THE CRIMES OF JOE "THE CANNIBAL" METHENY
On December 19, 1996, Joe Roy Metheny, was charged with the murders of three women in three separate incidents.
He confessed to killing a male victim, as well, and in time he admitted to killing at least 10 people, however it was what he did with the bodies that was the most nauseating aspect of his crimes.
In August 1995, the massively obese Baltimore resident had beaten the rap for killing two homeless men with an ax. He had, however, actually been hanging around homeless camps, preying on prostitutes and other vulnerable women there.
Ultimately, Joe Metheny confessed to an array of transgressions that included eating and grinding up his victims’ body parts, which he would then mix with pork and beef that he served to customers at his roadside open-pit barbecue stand.
So that’s how he got his nickname, “The Cannibal.”
According to his own statements, the murderous rage began in the summer of 1994. He was a truck driver at the time living in South Baltimore, Maryland. His crack-addicted wife left him and took their six-year-old son.
He said all she had to do was to leave his son at his mother's house and she could have gone on with her life, but she chose to take the boy with her. Six months later he found out she'd hooked up with a guy who was pimping her out. They were living under a bridge. The state took the child on the basis of child neglect and abuse. Because of his criminal record he had no chance of having his son placed with him.
Upon hearing this, Metheny grabbed an axe and went to the bridge to search for the drug-induced pair.
Quoting his statements: “They were not there. But the two homeless motherfuckers they got high with 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.”
Metheny was later acquitted of those murders, but it is largely believed he committed them.
He went on to state that after the murder, he doped up a prostitute and lured her under the bridge to pump any information out of her. “She acted like she didn’t know, so I beat the hell out of her and raped her ass then killed her.”
He threw her into some bushes, and lured another prostitute down. He killed her as well. Just as he was about to dump her body, he saw an old black man, who was fishing looking up at him. He took a steel pipe and beat him around the head killing him.
Then he took the bodies, weighed them down and threw them in the river.
In the space of seven hours he killed five people. He washed up in the river, and cleaned up the crime scene as best he could. Eventually he took police to the spot three years later, but they couldn't find the victims, so they couldn't charge him.
“I killed seven people (confessing to three more later), 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."
Once free he convinced his boss to give him back his old job at the pallet company, which conveniently for him was isolated and sat on a dead end road. He worked as a forklift operator, and part of the agreement was he would live in a trailer on site, and keep an eye on things. Metheny was given the keys to the main building and the front gate.
Later in 1995, Metheny said he lured “crack whores” Cathy Ann Magaziner, 45, and Kimberly Spicer, 26, to his trailer near the food stand. Magaziner and Spicer were stabbed to death. What was left of them he buried in seven shallow graves in a copse of woods behind the company.
He dismembered, and partially ate them, prior to preparing their remains as burger meat.
While on trial Metheny said: “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. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches. They were very good. The human body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.”
Another prostitute Ingrassaia was strangled, and what was left of her was dumped along Interstate 95 on the ramp into south Baltimore.
Metheny’s sickening run came to an end in 1996, after he kidnapped Rita Kemper, another prostitute. Kemper survived a severe beating from Metheny in his trailer and managed to escape, whereupon she notified the police.
He described her escape thus: "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."
At his trial, Metheny said, “The words `I’m sorry’ will never come out, for they would be a lie. 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… I just enjoyed it.”
After convening for two hours, the jury convicted Metheny for the murders of Kimberly Spicer, Cathy Magaziner, and Toni Ingrassia. Initially, Metheny received the death penalty, but that sentence was changed to life in prison on July 24, 2000.
He said his only regret was not having been able to kill his ex-wife and her boyfriend.
Despite his early confessions, Metheny was killing people long before the first one he was accused of.
He was 41 then. He killed two prostitutes in 1988, and 1989. Way back in 1976, another man, unidentified was killed after a barroom fight. This happened to be the same year his 17-year-old brother John Michael Metheny died.
His father, Audra Earl Metheny died in 1965 in a car accident when Joe was 10 years old. His mother Gene Metheny died in 1999, at the age of 81. She went on to contradict the story he told his attorneys of being sent to foster care. She said after the death of her husband, she worked odd and various jobs to keep her children together. She never even took welfare.
Police brought him to the Joseph Stein & Son pallet company where he worked hoping to located the remains of one of his victims, but then he said he might have dug up the remains, dismembered it and put them in a garbage container headed for Pennsylvania. In other words, despite his confessions there were probably other murders he hadn't admitted to.
In August 2017, Maryland corrections officials reported that Joe Metheny was found dead in his cell. He was found unresponsive at Western Correctional Institution around 3 P.M. His cause of death is still under investigation. He was 62 years old.
As of 2019, it appears that the cause of death has not been made public. Could it have been suicide since he had wanted to be executed instead of serving time behind bars? He had served over 20 years and perhaps decided to have the last word. What happened ultimately to Joe "The Cannibal" remains a mystery.