The Baltimore summer heat pressed down like a sweaty palm that July afternoon when Joseph Roy Metheny first walked into the dimly lit roadside bar. He moved with the careful steps of a man who’d spent too many nights sleeping rough, his flannel shirt stained with motor oil and something darker. The bartender would later tell police there was nothing particularly remarkable about him – just another working-class guy with calloused hands and tired eyes. But the women who survived encounters with him remembered something else – the way his smile never reached his cold, dead-fish eyes.
Metheny’s descent into darkness began with the kind of personal tragedy that breaks ordinary men. When his wife left with their six-year-old son, taking his last shreds of dignity with her, something fundamental fractured inside him. He started haunting the industrial wastelands near the docks, places where missing persons reports gathered dust at the bottom of police inboxes. The first victim was a sex worker named Rita (not her real name), who barely escaped his rusted pickup truck with bruises around her throat and a story no one believed.
But Kimberly Spicer wasn’t so lucky. The 28-year-old mother of two had been trying to get clean when she crossed paths with Metheny near the abandoned meatpacking plant. Her sister would spend years showing Kimberly’s photo to anyone who might have seen her last. “She had this laugh,” the sister remembered, wiping tears, “this big, booming laugh that didn’t match her tiny frame.” What remained of Kimberly would eventually be found wrapped in plastic behind Metheny’s trailer, though not before he’d done unspeakable things to her body.
The killings followed a gruesome pattern. Metheny would later confess to selecting vulnerable women – those battling addiction, those estranged from family – luring them with promises of drugs or money. The actual murders were almost pedestrian in their brutality – strangulation with whatever was handy, a belt, his bare hands. But what came after… even seasoned homicide detectives had to step away during the autopsy reports.
In his jailhouse confession, Metheny described with chilling nonchalance how he’d dismember victims with tools from his construction job, storing parts in the same cooler he used to bring beer to family cookouts. The most disturbing claim – that he’d ground human flesh into patties and sold them from his roadside barbecue stand – was never proven, though police did find suspicious meat in his freezer that tested “inconclusive.”
At trial, families of the victims sat stunned as Metheny showed less emotion than a man ordering breakfast. When given the chance to speak, he leaned into the microphone and said, “I’d do every single one of them again if I could.” The jury took less than two hours to sentence him to death.
Prison changed nothing about Metheny. Guards reported he spent years in near-total isolation, not for his protection, but because other inmates couldn’t stomach being near him. He passed time writing rambling letters to newspapers claiming additional victims, though most were dismissed as the fantasies of a man desperate for notoriety.
His end came as quietly as a man like him could hope for – found stiff on his prison cot one morning, the exact cause of death never disclosed. No memorials were held, no flowers placed on graves. Just a brief notice in the local paper that failed to mention the countless lives he’d shattered.
Today, the roadside stand where he allegedly served his ghastly meals has been paved over for a parking lot. But in certain Baltimore neighborhoods, you can still find old-timers who lower their voices when telling newcomers, “You should’ve seen the lines at that barbecue joint… and the strange taste that lingered after.” Whether myth or horrifying truth, it serves as a reminder that monsters don’t always look the part – sometimes they come smiling, with a cooler full of meat and dead eyes that don’t reflect the light.
