Sick Serial Killer’s Human Burgers
Bloodthirsty serial killer Joseph Roy Metheny set up a food stall selling his victims’ cooked flesh
In 1994, Joseph Roy Metheny was working long hours as a truck driver. He was an adoring dad to his 6-year-old son, and was doing his best to provide for himself and his wife.
Only, after an overtime stint, his world fell apart. Switching on the light in their apartment, he found the place empty.
His wife, who he says was addicted to crack cocaine, had taken everything – including his son – and fled.
Joseph was desperate to get his son back. But, with his criminal record, he knew he’d no chance of winning custody.
Morbidly obese and wanting revenge, Metheny spiralled into despair.
He’d heard on the grapevine that his wife had been getting high under a bridge in Baltimore, Maryland. So he went looking for her with the intention of killing her and the man he’d heard she was now living with.
Arriving, he only found two homeless men sleeping rough. Believing his wife had been getting high with them, he took out his rage on them and axed them to death.
‘They were passed out on some old, stinking mattress, and that’s where they were when I left…dead from being chopped up,’ he said.
Metheny was later charged with their murders but, due to a lack of evidence, he was never convicted of them.
According to his later confession letter, he’d murdered two prostitutes that night, too.
He’d lured the first to the bridge, got her high, and grilled her about his wife’s whereabouts. When she’d claimed to know nothing, he’d beaten her up, raped and killed her, before dumping her body in bushes. He’d then done the same to another woman. But, before he could dispose of her body, he’d spotted an angler, who’d seen what he was doing.
‘I grabbed a steel pipe…ran down on him and laid his head wide open,’ Metheny said. He claimed he weighed down the three bodies with rocks and sunk them in the river.
Three years on, he confessed to police, but the bodies couldn’t be found, so no charges were ever brought.
In that one night, Metheny claimed to have killed five innocent people – and to have loved every second of it.
What started as wanting to get his own back on his wife had turned into a killing spree fuelled by pure bloodlust.
But Metheny’s sickest actions were yet to come…
In the freezer
Eighteen months later, Metheny was living in the isolated grounds of the pallet factory where he worked. And it was from there that he lured two more women, Kimberley Spicer, 23, and Cathy Ann Magaziner, 39, to his trailer.
He killed them in cold blood, then chopped up their bodies.
Sickeningly, he put some of the human flesh into plastic food boxes and stored it in the freezer before burying the rest of their remains in woods.
‘Over the next couple weeks… I opened up a little open-pit beef stand,’ Metheny boasted.
It was never proven in court, but he claimed he sold the
This was a killing spree fuelled by bloodlust
women’s barbecued flesh in burgers to unsuspecting folk, calling it his ‘special meat’.
‘The human body tastes very similar to pork. If you mix it together, no-one can tell the difference,’ he said.
It wasn’t long before Metheny tried to kill again.
He lured another woman to his trailer and began to beat her – but, when he turned his back, she escaped, flagged down a car and called the police.
Metheny was arrested, and confessed to her kidnapping, along with the murders of Kimberley and Cathy Ann.
Confession
Despite admitting to the string of previous murders, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Metheny with them.
When quizzed about his motives, he told police he ‘got a rush out of it, got a high out of it’.
He said, ‘My murder rampage started out as revenge, but ended up as a passion for the taste of blood and the overwhelming sense of power one gets for taking the life of another.’
At court in 1998, Metheny pleaded guilty and begged for the death sentence. His wish was granted but overturned later on appeal, and he was instead given two life sentences without parole.
It was from jail that Metheny wrote his confession, giving gruesome details of how he’d
killed and butchered his victims. He also issued a chilling warning…
‘The next time you’re riding down the road and…see an open-pit beef stand that you’ve never seen before…think about this story before you take a bite of that sandwich,’ he said. ‘You never know who you may be eating.’
In August this year, Joseph Roy Metheny, 62, was found dead in his cell at Western Correctional Institution, Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving his sentence.
Metheny never expressed any regret or remorse for any of his crimes. In fact, in his written confession, he said his only regret was not killing his wife as he had initially intended.
He pleaded guilty and begged for the death sentence
It’s thought he sent this photo from jail, to a penpal