This notice contains parts of explicit violence.
In the mid-1990s, a man weighing 450 pounds and over 6 feet tall with a portable grill was positioned on the outskirts of Baltimore, USA, to offer hamburgers to travelers circulating through the sector.
Hungry motorists didn’t hesitate to get out of their vehicles to enjoy a snack before driving on, while those in charge of such preparations, Joe Metheny, took each of the hot cuts of meat to sandwich them between the slices of bread.
What his guests didn’t know was that this subject, diagnosed with morbid obesity, was hiding a dark and brutal secret.
He wasn’t exactly there because he wanted to raise money through fast-food sales, but because he watched with every bite of his flashy burgers as the evidence disappeared into a series of horrific crimes that he had been the author of.
Every time they ran out, he would go home to get more.
And despite the fact that in this way he threatened human integrity from all sides, he planned to continue his position on the side of the road.
He had become “the hamburger man” as some in town called him, although over time he became known across the country as “the cannibal killer”.
Joe Metheny. Photo: Joe Metheny.
Since his birth in March 1955, Metheny has experienced several traumatic episodes: his schoolmates beat him and discriminated against him because he was overweight, and his alcoholic father constantly attacked the whole family before abandoning them.
The mother was concerned about supporting her six children in Essex, a 25-minute drive from Baltimore, so she spent most of her time and energy raising funds to meet their basic needs.
In 1973, at the age of 19, Metheny enlisted in the US Army, a move that distanced him further from his family and brought new complications, although he did not stay with the regiment for long.
A sergeant forced him to exercise constantly to lose weight, a situation that favored his release from the military facility.
Already separated from the rest of the recruits, he looked for work in sawmills in the industrial area, but that didn’t last long either. He also began to get involved with drug use.
With no big predictions about his future, he found a chance as a truck driver. At the time, he married a woman — also a drug addict — who had a 6-year-old son who, despite not having a biological relationship, called him “father,” according to Infobae.
Metheny believed he was finally building a home, one like the ones he didn’t have growing up, but the drug use of both furthered the destruction of that ideal that lived only in his mind.
Everything seemed to be fine for him both at home and on his long drives behind the wheel. Although this scenario has suddenly changed.
After a long shift hauling cargo on the freeway, he returned to their residence in South Baltimore, but no one was there and the atmosphere suggested they wouldn’t be coming back either.
He fell into a state of anger and despair. With his huge arms he smashed, among other things, the kitchen chairs and smashed the window of one of the doors. Shards of glass lay scattered on the floor.
Later he went in search of the woman and the child. She was like this for days, until it occurred to her to walk under a bridge where she often bought drugs.
Although not there, two men were in a street situation.
With a sharp ax in hand, he asked them for information about where he had gone, but they told him they didn’t know. Metheny insisted. They gave him no message.
So, without further dialogue, he grabbed the tool, which had now transformed into a deadly weapon, and attacked them with repeated blows until he had two collapsed and blood-soaked corpses before his eyes.
And when he realized a third party nearby might have seen the crime scene, he decided to pounce on him and end his life.
When he was done, he loaded up the three bodies and threw them into the Patapsco River.
This was only the first of several attacks, although not all ended the same.
Patapsco River in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: USGS.
His maneuver to remain unnoticed failed.
Baltimore police quickly found Metheny and named him the prime suspect, prompting court officials to refer him to the Baltimore County Correctional Facility to await trial.
He spent about a year and a half there, a time during which he kept obsessively contemplating leaving his ex-partner.
“Some time later I found out that she had been walking across town with an idiot who made her sell her body for drugs. They were arrested by the police and the child was taken away from them due to negligence and abuse,” he explained himself, according to testimonies collected by the outlet mentioned above.
Despite the atrocities he committed, he was acquitted for lack of evidence as investigators had not yet found the bodies.
Joe Metheny was able to continue his iterative search. And dissatisfied with the three victims he had on his record, he decided to use even more twisted methods to get rid of the next ones.
One day he approached two sex workers and demanded that they give him information about his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts, but they flatly refused.
Enraged, the 400-pound, 6ft 1 man pounced on her, adding two more kills almost immediately.
Joe Metheny. Photo: Joe Metheny.
The trucker recalled that the last time he committed a crime and dumped the bodies in the river, he was spotted by the police, so now he took them home to later dismember, the pieces of human flesh to store in a refrigerator and bury the other parties on the property of the company for which he worked as a driver.
But there was one more factor that could give him away. If the flesh stayed there too long, it would begin to decompose and spread its pungent odor outside the home.
So, without much thought, he went to a local butcher shop, bought beef and pork products and mixed them with the human remains, later making hamburgers and selling them on the street next to a portable grill he used to heat them up.
Of course, the buyers had no idea of the origin. And as he reduced the bodies of the two sex workers, he went in search of more people and brutally murdered them.
The process was repeated and he continued his position outside of Baltimore without raising suspicion.
Or at least he thought so.
In 1996, a woman fled her attacks and went to a police officer who happened to be nearby to report the horrific attacks she had suffered from him.
Joe Metheny’s name was already known to city officials due to the controversial case that ended in three bodies in a river. Also, they suspected that catching him would not be easy given that, as a man with an extremely violent profile and a sturdy body, he could resist the authorities.
As part of an operation involving a team of vigilant officers, they went to his home to arrest him. But unlike the bloody fight they believed was about to take place, he showed no resistance and even declared that he was ready to confess to his crimes.
Joe Metheny. Photo: Joe Metheny.
When they arrived at the police station, he began his story.
He said he was desperately looking for his ex-partner and her new boyfriend to kill, admitted that he had murdered – and in some cases raped – nearly 10 people, confessed that he ate human flesh on his hamburger -Sold the stand and expected it. He had no intention of killing her or stopping her bloody operations.
Officials were stunned: Metheny showed neither remorse nor enthusiasm when recounting such atrocities. In the same way, he explained that he also ate those sandwiches.
“I’m a very sick person,” he exclaimed in his extra large, sweat-soaked t-shirt, later adding, “I had no real excuse for it other than that I liked it (…) I can’t describe it.”
“The next time you walk down the street and see an open hamburger stand that you’ve never seen before, think about that story beforehand,” Infobae warned researchers, surprised and alarmed by what they heard.
Later, when the day of his trial arrived in court, he stated that he was “more than willing to give my life for what I did so that God would judge me and send me to hell for eternity.”
Joe Metheny. Photo: Joe Metheny.
The authorities initially sentenced him to death, but the sentence was later replaced by two consecutive life sentences in a high-security facility. They thought it best that he never left prison as he posed a potential risk to humanity.
He was imprisoned for almost two decades and was serving his sentence, but was found unconscious in his cell in 2017. A few hours later, the experts discovered that he had taken some pills in an attempt on his life, how it was never known how they got to him.
It also wasn’t entirely clear how many people he actually killed, nor how many burgers he sold to street patrons.