It’s the mid-1990s in Baltimore, a city so ravaged by drugs and violence some sections
resemble a dystopian movie. It’s close to one of those rundown places where a tall,
450-pound man named Joe Metheny runs an open-pit pork and beef stand on the weekends. It’s so
popular that on some afternoons people queue to be served up one of his famous tasty burgers.
What they don’t know is that a couple of years after they consumed that delicious piece of meat
encased between two lightly grilled buns, they’ll discover they were eating people.
As with many of our serial killer stories, we’ll start with childhood since in most cases
it’s during the criminal’s formative years where you find clues as to
what drove the person to do what they did. The problem with Metheny’s story is that there
are conflicting reports. Metheny himself said his childhood wasn’t a happy one at all. He said
his alcoholic father often abandoned the family when he was just a kid and his mother was hardly
ever around because she worked double shifts in an effort to look after her six children.
His conclusion is that he was neglected. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. When he was
eventually arrested for his crimes, he said he hadn’t seen any of his brothers or sisters for
many years and both his mom and pop were dead. This wasn’t true. His mother was found,
and she said, “Maybe he just wishes I was. He pushed his family away a long time ago.”
She explained how it was true that her son just took off, but his family life
wasn’t all that bad, and he was an intelligent kid. She denied that
he’d ever been in any foster homes, while he said he’d been passed around plenty of them.
What is certain, though, is that he had a homicidal rage that drove him to commit
some very heinous crimes and in his own words, “enjoyed it.” It’s also true that from a young
age he spent just about all his time taking drugs, namely heroin and crack cocaine.
What led to this addiction we can’t say, but things started to go wrong for him when he was
six. That’s when his father crashed his car and died. From then on, his mother worked pretty much
night and day, sometimes as a waitress, sometimes as a barmaid, sometimes as a canteen truck driver.
Despite being a very large kid, he was scared of violence and didn’t like to fight when prompted to
do so. “He wasn't a mean kid at all. He was always polite to everybody,” his mother later said.
He was also bright at school, but instead of pursuing academic success, he joined the army.
After serving in Germany, he said he was sent to Vietnam.
It’s there he said he was introduced to heroin and that’s how he got a taste for opioids. Still,
there’s some doubt if he even served in Vietnam. What’s a nailed-on fact is in the mid-70s he
was already a junky. That’s when he lost all contact with his family. His mother later said,
“He just kept drifting further and further away. I think the worst thing that ever happened to
him was drugs. It's a sad, sad story.” Sad indeed, because this once-bright
kid turned heroin and crack fiend was about to cozy up to doing very, very bad things,
as the body of headless young woman would prove, among other terrible crimes he committed.
To know when all this violence started we can look to Metheny’s long confessional pieces of writing.
He said that July 1994 was when he finally lost the plot. Sure, he was known before that as a
heavy-drinking, drug-taking man who liked to hang around some of the meanest streets,
but those that knew him ironically as “Tiny” said he was always friendly and polite.
That July something snapped in him. He got home one day to find his wife and son
gone. She’d taken anything of value from the house and vanished. This is how Metheny described it:
“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.”
He said he didn’t care much that she was missing, since like him, her main focus in life revolved
around little hard, white rocks that provide a temporary feeling of euphoria. What drove him
mad was the fact she’d taken his kid with her. Metheny says six months later she was busted
for drugs along with the man that had become her pimp. The child was subsequently moved
into care and his wife and her pimp were back out on the streets. Metheny explained:
“I took it upon myself with the hatred I had for these two who lost my son,
to go looking for them. I had found out from someone that they were going under
that bridge and getting high with some homeless.” The place he mentioned was actually home to a kind
of tent city underneath Baltimore's Hanover Street Bridge. There he didn’t find his wife,
but he did see two men that in his own words were “passed out on some stinking mattress.” They were
Randall Brewer and Randy Piker, and they both died after Metheny bludgeoned them with an ax.
That same night he says he lured a woman down to the same spot on the promise of some free drugs.
He said in exchange for information about his missing wife she could get high on his account,
except she was not forthcoming with any information. For that, Metheny killed her.
Not long after, he lured another vulnerable drug addict down to the bridge and killed her, too.
The bodies were mounting up, and then another person became the victim of Metheny’s rage. Just
as he was trying to dispose of the two women’s bodies, he noticed that a man who was fishing had
spotted him. Metheny let go of the body, picked up a steel pipe, and raced down towards the man.
Metheny explained how things went after that: “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.” You’re probably now wondering how this
extremely violent man managed to make people into burgers after being arrested for murder.
The plain answer is after spending 18 months in Baltimore City Jail the case was thrown
out of court because of a lack of evidence. Once a free man, he got his old job back as
a forklift driver at Joe Stein & Son Pallet Co. His boss was kind enough to let him live on the
premises in a trailer, and that’s where some terrible things happened. On the promise that
he’d ensure no one broke into the factory, his boss handed him the keys. In Metheny’s own words,
“The company was on a dead-end road and was very isolated. It was perfect for what I wanted to do.”
What he wanted to do was kill again. If the first murder spree had happened out of some
kind of blind rage, now he wanted to do it because he’d discovered he enjoyed it. He
admitted as much later in court, saying, “I got a very . . . got a rush out of it,
got a high out of it. Call it what you want. I had no real excuse why other than I like to do it.”
Now we’ll explain how his addiction to killing evolved.
In the year 1995, a 23-year old woman named Kimberly Spicer could be seen on a video taken
by her sister when the two were visiting their father in hospital prior to him having surgery.
The sister asks Kim what she’s doing since she looks to be in some sort of trance.
Kim responds, “I'm looking out the harbor window, wishing I was on the boat.”
Her dream of sailing away was likely due to the fact that she was addicted to crack cocaine.
That’s why not long after that video was taken, she walked into the world of the
man who was going to take her life. It’s likely she met Metheny in a bar,
the kind of place where he spent his $7 an hour when he wasn’t out buying drugs. It was there
that the predator scoured the faces of women looking for the most vulnerable. The thing was,
no one expected him to be a killer. Kim had an older sister who worked in
one of the bars where Metheny frequented. This sister once said, “Nobody would have thought it.
He was so mannerly, saying 'thank you' and 'please' all the time. My sister once even
said to me she felt sorry for him.” That was her fatal mistake,
because one night she ended up in his trailer and that was the last night of her life.
Her body was later discovered buried not far from the trailer. This plot, if you can call it that,
wasn’t far away from the buried body of a prostitute that Metheny had murdered much earlier.
That was the body of Cathy Ann Magaziner, a woman who Metheny killed, buried, but then
for some warped reason he exhumed her body to remove the head. He later said in court, “I just
took the head and threw it in a box in the trash.” He also later admitted to chopping up the bodies
and storing some of the “meat” in Tupperware bowls which he then put in a freezer. That’s
when he got the idea to start a meat stand on the weekends and offer burgers to passersby
and the occasional trucker. Again, you need to hear this from the horse’s mouth. Metheny said:
“I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches and why not they were very good. The human
body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.” He said
everything was going great, explaining that the sandwiches, which people told him had a peculiar
but amazing taste, were selling really well. The thing was, he ran out of his “special meat”.
He went out once again to the streets looking for prey. He found what he was looking for when he met
a young woman named Rita Kemper. She was happy to go back to his trailer and share his drugs,
but when his giant frame got too close to her, she made a run for it.
As you know, this trailer was in a dark place pretty much out of sight of everything,
and although Kemper managed to get a certain distance away, he caught up with her and beat her.
He dragged her kicking and screaming back to the trailer. Once there he looked at her
menacingly and said, “I'm going to kill you and bury you in the woods with the other girls.”
He later admitted that it was after a momentary lapse of concentration that she escaped again,
this time managing to find a way out of the nightmarish factory grounds.
Metheny explained in detail how this happened: “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.” He said she “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.”
He knew now that he was done. Metheny says he gathered all of Kemper’s clothes and calmly
walked to the gates that he’d earlier locked to prevent her from getting out. Just then
a cop pulled up in a car. A man got out and pointed a gun at Metheny. In his own words,
“That is where it all came to an end.” What Metheny failed to mention in his own story
was what he said to the cop. This was Baltimore City police Officer Timothy Utzig, who explained
in court how their interaction went. As soon as Metheny was cuffed and in the back of the car,
he looked at Utzig and said, “You don't have to be scared.” Utzig, surprised, seeing as Metheny was
in handcuffs, said don’t worry pal, I’m not scared. Metheny replied, “You ought to be.”
Kemper told police that Metheny had told her he was going to kill her and bury her next to
his trailer just as he’d done to those two other women. Sure enough, police soon found
the bodies, including one with a missing skull. Metheny told police that he’d killed more women,
and was indicted but not convicted for one of those confessions. It’s likely in total
he murdered 10 women, most of them drug addicts, the homeless, or prostitutes.
Police just didn’t have the evidence to convict him of any more murders even though chances
were he was telling the truth. Unfortunately, sometimes when the poorest and most vulnerable
in society go missing, what some academics have called the “less dead” people, investigations are
often lax or hardly even started. Less dead people are also often not reported missing.
The jury is still out as to if he really did kill that many people. His attorney,
Margaret A. Mead, who once said he was kind and gentle when he spoke to her,
thinks he likely did. She said in an interview, “I have no reason not to believe him.
I have always found him to be forthright and honest. I think he's telling the truth.”
Metheny was sentenced to death in 1998, aged 43. That sentence was later overturned because of a
technicality and he was given life without chance of parole. While incarcerated at the
Western Correctional Institution he was found dead in his cell, just short of twenty years into his
sentence. During his imprisonment he’d put pen to paper many times, once offering the stark warning:
“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!”
Now you need to watch, “Brutal True Story of What They Didn't Tell You About the Burger
Chef Massacre.” Or, have a look at, “My Nice Neighbor (Serial Killer - True Crime)”