The Pitmaster of Baltimore: Joe Metheny’s Secret Ingredient
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
On December 19, 1996, police finally shackled Joe Roy Metheny, charging the man with the brutal murders of three women. But the handcuffs only unsealed a much darker vault. Metheny soon confessed to a decade-long spree, claiming at least ten lives. Yet, it wasn’t the body count that turned the investigators’ stomachs—it was the disposal.
Just a year prior, the 450-pound Baltimore resident had walked free after an axe-murder trial involving two homeless men. Emboldened by his acquittal, he prowled the city’s fringes, haunting homeless camps and preying on the vulnerable.
Ultimately, Metheny confessed to a transgression that haunts the region to this day: he ground his victims into a grim slurry, mixing human remains with pork and beef. He then served the concoction to unsuspecting customers at his roadside open-pit barbecue stand.
That grisly secret earned him a moniker that still curdles the blood: “The Cannibal.”
A Descent into the Underworld
Metheny traced his murderous awakening to the sweltering summer of 1994. While he drove trucks through South Baltimore, his crack-addicted girlfriend vanished, taking their six-year-old son with her. 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.
Fueled by a cocktail of rage and loss, he went looking for her throughout Baltimore, including a homeless tent city under the Hanover Street Bridge.
“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.”
The men were Randall Brewer and Randy Piker, both in their mid-30s. The men’s bodies were found on August 2, 1995, stacked one on top of the other on a mattress. An autopsy showed that each had been hit in the head with an ax. The murder weapon was recovered from Larry Amos, from a rival tent city, who stole it and used it to kill another homeless man, Everett W. Dowell.
That same night, he lured a prostitute beneath the bridge to extract information. When she knew nothing, he beat, raped, and slaughtered her.
“She acted like she didn’t know, so I beat the hell out of her and raped her ass then killed her.”
He did the same to a second woman moments later. When an elderly fisherman witnessed the disposal, Metheny silenced him forever with a steel pipe. He took the bodies, weighed them down, and threw them in the river.
Metheny spent 18 months in jail awaiting trial for the murder of the two men, and he was acquitted since the jurors believed another homeless man had committed the crime. Violence was common among the residents of several tent cities in the area. Later, Metheny admitted to killing both men to rob them.
He did find information about his son’s whereabouts, saying:
“I found out about six months later she had moved to the other side of town with some asshole that had her out selling her ass for drugs. They got busted for drugs, and they took my son away from them for child neglect and child abuse.”
Because of his criminal record, he had no chance of having his son placed with him.
The Pallet Company Trailer
In a staggering seven-hour window, he claimed five lives. He washed the gore from his skin in the river and vanished into the night. He beat the rap for those specific killings, but the bloodlust had taken root.
After his acquittal, Metheny retreated to a secluded pallet company on a dead-end road. Living in a 1-room trailer on-site, he held the keys to the gate and the shadows. In 1995, he lured two women whom he called “crack whores”, Cathy Ann Magaziner and Kimberly Spicer, to this isolated sanctuary.
He strangled Magaziner with his hands until she grew unconscious, and then used an extension cord to kill her.
He claimed to dismember the women and kept the “choice cuts” in Tupperware bowls in his freezer. What was left of them he buried in seven shallow graves in a copse of woods behind the company.
Another prostitute, Toni Ingrassaia, was strangled, and what was left of her was dumped along Interstate 95 on the ramp into South Baltimore. Her case would eventually be dropped by prosecutors due to a lack of evidence.
“I opened up a little open-pit beef stand,” he boasted during his trial. “The human body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together, no one can tell the difference.”
Later, he would claim that he lied about mixing human flesh and selling it at his stand.
The One Who Got Away
The feast of horrors ended in 1996. Rita Kemper, another intended victim, survived a savage beating and scaled a ten-foot barbed-wire fence with the desperation of a hunted animal. She reached a gas station, and the police finally closed the gates on Metheny.
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.”
Police brought him to the Joseph Stein & Son pallet company, where he worked, hoping to locate the remains of one of his victims, but he said he might have dug up the remains, dismembered them, 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.
At his trial, the “Cannibal” showed no remorse.
“The words ‘I’m sorry’ will never come out, for they would be a lie,” he told the court. “I just enjoyed it.”
Although he confessed to killing as many as 10 to 13 people, he was convicted only of murdering Cathy Ann Magaziner and Kimberly Lynn Spicer.
In 1998, he was found guilty of first-degree murder of Kimberly Spicer. He stabbed her to death but was spared the death penalty since he did not rob or sexually assault her. They had been drinking at a Southwest Baltimore bar, and he took her to his trailer. She resisted when he tried to rape her with a beer bottle. He then plunged a knife into her chest and stomach and stabbed her in the back nine times. Spicer’s body was found beneath the trailer. The medical examiner found a beer bottle inside her body.
Metheny’s defense lawyers told the judge he had a history of having sex with dead women, and that necrophilia is not a crime, and the bottle was inserted after her death.
Cathy Magaziner, 42, was last seen alive in May 1994. Police found her body on December 18, 1996, near the pallet company. He buried her, then went back 6 months later and took the skull from her skeleton. He threw it in the trash, and it has never been recovered.
Initially, Metheny received the death penalty, but the state commuted his sentence to life in prison in 2000. He spent the next seventeen years in the shadows of a cell, his only regret being that his ex-wife had escaped his blade
The Final Mystery
Joe Metheny’s story began in a broken home—an alcoholic father dead in a car crash and a mother who claimed he drifted into the fog of drugs. His mother relocated to Baltimore from West Virginia after her husband’s death.
Gene (Jenne) Metheny went on to contradict the story her son told his attorneys about being sent to foster care. She said after the death of her husband, she worked odd and various jobs to keep her six children together. She never even took welfare.
She said Joe joined the army in 1973 at 19 and that they lost touch after that. “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.”
Metheny was killing people long before the first one he was accused of. 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, shot himself in the head.
On August 5, 2017, correctional officers found the 62-year-old unresponsive in his cell at the Western Correctional Institution. To this day, officials have never disclosed the cause of death. Did the man who begged for execution finally take matters into his own hands, or did the weight of his “secret ingredients” finally pull him under?
The final chapter of Joe “The Cannibal” Metheny remains as cold and silent as the graves he left behind.