed that his serial murder spree actually began in 1976. The number of victims that he admits to have killed frequently changes as well. His known body count stands at nine, but there could be more, as he's bragged about killing others. He also claimed to have fed human meat to the customers of his small BBQ stand, but that could just be the talk of a madman. 

By all accounts, Metheny was not a little man. Many news stories describe him as being over six feet tall and weighing around 450 pounds. His intimidating size explains how he managed to overpower his victims, as well as explains how his last would-be victim - Rita Kemper - got away with her life. He couldn't run fast enough to catch her. 

In 1994, Metheny was living with his girlfriend and their six-year-old son in South Baltimore; however, he worked as a truck driver so he was gone for long stints of time on the road. One day, he came home and realized that his girlfriend abandoned him and taken their child. She was a drug addict and began living on the streets. Metheny said in his confession,

"I found out about six 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." 

Metheny was so enraged by this that he went out to find his former girlfriend. He couldn't locate her, though, and instead ran into two homeless men. In a fit of anger, he killed them both with an axe and proceeded to chop them up into pieces, leaving their bodies where he had found them.

Metheny admitted to killing two women - Kimberly Spicer and Catherine Ann Magaziner - before dismembering them and putting their flesh into Tupperware containers that he kept in his trailer. Then, he decided to open up a small BBQ stand by the side of a busy Maryland road and served his unsuspecting customers human flesh - the flesh from Spicer and Magaziner's bodies. Metheny claimed that there was little difference between pork and human meat.

In 1994, Metheny was arrested and spent a year and a half in the Baltimore County Jail. He had been charged with the murder of the two homeless men that he chopped up and left under a bridge. He was denied bail, and had to sit in prison until his trial. However, due to a lack of evidence, he wound up getting away with the crime and was released from jail.

At the time of Kimberly Spicer's murder in the fall of 1995, she had been working as a prostitute in South Baltimore. Metheny was driving a forklift for a company that made wooden pallets and was living in a small trailer located near by his employer. One night, Metheny brought Spicer to his trailer where he brutally killed her, dismembering her body and discarding parts of it under some wooden pallets at his work - nobody noticed.

His last victim, Rita Kemper, was lucky. She was working as a prostitute in 1996 when Metheny kidnapped her and forced her into his trailer. He was gearing up to kill her, but she managed to get away, scaling an eight-foot-tall chain link fence as she fled. Kemper went straight to the authorities who, thankfully, believed her. Metheny was arrested for multiple murders shortly thereafter and confessed to all of his evil deeds.

During his confession to the authorities, Metheny admitted to committing some very horrific acts, one of which involved Catherine Magaziner's skull. She had been working as a prostitute when he invited her into his trailer. After she stepped inside, he stabbed and strangled her to death before dismembering her body. Apparently, six months later, he went back to the place where he had discarded some of her remains, found her skull, cleaned it off, and then had sex with it. 

Over the course of his killing spree, Metheny worked several different jobs, drifted in and out of homelessness, and spent most of his paychecks on drinks at local bars. He worked as a truck driver for a time before eventually getting a job at a wooden pallet factory driving a forklift. Later, he went on to open up what he described as a "BBQ pit stand," which he used as a way to dispose of the flesh of his victims by selling them as food.

The same night that he killed two homeless men, Metheny also went on to kill two prostitutes - luring them under a bridge and murdering them with the same axe he had used on the two men. A nearby fisherman, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, was then spotted by Metheny and was promptly killed as well. He then tossed all three bodies into a nearby river and placed rocks on top of them so that they wouldn't float to the surface. No evidence of them has ever been found.