On a warm summer’s night in 1994, a tired and weary Joseph Metheny returned home to find his entire life in shambles. Joe was a truck driver for Joe Stein and Sons’ Pallet Company in Baltimore, Maryland, so he was used to being away from home for long stretches of time, but on this particular night, he had been working especially late. When he stepped through the door, he saw that his longtime girlfriend had left him and taken everything but the light bulbs. This may not sound like such a tragedy considering Joe would later admit that he couldn’t have cared less about his “worthless” girlfriend—or the furniture for that matter—however, there was something else missing besides the boxy television set, rusted kitchen appliances, and countless piles of dirty, unsorted laundry: It was his 6-year-old son, the son that Joe had been working so hard to provide for.
Joe’s blood began to boil; his eyes bulged and twitched with anger. Normally, despite his outward appearance, Joe was a well-tempered and polite man. Standing at 6’1” and weighing over 350lbs, Joe was a paradox.
On the outside, he was large, bald with crooked teeth, and covered in tattoos, but according to those that knew him, he was kind, mannerly, and considerate. He was intelligent enough to study physics while training for service in the US Army; however, he also spent most of his life living in homeless camps and addicted to hard drugs. All of that is to say that, like so many people, Joe Metheny was a complicated man, but on this summer night, his lifetime of drug use combined with the feeling of betrayal caused Joe to snap.
He wanted to know where his girlfriend had taken their son, and he was going to do everything in his power to find them. He knew that she was addicted to crack cocaine, a habit that he himself had been working hard to kick, and that she would most likely be staying with someone who could provide it to her.
After this night, Joe Metheny embarked on a murder spree that left as many as 13 people dead as he stalked the homeless camps of South Baltimore City for over 2 years. This is the story of Joe Metheny, The BBQ Burger Butcher.
A Life of Struggle
Now, before we talk about Joe Metheny’s past and his upcoming crime-spree, there is something you need to know: Joe Metheny is an unreliable narrator and, unfortunately, most of the details available online about his crimes are self-reported. While talking about his life, Joe often contradicted himself—sometimes even in the same sentence. Some of the things he said were provably false, while others were at one time assumed to be false but later proven true.
So, going forward, you might be tempted to think that Joe Metheny is a liar or is exaggerating his crimes as some serial killers do, but I don’t think so. I think that most of his confusion comes down to one simple thing: drugs.
For almost the entirety of his adult life, Joe was wasted on either alcohol, heroine, crack cocaine or a combination of all three. During his crime spree in particular, Joe admits that he was spending every single penny he earned on his vices and that his memories of the murders are hazy at best. To give further credit to his claims, Joe’s own attorney, Margaret Mead, who was appointed to represent him at trial, once said: “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.” So, in my opinion, Joe Metheny was not a liar, he was just incapable of remembering the exact details.
I know that we are getting ahead of ourselves here, but I wanted to set the expectation as we move forward because the timeline is somewhat complicated. Therefore, going forward, I will be presenting you with what I believe to be the proper order of events; however, where there is doubt or contradictory evidence, I will interject to tell you the other side of the story. And with that out of the way, let’s start with our first point of contention: Joe’s childhood.
Joe Metheny was born in 1955 to Jean Metheny and a father whose name is difficult to track down. One thing that we do know about Joe’s father is that he was a severe alcoholic and was killed in a drunk-driving accident when Joe was only 6 years old. After this, his mother was given the impossible task of raising Joe and his 5 siblings alone while also working double-shifts as a waitress to keep the family finances from going under.
Joe claims that he was neglected as a child and that his mother sent her children away to live in foster homes all across northern Virginia and Maryland. This is the first disputed point as Jean Metheny’s recounting of her son’s childhood paints a very different picture. She says that—other than occasional financial troubles—her children did not have a single problem in the world.
They were poor, but they always had food to eat and a solid roof over their heads. In my opinion, both accounts can be true at the same time if you consider them from different perspectives. Joe’s mother was a working woman who always put bread on the table and made sure that her children were not forced onto the street; however, working that many hours to provide for them also meant that she was never home to raise and nurture her children the way a parent should.
So, it is very possible that Joe felt neglected while his mother did not see it that way.
She also claims that Joe was a kind and polite child who never got into trouble. He was an above average student, had normal childhood hobbies, and avoided getting into fights whenever possible. Joe says that his childhood was far more adventurous than the one his mother describes.
When Joe turned 18, he left home to join the Army. This much is true and verifiable, but the exact details of his deployment are also disputed. His mother said that he was stationed in Germany; however, Joe told multiple people that he was actually stationed in Vietnam.
He claims that his drug dependencies started with heroin while living and fighting in the Vietnam jungle. As I said, there is no questioning the fact that Joe was in the army because official records prove that he was, but it is unlikely that he was stationed anywhere near Vietnam because, as many people online have pointed out, the US had already pulled out of the war by the time Joe entered the military and troops were no longer being stationed there.
Either way, after leaving the army, Joe did not return home. Instead, he spent the next decade and a half drifting around, never really establishing himself anywhere, and choosing to live among the homeless population in various cities across the Eastern seaboard. This is where his drug dependencies really started to take hold. He was already a heavy drinker, but soon, he found himself needing more.
He turned back to heroine and, eventually, crack cocaine. He attempted to maintain steady employment; however, that is an almost impossible task when you spend 10 hours each day passed out in a gutter and the other 14 desperately trying to score your next hit.
For over 15 years, Joe continued to live like this. He floated around committing crimes, acquired a few small felonies in the process, and eventually landed in South Baltimore City. Now, in his late thirties, Joe met a woman.
Like Joe, she was also homeless and addicted to various drugs, but when Joe found out that he had gotten her pregnant, he attempted to clean up his life to provide for them. To do this, he got his CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) and started driving truck for a pallet company called Joe Stein & Sons. At this point, Joe seemed like he really was trying to turn his life around.
I’m not sure exactly where his family was living, but at the very least he claims that it was a house and not some tent down by the river. Unfortunately, neither he nor his Girlfriend could completely kick their drug habits, and on that fateful day in 1994, when Joe’s son was 6 years old, she left him to score drugs with another man. This destroyed Joe and marked the start of the complete collapse of his mental health.
The Long Night
To find his son, Joe spoke with friends, drug dealers, and work acquaintances, but nobody had heard from either of them. Since stalking his ex-girlfriend had become his obsession, Joe quit his job and dove headfirst back into the world of drugs so that there would be nothing to hold him back. After injecting or smoking his remaining money, Joe had no way to pay his bills and once again found himself homeless. He moved back into one of the homeless camps that he had been living in previously—a spot known as “Tent City”—and began questioning people in the few hours of each day that he was able to stay conscious.
After months of searching, Joe learned that both his ex-girlfriend and her new man had been arrested for possession of drugs and that his son had been taken by the state of Maryland and placed into foster care. With multiple felony convictions and his own drug habit once again weighing him down, Joe was convinced that no judge would ever release his son into his custody. Now, at this point, any rational person might decide that the best thing to do is clean yourself up, find steady employment, and work your ass off to prove to the judge that you are a reliable father; however, by this point in his life, Joe was not a rational person.
In Joe’s mind, his son was lost to him forever, and there was nothing he could do to change that. So, if he couldn’t have his son, he wanted the next best thing.
Joe decided that he was going to murder his ex-girlfriend and the “drug-pushing piece of shit who cost him his family.” Joe asked the man where his ex was staying, and he was informed that the pair were headed to the Hanover Street Bridge to buy more drugs and get high. Infuriated and seeing his chance to act, Joe grabbed an axe—which was occasionally used by the camp for self-defense against rival homeless gangs—from underneath a collapsed sofa and set off into the night—after smoking more crack cocaine, that is.
When Joe arrived at the Hanover Street Bridge, he found two men, Randall Brewer and Randy Piker. Both were passed out on an old, rotting mattress, high beyond belief, and unintelligible. Joe quickly woke them and began grilling them for answers. He learned that these two men had gotten high with his ex-girlfriend, but they told Joe that the couple must have left after they had passed out.
Furious, Joe raised the axe and brought the blunt end of it down onto the men’s heads repeatedly. He left their bodies on the mattress where they had just been sleeping.
That same night, underneath that same bridge, Joe lured, interrogated, and killed two separate sex workers who he falsely believed could lead him to his real targets. However, instead of leaving them out in the open like he did with Randall and Randy, he decided to toss their bodies into the nearby Patapsco River. While disposing of them, Joe claims that he was spotted by a dockworker working the midnight shift. He confronted the man, then beat him to death with a steel pipe.
This man’s body was also thrown into the river.
After about 7 straight hours of hunting, interrogating, and murdering his 5 victims, Joe Metheny waded into the water of the Patapsco at dawn and washed their blood from his body and clothes. He then washed and returned the axe to the homeless camp, found a nice pile of trash to use as a pillow, and fell deeply into a drug-induced slumber.
Murder After Murder
For the next few weeks, Joe continued to search for his ex-girlfriend all across South Baltimore; however, unfortunately for Joe, his drug-fueled night of revenge eventually landed him inside a holding cell after police discovered Randall and Randy’s bodies atop the old mattress. Unfortunately for the victims, because it had taken police over 3 weeks to discover their bodies, much of the evidence that tied Joe to the murders had already been lost or contaminated. This included the murder weapon as, on August 2nd, 1995, another homeless man, Larry Amos, had used the “self-defense” axe to murder another homeless man, Everett Dowell, underneath the same Hanover St. bridge.
It wasn’t until police began investigating this new murder that the bodies of Randall and Randy were even discovered. Larry Amos was then arrested and charged with first-degree murder, but that charge would later be reduced to manslaughter. He was given 8 years in prison—of which he only served 1 year and 9 months.
Use that shockingly light sentence as a barometer for how much police and judges actually care about the lives of homeless people.
Although Joe did spend the next year in jail awaiting trial, he was eventually acquitted and released back into the streets. Joe was now a charge-free and drug-free man, but the latter would not last long. He had been forced to get clean while in jail due to the low supply on the inside, but as soon as the first opportunity presented itself, he was back on heroine.
With his name cleared, Joe returned to his old jobsite at Stein & Sons’ Pallet Company and convinced his bosses to rehire him. Because his boss had a habit of hiring mostly-reformed felons, Joe Metheny was brought back onboard as a forklift driver and paid a measly $7-per-hour.
With nowhere else to stay and not wanting to return to the homeless camp, Joe requested to use the trailer located at the rear of the pallet company’s property as a home. He offered to be the property’s night watchman in return, and his bosses agreed. This trailer, which was small, dirty and collapsing into itself, was located at the rear of the Stein and Sons’ property and surrounded by tall trees. A chain-link fence and stacks of old, broken pallets separated the trailer from the nearby main road.
It wasn’t much, but Joe quickly made it his home.
A lot had changed for Joe Metheny over the past year years, but one thing that remained the same was his hatred for his ex-girlfriend and his desire to see her dead. But, despite his best efforts, Joe was never able to find her again. She had simply vanished and Joe hoped that that meant she was dead.
Still, his anger lived on, and one night, while cruising through South Baltimore City, Joe spotted a woman that he vaguely recognized. Her name was Cathy, and she was dressed in a pair of cutoff jeans, a white pullover sweater, and white tennis shoes. She carried a purse over her shoulder.
This was 45-year-old Catherine Ann Magaziner. She was a sex-worker who had spent years on the streets and was addicted to multiple hard drugs. She wasn’t Joe’s ex-girlfriend, but she reminded Joe of her.
He rolled down his window and called to her; she looked at him and offered a smile that revealed multiple missing teeth. She approached the car, and Joe asked her if she would like to join him in his trailer. He made promises of money and drugs, and she agreed.
Inside his trailer, Joe and Cathy had sex, and then, while she lay half-clothed and high out of her mind on Joe’s mattress, he lunged at her and strangled her with a nearby extension cord. She was too far gone to put up any significant fight. Although, even if she had been in her right mind, the frail, 130 lb. woman wouldn’t have stood a chance against the massive Joe Metheny.
What comes next requires its own separate content warning for anyone eating: On the floor of his trailer, Joe proceeded to desecrate her corpse by harvesting as much muscle tissue as he could from the meatiest parts of her body. He stored this meat in Tupperware containers inside his freezer, and, after disposing of the remainder of her body in a shallow grave in the forest behind his trailer, seasoned this meat, cooked it, covered it in sauce, and ate it. He claims that he doesn’t know why he ate her, he just did.
Months later, he would return to her grave and further desecrate her body by cutting it into 7 pieces and reburying each piece separately. Her head was taken back inside his trailer, thrown into a box, and left to rot. Eventually, he disposed of it offsite, and it was never recovered.
In the weeks following her death, Joe found that he was unsatisfied with simply eating her himself. He gathered the supplies he would need to open a street-side barbecue cart, fashioned a handwritten, makeshift sign, and ground up small amounts of her frozen remains into fresh beef and pork. He rolled this mixture into patties and loaded them into his food cart. Then, as unsuspecting people went about their day, he served them this rancid meat.
They ate it without ever knowing what they were consuming. When asked about this food cart, Joe laughed and admitted: “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.”
This did not stop with Cathy. Joe continued to lure homeless sex workers into his home by providing them with drugs. He killed them, harvested meat from their bodies, then dumped them all around Baltimore. He claims to have killed at least 10 women in this way, but due to the way homeless people go unreported, police were not even aware that they were missing.
On Nov 11, 1996, Joe lured Kimberly Spicer to his trailer and attempted to sexually assault her with a beer bottle. She fought back, and Joe stabbed her 26 times in the face and neck. He then dragged her body to the woods behind his trailer and tossed it unto the bushes.
On December 8th, 1996, Joe lured another woman, 37-year-old Rita Kemper, into his trailer just as he did with the other women. Rita knew Joe fairly well as they had been using cocaine together for many years, but Rita was clear that she was not interested in Joe sexually. That night, while high, Joe ordered Rita to remove her clothes.
Rita resisted and Joe hit her twice. While hitting her, he laughed and said, “I’m going to kill you and bury you in the woods with the other girls.” During their scuffle, Rita was able to slip out the door; however, Joe caught her and pulled her back inside.
As he was removing her clothes, she managed to slip through an open window and make it to the chain-link fence that separated Stein and Sons’ property from nearby Washington Avenue. She then scaled the fence—cutting herself badly on the razor wire—and dropped onto the ground on the other side. Joe Metheny watched helplessly as the first victim he had ever let escape flagged down a passing truck and disappeared into the night.
A Small Complication
After Rita Kemper’s escape, Joe braced for the worst. He was sure that she would go to the police, but for some reason—possibly because she was a homeless sex worker—Rita did not immediately report Joe’s attempted sexual assault. Still, Joe had no way of knowing this and was paranoid that she would eventually bring the police to his doorstep. So, he began trying to hide the evidence.
Joe gathered Catherine’s belongings—her clothes and her purse—and buried them far away from his own trailer so that, if discovered, they might not be linked to her body.
A couple days later, Joe and a fellow coworker named Clint Ashbrook were sitting inside Joe’s trailer, drinking whiskey, and snorting lines of cocaine off Joe’s dirty, dilapidated furniture. As Joe became increasingly intoxicated, his secrets began to spill and, eventually, he revealed to his friend that he needed help with something important; he needed help moving a body. Clint thought that Joe was trying to pull a prank on him and agreed to follow Joe outside where he said the body was located.
As they approached the forested area behind his home, Joe began heaving away piles of trash, leaves, and debris until Clint could plainly see the body of Kimberly Spicer lying in the dirt. By this point, she was bloated, and covered in maggots. He told Clint that he wanted to throw the body into a nearby dumpster but didn’t give him an exact reason why.
Joe then grabbed a tarp and began rolling the body onto it, and once again, asked for Clint’s help. Clint claims that, in that moment, he was terrified of the much larger man and didn’t want to set him off; however, he still refused to help by claiming that he had something else to do but would “help some other time.” Clint then left Joe by himself and sped off on his motorcycle—which some newspaper articles hilariously refer to as a bicycle—but for some unknown reason, he returned an hour later with a peace-offering of more cocaine.
Clint says that when he arrived back at Joe’s trailer, Joe was relieved to see that he hadn’t gone to the police. He also said that Joe was sweaty and out of breath because he had moved the body himself. The two of them then proceeded to party late into the night, drinking beer and doing cocaine, until both men finally fell asleep on the floor of Joe’s collapsing trailer.
The next morning, Joe acted as if nothing had happened the previous night, and Clint was left wondering if the man could even remember what he had asked him to do.
That morning, when Joe and Clint’s bosses, Joe Stein Sr and Joe Stein Jr, arrived for work, Clint sat them down and told them all about the previous night. Joe Stein Sr ordered Clint to NOT tell anyone about what he had seen. Now, I’m not a business owner, but I feel like, maybe, if I were a business owner and one of my employees had murdered someone and buried them on my property, I would definitely call the police and tell them that one of my employees had buried a body on my property!
Why Joe Stein Sr did not immediately go to the police was a mystery to me; however, I quickly discovered that Stein and Son’s Pallet Company had a great many skeletons in their own closet. As it turns out, Joe Stein Sr—who I will be referring to as Stein Sr for the sake of clarity and brevity—was a man with an extensive criminal background, multiple felonies, and a history of drug-dealing and gun-trafficking. At the time of Joe Metheny’s murder spree, Stein and Son’s Pallet Company was under investigation by the FBI as part of an organized crime sting.
Stein’s company had been engaging in corporate fraud and trafficking of stolen goods. I promise, I am not making this up. My jaw nearly hit my keyboard the moment I realized that I had accidentally stumbled into an organized crime story as well.
Now, are you ready for the real kicker? Stein Jr was working as an informant for the FBI against his own father. The son in “Stein and Sons’” had flipped for immunity from prosecution and had been wearing a wire for months as the FBI slowly gathered evidence against his father.
Stein Sr did not want Clint to go to the police because he knew that they would find much more than a body if they investigated the pallet company’s property. Unfortunately, on the morning that Clint revealed his discovery to Stein Sr and Stein Jr, Stein Jr was not wearing his wire and did not capture the confession; however, Stein Jr did put Clint in contact with his FBI handler so that Clint would not get in trouble for failing to report Metheny’s crimes to the police.
Later that day, while Joe Metheny was away from his trailer, Stein Jr went to the back of the property and began looking around. Amid the stacks of broken pallets and heaping piles of trash, Stein found a small opening that led underneath Joe’s trailer. When he crawled inside on his hands and knees, he came face-to-rotting-face with the body of Kimberly Spicer.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “what are the odds that Joe Metheny just so happened to find himself employed and living on the property of someone under investigation for organized crime?” Well, if Stein Jr and Clint Ashbrook are to be believed, and I don’t have any reason to doubt their testimony, Joe Metheny was complicit in Stein Sr’s crimes and was acting as the Stein Family’s enforcer. Joe Metheny was the muscle, the fixer, the person that Stein Sr sent to do the family’s dirty work. Joe Metheny wasn’t just a man on drugs who killed sex workers who resembled his ex-girlfriend, he was the Luca Brasi to Joseph Stein’s Corleone Family.
Taking a Breather
Now, there are two reasons why I did not mention Joe Metheny’s ties to organized crime up until this point: First, no-one, including Joe himself, has ever officially tied Joe Metheny to the crimes of Stein and Sons’. No charges were ever filed against him, and despite having ample opportunity and displaying an eagerness to confess, Joe never talked about or admitted to anything that Stein Jr or Clint Ashbrook alleged. That means that, even if I had wanted to tell you about Joe Metheny’s specific crimes, I wouldn’t have been able to give you any details beyond what he may have been involved in by association.
Without fully jumping into speculation, all I can say for certain is that Joe Metheny was tasked with guarding the Stein and Son’s property by acting as it’s night watchman. That is all he has ever confessed to.
Second, I wanted you to feel just a tiny fraction of the shock that the FBI agents must have felt when they learned that they had inadvertently stumbled into a full-on serial killer while investigating something completely unrelated. I mean, can you imagine how Stein Jr’s FBI handler must have felt when a random man approached him and said, “Hey, Mr. FBI Man, your mole just outed himself to me and I’ve got a hell of a secret to tell you.”
So, with that out of the way, how does this effect the information that you have so far? Well, as I said when talking about Joe and his mother’s separate recollections of Joe’s childhood, two things can be true at once, and I believe that this is another example of that. Joe Metheny was a man who was driven to madness by losing his son, but he also worked for a shady boss and may have participated in far more crimes than we will ever know.
Really, at this point, the only thing that needs to be amended about Joe Metheny’s life story is the fact that his boss was involved in organized crime, but based on the reaction of Stein Sr and Stein Jr when Clint revealed the body to them, it’s unlikely that anyone else at Stein and Sons’ were remotely aware of what Joe was doing during his off-hours. So, from this point on, I will only be giving you the facts as we talk about how the FBI sorted through this absolute mess.
The Arrest of Joe Metheny
This new revelation by Clint Ashbrook lit a fire at the FBI. Up until this point, they had been taking their time to ensure that they had enough evidence to convict everyone involved; however, because of this new complication, they were forced to accelerate their investigation. This was due to the very real fear that Joe Metheny would kill again. They also didn’t want to give Stein Sr the opportunity to destroy any vital evidence before they could move in and make the arrests.
On December 15th, 1996, at 1:40 AM, Joe Metheny and Stein Sr were arrested while exiting the company’s Christmas party. Joe did not resist. He did not put up a fight.
He seemed like he had already come to terms with his arrest before they even slapped the cuffs on him. With their two main targets now in custody, the FBI then proceeded to round up the grunts: One employee was arrested for and later convicted of arson for burning two trucks that belonged to a rival company. He was given 10 years in prison.
Two others were convicted of theft of merchandise, and Clint Ashbrook was also convicted of arson for a separate offense. Stein Sr was charged and later pled guilty to 1 count of possession of stolen firearms and 1 count of destruction of property by fire. He also pled guilty to 1 count of aiding and abetting for his attempt to cover up Joe Metheny’s crimes.
He was sentenced to 10 Years in prison. Stein Jr and the other members of the Stein family who had cooperated with the FBI were relocated for their own protection.
On the night of their arrests, many employees found themselves in hot water, but Joe Metheny’s water was boiling. He was separated from the rest of the group and transported to the Homicide Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department. When Joe was interrogated about the woman who had been found underneath his trailer, investigators were shocked by what came next: Joe Metheny confessed.
They assumed that he would lawyer up, shut his mouth, and say nothing like he did when arrested for the murders of Randall Brewer and Randy Piker, but Joe seemed to already know that he was sunk. He didn’t hold back; he answered every single question asked of him by both the FBI and local police. Joe confessed to the murders of Catherine Magaziner and Kimberly Spicer, as well as the slaying of Randall Brewer and Randy Piker.
He confessed to the kidnapping and attempted rape of Rita Kemper, and then went on to confess to another 8 murders.
During questioning, Investigators asked Joe why he killed Kimberly Spicer, and he responded: “Sense of power. I don’t know. Vulnerable. I dreaded, (I 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. I don’t know how to describe it.”
At first, they weren’t sure whether or not to believe him, so they asked Joe to take them to the bodies. At this point during my research, I stumbled across a familiar name: I had previously discussed Body Farms and how scientists use donated corpses to study human decomposition and perfect body recovery techniques. The pioneer of that field of study, Dr William Bass, and his students placed corpses onto an open field in Knoxville, TN to study how the elements affect decomposition speed. One of Dr Bass’s students that I mentioned by name was William Rodriguez.
In the 1980s, Rodriguez was just another student, however now, in this story, he is William C. Rodriguez, III, PhD. He is also the leader of the forensics team charged with excavating the areas that Joe Metheny pointed out to investigators.
After having Joe describe where exactly he left the body of Catherine Magaziner, dogs were brought in to aid in the search; however, nothing was immediately recovered. Frustrated, investigators transported Joe to the location that he had specified, but Joe quickly amended his statement. Catherine was the woman who Joe had dug up and reburied multiple times. Now, standing at one of her many temporary resting places, Joe remembered the correct spot.
Joe then gave them a new location, and Rodriguez and his team were able to find and unearth Catherine’s skeletal remains. Just as Joe had confessed, he had dismembered and buried her in multiple locations throughout the woods. Rodriguez was able to find all of her remains, save for the cranium, which would never be recovered. Using the teeth of the body’s lower mandible, he was able to confirm that the body did belong to Catherine.
For the next month, Joe was transported to and from jail to various locations where he thought police might find more of his victims, but, unfortunately, no more were ever recovered or identified. Dive teams were brought in to help locate the bodies that had been dumped into the Patapsco River, but this too yielded no results. Joe said he used rocks to weigh the bodies down, but police believed that they still were not heavy enough and were likely carried out to sea.
Trial and Death
With a confession in hand, Joe Metheny was charged with the kidnapping, sexual assault, and attempted murder of Rita Kemper. At some point between pointing the police to the burial sites of his victims and going to trial, Joe changed his mind about confessing because, initially, he entered a plea of not guilty. Joe’s lawyer petitioned the court to have his initial confession and cooperation thrown out, but the judge denied the request and essentially told him, “Too little, too late.”
In the end, Joe was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault charges; however, the jury acquitted him of attempted murder because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove motive. Apparently shouting, “I’m going to kill you and bury you in the woods with the other girls,” is not enough. For the charges he was convicted of, the Judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
Next, in August of 1998, Joe was put on trial for the murder and robbery of Kimberly Spicer, the woman he had dismembered, buried, dug up, decapitated, reburied, and eaten. To keep things simple, if someone commits murder while engaging in another crime—such as sexual assault, robbery, or any other atrocious felony—their charge can be raised from first degree murder to aggravated murder in the first degree. This means that, per the laws of Maryland in 1998, had Joe simply murdered Spicer and left her body to be found by police, he would have only been eligible for life. But, because he had also robbed her, stripping her naked in the process and stealing her purse, his crimes were elevated, and he became eligible for the death penalty.
At his trial, Joe begged for death. While testifying, he turned to the jury, looking each of them in the eye as he spoke, and 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.” On November 13, 1998, Joe’s request was granted and he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kimberly Spicer.
Unfortunately for Joe and for fans of the death penalty, this sentence was later overturned in the early 2000s and reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This happened after it was decided that the act of burying Spicer’s clothing was an attempt to hide her identity, not that the murder was the result of a robbery. As far as the law is concerned, these are two distinctly different acts.
Joe was then convicted of murdering Kathrine Magaziner, and all other charges against him were dropped once this sentence was handed down as there simply was not enough evidence to convict him of any other crimes. One case in particular involved a woman named Toni Lynn Ingrassia, and although police were almost certain that Joe was involved in her death, they could not prove it. Toni’s father was told that he would have to be satisfied with and share in the justice that was reached during the other girls’ trials.
After his death sentence was overturned, Joe was transferred to the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland where he lived until his death on August 5th, 2017 at the age of 62.
Key Takeaways
- Joe Metheny’s murder spree began in 1994 after his girlfriend left him and took their 6-year-old son, triggering a drug-fueled rampage.
- Metheny confessed to killing up to 13 people, harvesting meat from victims’ bodies, mixing it into barbecue, and serving it to unsuspecting customers from a food cart.
- He was initially acquitted of two 1995 murders due to contaminated evidence, then later convicted after confessing to multiple killings including Catherine Magaziner and Kimberly Spicer.
- Metheny’s arrest resulted from an FBI organized crime investigation into his employer, Joe Stein Sr, whose son was an FBI informant wearing a wire.
- His 1998 death sentence for murdering Kimberly Spicer was overturned in the early 2000s, and he died in prison in 2017 at age 62.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What triggered Joe Metheny’s murder spree in 1994?
Joe Metheny returned home from working late to find that his longtime girlfriend had left him, taken all their belongings except light bulbs, and most importantly, had taken his 6-year-old son. This betrayal, combined with his lifetime of drug use, caused him to snap and embark on a murder spree as he searched for his ex-girlfriend and son in homeless camps throughout South Baltimore City.
How many people did Joe Metheny claim to have killed?
Joe Metheny claimed to have killed as many as 13 people. He confessed to 4 specific murders (Randall Brewer, Randy Piker, Catherine Magaziner, and Kimberly Spicer), the kidnapping and attempted rape of Rita Kemper, and then confessed to another 8 murders, bringing his claimed total to 13 victims.
What was Joe Metheny’s connection to Joe Stein and Sons’ Pallet Company?
Joe Metheny worked as a truck driver and later a forklift driver for Joe Stein and Sons’ Pallet Company in Baltimore, Maryland. After being acquitted of his first murders and released from jail, he was rehired at $7 per hour and lived in a trailer on the company’s property as a night watchman. According to coworker Clint Ashbrook and Joe Stein Jr., Metheny may also have served as an enforcer for Stein Sr’s organized crime activities, though Metheny never confessed to this.
How did Joe Metheny dispose of Catherine Magaziner’s body?
After strangling Catherine Magaziner with an extension cord in his trailer, Joe Metheny harvested muscle tissue from her body and stored it in Tupperware containers in his freezer. He buried the remainder of her body in a shallow grave in the forest behind his trailer. Months later, he returned to her grave, dismembered her body into 7 pieces, and reburied each piece separately. Her head was taken back to his trailer, put in a box, and eventually disposed of offsite; it was never recovered.
What did Joe Metheny do with the meat he harvested from his victims?
Joe Metheny seasoned and cooked the harvested human meat, claiming it tasted very similar to pork. He also opened a street-side barbecue cart where he ground up small amounts of his victims’ frozen remains into fresh beef and pork, made them into patties, and served them to unsuspecting customers. He stated: ‘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.‘
How was Joe Metheny eventually caught?
Joe Metheny was caught after Rita Kemper escaped from his trailer on December 8, 1996, and flagged down a passing truck. Though Kemper did not immediately report the crime, Metheny panicked and asked his coworker Clint Ashbrook to help him move Kimberly Spicer’s body. Clint refused but later told their bosses, Joe Stein Sr and Joe Stein Jr.
Because Stein Sr was under FBI investigation for organized crime and wanted to avoid police attention, and because Stein Jr was actually an FBI informant wearing a wire against his father, the information reached the FBI. They accelerated their investigation, and Metheny was arrested on December 15, 1996.
What was Joe Metheny’s original sentence and how did it change?
Joe Metheny was initially sentenced to 50 years in prison without parole for the kidnapping and sexual assault of Rita Kemper. In November 1998, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kimberly Spicer because he had also robbed her, elevating the charge to aggravated murder. However, this death sentence was overturned in the early 2000s and reduced to life in prison without parole after it was determined that burying Spicer’s clothing was an attempt to hide her identity rather than evidence that the murder resulted from robbery. He was also convicted of murdering Catherine Magaziner.
Why was Joe Metheny considered an unreliable narrator of his own life?
Joe Metheny was considered an unreliable narrator because he often contradicted himself, sometimes even in the same sentence. Some of his claims were provably false (such as being stationed in Vietnam when records show the U.S. had already pulled out), while others were initially assumed false but later proven true. The author attributes most of this confusion to Metheny’s extensive drug use throughout his adult life—he was regularly using alcohol, heroin, crack cocaine, or combinations of all three, and he admitted his memories of the murders were hazy at best.
What role did forensic anthropologist William Rodriguez play in the case?
William C. Rodriguez, III, PhD, a former student of body farm pioneer Dr. William Bass, led the forensics team charged with excavating the areas Joe Metheny pointed out to investigators. After Metheny initially gave an incorrect location for Catherine Magaziner’s remains, Rodriguez and his team were able to find and unearth her skeletal remains at the corrected location.
They found all of her dismembered remains except for the cranium, which was never recovered. Rodriguez used the teeth from the body’s lower mandible to confirm the identity as Catherine Magaziner.
How did Joe Metheny’s first murder trial end, and why?
Joe Metheny was arrested for the murders of Randall Brewer and Randy Piker after their bodies were discovered, but he spent a year in jail awaiting trial and was eventually acquitted and released. The evidence tying him to the murders had been lost or contaminated because it took police over 3 weeks to discover the bodies. Additionally, another homeless man, Larry Amos, had used the same axe (which was communal property for self-defense at the homeless camp) to murder someone else, further complicating the case.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: “Sloppy Joe” Metheny: The BBQ Burger Butcher
- Hero image source by Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA / openverse, cc0.
