All of us have experienced that feeling when you're on a long trip, you get hungry, and you stop at some food stall for a quick bite. Then you feel a bit uneasy and worried, wondering if the food here is clean and safe. But right after you hear this story, perhaps from now on you won't dare to eat fast food from roadside stalls anymore. You might even give up fast food altogether.
Many murderers can evade justice for a while because they appear completely normal. There's nothing suspicious about them. But with Joe Metheny, just looking at his appearance, you would realize that he is the embodiment of evil. And once people hear his story, they will have no more doubts.
Joe Metheny was born on March 2, 1953, in Maryland, into a large family with six children. His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother was rarely home due to her drugs addiction. To be honest, his family was no different from a hellish version of the Brady Bunch. When Joe was 6 years old, his father died in a car accident. According to his story, throughout his childhood, he was constantly moved from one orphanage to another. At the age of 18, Metheny joined the military. It was during this time that he became involved with drugs. Like father, like son, right? His mother once said that Joe served in Germany in 1973. However, he himself claimed to have fought in Vietnam.
After being discharged, Joe cut off contact with his family and began living a vagrant life. Homelessness led him deeper into addiction, and everything went downhill from there. People also nicknamed Joe "Tiny," which was a kind of joke because he was a very large and burly man, standing 1.85 meters tall. He often wandered around bars and lived with homeless people in makeshift camps in South Baltimore. All the money he earned from his job as a forklift driver was spent on drugs and alcohol.
Yet, somehow, in the early 1990s, Metheny built a seemingly stable life. He worked as a truck driver, got married, had children, and even bought a trailer for his family to live in. But as they say, history often repeats itself, and in Metheny's case, that was absolutely true. His wife gradually became distant and addicted to drugs. One day, when Joe returned home, he found the house empty. His wife, children, and all their belongings had disappeared without a trace. According to his later confession, his wife had met another man and left with him, taking the children to start a new life.
Not long after, Joe heard rumors that the other man had ill intentions. His wife, due to her addiction, had become a prostitute to earn money, supporting both their habits. Eventually, they lost custody of the children and had to live under a bridge with other homeless people. Hearing this news enraged Joe, and he decided to set out to find his ex-wife. It was unclear whether his intention was revenge or rescue. However, after hearing what he did on that journey, you certainly wouldn't see any goodness left in him.
After learning that the place his wife frequently visited to shoot up was an abandoned bridge, Joe immediately went there. But upon arrival, he didn't find his wife anywhere—only dirty mattresses and a horrifying scene where she must have slept. In a fit of rage, he did drugs with two other homeless men, Randy and Randall Brewer. Afterwards, he brutally killed both of them. According to his later confession, he dismembered their bodies. Joe then approached a woman who had known his wife. He gave her drugs in an attempt to extract information, but she refused to reveal anything. In a rage, he assaulted her, strangled her to death, and dumped her body in some bushes.
Not stopping there, he lured another woman, and the result was exactly the same as the previous ones. While disposing of the second victim's body, he discovered a man fishing nearby. Fearful of being discovered, Joe approached him and used an iron pipe to strike the man's head, killing him instantly. He then buried the heads of the two homeless men, tied bricks to the bodies of the woman and the fisherman, and threw both into the river. As for the first victim, he kept her body in the bushes.
Even for seasoned criminals, the number of victims in Joe's first spree was chilling. In an interrogation, Joe Metheny once calmly said it was "a very busy night"—five lives in just seven hours. Some people only dip their toes into a life of crime to satisfy their base instincts. But Joe Metheny plunged headfirst into that muddy pit.
Another haunting detail was revealed in Joe Metheny's later confessions. After killing a woman named Catherine, he cut off her head and buried it in a different location from her body. Six months later, Metheny returned to the burial site. He dug up the decomposed head, washed off the maggots, and then did something unimaginable. Clearly, in Metheny's eyes, these victims were not human. He likely viewed those addicted women as inferior beings unworthy of life—individuals he could easily dispose of without a shred of remorse.
Two weeks after the murders, Metheny was arrested in connection with the deaths of Randy and Randall Brewer. He was imprisoned for 18 months. However, he was eventually released because the police lacked sufficient physical evidence to convict him. It was one of the worst decisions in Baltimore's judicial history. And this is when things became extremely horrifying.
After being freed, Metheny lost interest in finding his ex-wife and instead turned to killing others for pleasure. Not only that, he found a way to make money from his victims' bodies. People might wonder how killing others could generate income? It turned out that with the right spices, herbs, and preparation, human flesh could be turned into a dish more appealing than a Big Mac. Dehumanizing his victims was a consistent theme in Metheny's behavior, and he took it to a new level in the next phase of his life—a phase that would have prompted a public health emergency if the authorities had known.
After his release, Joe Metheny began selling food by the roadside. He set up a small barbecue stand near the area where he used to live. There, he served burgers that, by his own admission, were mixed with human flesh. He gleefully laughed recounting how customers ate the human meat without knowing, even complimenting its taste. Joe said that if you mix human meat with pork or beef and season it properly, people can hardly tell the difference. For him, it was not just a hobby—it was a business.
After getting out of prison, Joe Metheny was free to act on the sick fantasies he had nurtured while incarcerated. He returned to the pallet company where he had previously worked as a forklift driver and begged the owner for a job. Not only that, he convinced the owner to let him stay in a trailer on the company premises, under the pretext of providing nighttime security. The owner agreed. Metheny now lived alone on a remote plot of land at the end of a dead-end street—a place perfectly suited for a serial killer's activities.
There, Metheny lured two girls to his home under the familiar pretense of offering them drugs. After assaulting them, he killed both girls and dismembered their bodies. He stored parts of their bodies in plastic containers in his freezer for later use, burying the rest in shallow graves near his home.
After tasting human flesh, Metheny came up with a insane business idea: opening a roadside burger stand. It was a venture that should have been shut down early for false advertising, as the "meat" in his sandwiches came from the murdered girls. He casually remarked that human meat tasted very similar to pork, making it easy to mix into burgers. He kept the stand open for several weeks until his "special meat" ran out. Needing to restock, Metheny struck again.
He lured a 23-year-old woman named Kimberley Lynn Spicer, killed her, and hid her body on the pallet company's premises on December 8, 1996. A few days later, he invited another acquaintance, Rita Kemper, to do drugs with him. When Rita refused his invitation, Joe flew into a rage. He tore her clothes and laughed maniacally as she screamed in terror. He told her he would kill her and bury her like the other girls. Fortunately, this time, he hesitated. Rita broke free from the trailer, ran through the lumberyard, climbed over a pile of pallets, and jumped over a barbed wire fence. Ironically, his massive frame—1.85 meters tall and weighing 200 kg—which had once easily overpowered his drugged victims, now made him slow and unable to keep up with Rita.
Metheny could only stand and watch silently as a pickup truck picked up Rita and sped off into the night. Panicked, he gathered her clothes and threw them outside the gate, then called a friend to ask for help burying Kimberley's body, which was still lying in the pallet company's yard. That phone call would be the beginning of the end for the fiend.
On December 5, the police stormed in and arrested Joe Metheny—on the very day his friend reported the horrifying request to the authorities. This marked the end of Metheny's reign of terror and perhaps the beginning of a statewide burger boycott. The owner of the pallet company was also convicted as an accomplice for helping Metheny conceal evidence to protect his friend and his business.
When interviewed, Metheny confessed to having killed 10 people. His lawyer tried to dismiss the confession, claiming that long-term drug use had caused him to hallucinate and misremember events. While recounting his crimes, Metheny coldly stated, "It sounds like just a story of a betrayed man seeking revenge." But what truly brought Metheny the most pleasure was the act of killing and the feeling of making others eat their own kind.
During sentencing, Joe Metheny asked the court for the death penalty. When asked why he committed such cruel acts, he simply replied, "Because I liked it." In the case involving Rita Kemper, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison for kidnapping and attempted murder. In 1998, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. He later confessed to murdering and robbing Catherine. The prosecution also sought the death penalty for this crime to ensure Metheny would face the electric chair. However, things didn't go as expected. By 2007, the death sentence was overturned, and he was resentenced to life in prison without parole. This was one of many serious errors in the investigation and trial process, and many believed that not executing Metheny was the biggest mistake.
In 2017, Joe Metheny was found dead in his Maryland prison cell at the age of 62. However, everyone understood that a life of severe addiction and obesity had contributed significantly to his death. I've told many scary and horrifying stories, but Joe Metheny is undoubtedly one of the most evil among them.
People also advised being careful when buying snacks from roadside stalls. But I think it's fortunate that something as horrifying and disgusting as this has never been heard of happening in other countries. Or has it? If it has, please comment and let me know—I'd like to hear about it.