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)”
