Joe Metheny is one of the most dangerous serial killers, rapists, and psychopaths in the world. Even though serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Robert Pickton, Katherine Knight, and others were much worse, this story is about Joe Metheny, a serial killer who killed and raped his victims and then turned them into burgers.
Joe Metheny, who was also called the “Baltimore Cannibal,” said he had killed 13 people. The police could only link him to three killings, though. Joe Metheny allegedly turned his victims into human burgers or human beef sandwiches and sold them on the side of a road in Baltimore to people who didn’t know what was going on.
Joe Metheny’s Early Life
Joseph Roy “Joe” Metheny said during his trial that he had a hard childhood. When Joe was only six years old, his alcoholic father died in a car accident. After this, his mother kept ignoring him and his five other siblings while she worked two jobs to feed the family. As a child, he was a nicer student than most.
During his trial, Joe said that his parents put him in foster homes and that his difficult childhood made him depressed. Contrary to what Joe said, his mother said she worked hard at several jobs to give her children a normal family life. She also said that her kids had never been sent to live with foster families.
At age 18, Joe joined the U.S. Army in 1974 and served in Germany. But Joe said that he got hooked on heroin while he was on tour in Vietnam. After he joined the Army, Metheny didn’t talk to his mother very often. She once said, “He just kept getting farther and farther away. I think drugs were the worst thing to ever happen to him. The story is very sad.”
From Revenge To Thirst For Murder…
After leaving the Army, Joe Metheny started working blue-collar jobs such as, in lumberyards and as a truck driver. The next thing that happened shocked the whole country. Joe was 6’1″ tall, had a heavy build, and was overweight, but he was called “Tiny.” He spent most of his time in bars and in Baltimore, where he lived with homeless men in makeshift camps.
Joe did odd jobs to make money, but he spent most of it on heroin, crack cocaine, and alcohol. He committed his first three murders in 1994 when his girlfriend fled his house with their six-year-old son. He believed that his girlfriend, who was also a drug addict, left him for another man. He was so angry that he spent most of his time looking for them on the street.
One day, he couldn’t find her under the bridge, where she usually did drugs. Two homeless men told him they knew her, but they didn’t know anything else about her. Methany used an axe to kill these two men. Not only that, but he also killed a fisherman who may have seen him kill the other people. People thought these killings were acts of passion, but for Joe, this was just the start.
Metheny was in county jail for a year and a half while he was being tried for killing the two men. But he wasn’t found guilty because he threw their bodies in a nearby river and the police couldn’t find them. Metheny did find out what was going on with his son.
“About six months later, I found out that she had moved to the other side of town with some scumbag who made her sell her privates for drugs. They were caught with drugs, and my son was taken away from them for child neglect and abuse,” he said at the time. But what started out as a way for Metheny to get even turned into a sport, and what he did next was even scarier than that.
Joe Metheny: The Human Hamburger Maker
Joe Metheny was set free because there was no physical evidence against him. He then went back to looking for his wife and child. But this time, Joe Metheny did some horrible things because killing people was his hobby. Joe killed two sex workers who couldn’t help him find his missing girlfriend soon after he got out of prison. Metheny didn’t throw their bodies in the river. Instead, he took them home.
He took them apart and put the parts with the most meat in Tupperware containers. He dumped anything that didn’t fit in a truck lot owned by the company where he worked. Even scarier is that he mixed the sex worker’s flesh with beef and pork and made neat little patties, which he sold from a small barbecue stand on the side of the road.
Yes, his customers liked eating these “human hamburgers,” but none of them knew what they were really eating. In a strange twist, Joe’s victims’ bodies were hidden by these customers without their knowledge. Now, Joe would often go out and kill another prostitute or homeless person to get more meat.
During his arrest, Joe told the police that no one ever said the “meat tasted funny,” and no one ever noticed that there was something extra in the patties. He told the police, “The human body tastes very much like pork.”
“If you mix it up, no one will be able to tell the difference… “So the next time you’re driving down the road and you see an open pit beef stand you’ve never seen before, think about this story before you eat that sandwich,” he said. Well, he must have eaten his fair share of the patties he made from human meat for his customers.
Joe Metheny’s Arrest
Joe Metheny got away from the police for two years, but he was finally caught in 1996 when the woman he was trying to kill, Rita Kemper, got away from him and went straight to the police. Metheny didn’t get punished because there wasn’t enough proof against him. But this time, things were different.
This time, Metheny was willing to tell the truth. He admitted to killing almost ten people, and the police said he had no plans to stop killing if he wasn’t caught. In 1997, he was tried for the Kemper case and given a 50-year prison sentence for kidnapping and trying to sexually assault a child. Aside from that, he was given the death sentence in 1998 for killing Kimberly Lynn Spicer.
During his trial, Joe Metheny shocked the authorities when he said, “The words ‘I’m sorry’ will never come out, because they would be a lie. I’m more than ready to die for what I’ve done, so that God can judge me and send me to hell for all of time… I just enjoyed it.”
“The only thing I regret is that I didn’t get to kill the two motherfuckers I really wanted to kill. “And that’s my ex-girlfriend and the jerk she’s now with,” he said. He said that he killed up to 10 people, most of whom were young, white women who worked in sex jobs. For most of these people, the police never found any proof.
Joe talked about how horrible his crimes were and what he did with the bodies of the people he killed during his interview. Some of them he dumped in the Patapsco River, and others he sold to other people as “human hamburgers.”
Joe Metheny said, “I cut up the meat and put it in some Tupperware bowls. Then I put it in the freezer. I started a small beef stand with an open grill. I had real sandwiches with roast beef and pork. They were great. The taste of the human body was a lot like that of pork. If you mix it all together, no one will be able to tell.”
Metheny later said, “So, the next time you’re riding down the road and you see an open-pit beef stand you’ve never seen before, think about this story before you take a bite out of that sandwich.”
What Happened To Joe Metheny?
Joe Metheny was found guilty by a jury, which gave him a death sentence. But in 2000, a different judge overturned this verdict and gave the man two life sentences, one after the other. Around 3 p.m. on August 5, 2017, Joe’s cell at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland was found empty and he was later pronounced dead. At the time of his death, he was 62 years old.
When we talk about sick and twisted people like Joe Metheny, Hannibal Necter, Jeffery Dahmer, and many others, we can’t say that they were born that way. Metheny’s murderous mania was caused by his bad childhood, his heavy drug use, his bad experiences in the army, being homeless, and being left by his girlfriend. But making the people he killed into hamburgers? That takes crazy to a whole new level!
