Joe Metheny: the Baltimore confessions, a death sentence undone, and what was never proved

• Age41 at his arrest in December 1996; 62 at his death in August 2017
• Known asJoe Metheny; Joe Roy Metheny in court records
• Convicted ofMurdering two women in Baltimore, killed in 1994 and 1996; CBS Baltimore also lists kidnapping and sexual assault
• AcquittedOf killing two homeless men with an axe, before his 1996 arrest
• Arrested15 December 1996, Baltimore
• SentenceLife without parole for the 1996 killing; death for the 1994 killing (13 November 1998), vacated by the Court of Appeals of Maryland on 24 July 2000 and replaced by life without parole
• ClaimedAbout ten killings in all by his own account (13 in one later profile); never charged with most of them
• Died5 August 2017, Western Correctional Institution, Cumberland, Maryland, aged 62

Joe Metheny was a forklift driver who lived in a one-room trailer on the lot of a pallet company in Baltimore. Before 1996 he had been tried for killing two homeless men with an axe and acquitted. On 15 December 1996 he was arrested again, and in the days that followed he confessed to a series of killings and led detectives to the buried remains of a woman he said he had killed in 1994. He was convicted of murdering two women, killed in 1994 and 1996, and in November 1998 a jury sentenced him to death for the earlier killing. In July 2000 the Court of Appeals of Maryland vacated that sentence, and he spent the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was found unresponsive in his cell on 5 August 2017 and pronounced dead, aged 62.

The case is remembered for two reasons. The first is the gap between what Metheny said and what could be proved. He claimed to have killed about ten people, and later accounts pushed the figure higher, but he was convicted of two murders, and searches for other bodies he described found nothing. Some of his claims, including one about what he did with human remains, rest on nothing but his own word. The second is legal. Maryland’s highest court ruled that a robbery committed as an afterthought to a murder could not make that murder punishable by death, and three of its judges went further, writing that the state had stretched its death penalty law to reach a man it really regarded as a serial killer.

This account rests on the 2000 opinion of the Court of Appeals of Maryland in Metheny v. State, reports of his death in 2017 by the Associated Press, CBS Baltimore and The Independent, and later profiles by All That’s Interesting, Grunge, La Tercera and El Diario, listed at the end. The Baltimore Sun covered the case closely from 1996 to 2017, and several of these sources draw on its reporting; the Sun’s archive could not be consulted directly for this article. Where the sources disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Metheny killed, their families, the survivors and his own family are not named.

A forklift driver on a pallet lot

At his 1998 sentencing hearing his defence put before the jury evidence of his family background and difficult childhood, his history of substance abuse, his military service, his steady employment and the fact that he was a father, the Court of Appeals recorded.

By the mid-1990s he was working as a forklift driver at a pallet company, Grunge and El Diario report, and living in a small trailer by the fence of its yard, a lot about the size of a city block stacked with thousands of wooden pallets near Washington Boulevard in south-west Baltimore. The court’s description of the yard comes from the statement of facts agreed by both sides in his case; The Independent also places the trailer on the lot of a pallet company. The Independent reported that he was nicknamed “Tiny”.

The axe killings and the acquittal

Before his 1996 arrest, Metheny was charged with killing two homeless men with an axe at a makeshift camp in South Baltimore, according to the Associated Press. Grunge, All That’s Interesting and La Tercera place the killings under a bridge and say he was held in jail for about a year and a half awaiting trial. A jury acquitted him. Grunge puts that down to insufficient evidence; All That’s Interesting and La Tercera say the bodies had not been found.

After his later arrest, Metheny said he had in fact killed both men. The AP reported that he said he had lied and got away with the killings; The Independent, that he later said he had been guilty. He was never convicted of those deaths, and what he said about them remains his claim.

December 1996: arrest and confessions

Metheny was arrested at about 1.40 a.m. on 15 December 1996 by Baltimore police officers and members of an FBI task force, in what the agreed statement of facts calls an unrelated matter, and taken to the homicide unit. He was 41, according to El Diario and an AP photograph caption. Accounts of what led police to him differ. Grunge, La Tercera and El Diario say a woman escaped from his trailer and went to the police, and that he did not resist arrest; All That’s Interesting says he was arrested for assault; El Diario also says the arrest followed the discovery of a woman’s body under a trailer at the pallet yard. The court opinion says only that he was arrested as a suspect in a murder separate from the one before it.

Over the next three weeks Metheny gave detectives a series of statements, after waiving his rights each time, the Court of Appeals recorded. On the afternoon of his arrest he told Detective Homer Pennington of the Baltimore homicide unit that about two years earlier he had taken a woman to his trailer, strangled her and buried her, and he drew a diagram of the grave. Two days later he was taken to the yard to point out the spot. A search with cadaver dogs failed. Detectives brought him back, and after some hesitation he indicated a place about ten feet from the first. On 18 December 1996 a forensic excavation team recovered a woman’s skeletal remains there, and she was identified through dental records. The Independent and El Diario also report that he led police to the remains within days of his arrest and that dental records confirmed who she was.

The medical examiner concluded that the woman had most probably died of asphyxia. Metheny told detectives he had killed her in early July 1994. Asked why, he said, among other things, that it had given him a ‘sense of power’; The Independent quoted another part of the same answer.

What he claimed, and what could be confirmed

In his confessions and in later interviews, Metheny claimed responsibility for many more deaths than he was ever charged with. The AP, The Independent, El Diario and La Tercera all put his own count at about ten; All That’s Interesting gives 13, and says police connected him to three. According to the AP, he said he had dumped other bodies in the Patapsco River, which runs through south Baltimore, but none were ever found. The Independent reported that police were unable to gather enough evidence to charge him with all the killings he described, and El Diario that he was convicted of only two because the evidence in the others was insufficient. El Diario also reports that he was linked to the death of another woman, but that the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

The best-known of his claims, reported by The Independent from a written account it called unverified, is that he mixed human flesh with pork and sold it from a roadside barbecue stand. None of the sources consulted for this article reports that investigators confirmed it. It does not appear in the facts agreed by prosecutors and defence in the 1994 case, as the Court of Appeals quoted them, or in the AP and CBS Baltimore reports of his death. La Tercera, recounting the story in 2023, concluded that it is not clear how many people he actually killed.

Even in the case that sent him to death row, the state relied heavily on his word. Because the 1994 killing went undiscovered until he described it, the Court of Appeals wrote, the prosecution depended to a great extent on his own version of events, and as to what happened and why there was only one account: his.

Two cases, two sentences

Metheny was convicted of the murders of two women: the woman he had told detectives about, killed in 1994, and a woman killed in 1996, according to CBS Baltimore, the AP and The Independent. CBS Baltimore, citing police, said he had buried both women’s remains at the pallet yard, and that his sentences also covered kidnapping and sexual assault.

The 1996 case was decided first. By the time of the sentencing hearing in the 1994 case, in November 1998, he was already serving life without the possibility of parole for the 1996 killing, Detective Pennington told the jury, according to the Court of Appeals.

The 1994 case was moved from Baltimore City to the Circuit Court for Baltimore County because of pretrial publicity. Prosecutors gave notice that they would seek the death penalty. On 25 September 1998 Metheny pleaded guilty to premeditated murder and robbery but chose to have a jury decide his sentence. Under Maryland law at the time, a murder could carry the death penalty only if the state proved one of a list of aggravating circumstances. The one prosecutors relied on was robbery: after killing the woman, Metheny had taken her clothing and purse and buried them separately from her body.

The hearing began on 9 November 1998. Four days later, on 13 November, the jury sentenced him to death, and the judge added a concurrent ten-year term for the robbery. CBS Baltimore and El Diario also report the 1998 death sentence. The verdict sheet showed doubts. Some jurors listed his life history and drug history as mitigating factors, and the form carried the note: “There is some concern that the circumstances of the robbery constitute sufficient aggravating circumstances.” The trial judge, who was bound by law to impose the jury’s sentence, later told the Court of Appeals that his only reservation was that Metheny was eligible for death solely because of the robbery. Someone who had killed in the same way but buried the victim in her clothes, he wrote, would not have qualified.

The Court of Appeals

Every death sentence in Maryland went automatically to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. It ruled on 24 July 2000. Writing for the majority of four, Judge Harrell upheld the murder and robbery convictions but held that the robbery could not support a death sentence. The words of the statute, a murder committed “while committing” a robbery, required more than coincidence between the two crimes, he wrote; a robbery that was an afterthought to a murder did not count. Because Metheny’s intent to take the clothing and purse had formed only after the woman was dead, no rational jury could have found the aggravating circumstance. The court vacated the death sentence and sent the case back to Baltimore County for a new sentencing, ruling out any new death sentence because no valid aggravating circumstance remained.

Chief Judge Bell and Judges Eldridge and Cathell dissented from the majority’s reasoning but agreed with the result, so all seven judges voted to set the death sentence aside. In the dissent, Judge Cathell argued that the robbery had not been proved at all. He wrote that the death penalty had really been sought because Metheny was a serial murderer, if the record and his statements were accurate, but that the legislature had not made serial murder a capital offence: a person who killed two people in one incident could be sentenced to death, while someone who killed once a month for a year could not. In his view, the prosecution had stretched the law beyond what the legislature intended.

Life without parole, and death in custody

After the ruling Metheny was resentenced to life in prison without parole, CBS Baltimore reported in 2017, citing the Baltimore Sun; El Diario also describes two life terms without parole. When he died, the AP and The Independent reported, he was serving two life sentences.

He was held at Western Correctional Institution, a state prison in Cumberland, in western Maryland. On the afternoon of Saturday 5 August 2017 he was found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead, the AP and CBS Baltimore reported; CBS Baltimore, citing the state’s corrections department, and The Independent put the time at about 3 p.m. He was 62. Corrections officials described their inquiry into his death as routine, the AP reported; CBS Baltimore said an investigation was ongoing. No cause of death was given in any of the reports consulted for this article.

Where the accounts differ

• How many he claimed: the AP, The Independent, El Diario and La Tercera put his own count at about ten; All That’s Interesting says he claimed 13 and that police connected him to three killings. Only two ended in murder convictions.
• What led to the arrest: Grunge, La Tercera and El Diario say a woman escaped from his trailer and alerted police; All That’s Interesting says he was arrested for assault; El Diario also links the arrest to the discovery of a body at the pallet yard; the agreed statement of facts quoted by the Court of Appeals says only that police and an FBI task force arrested him ‘in an unrelated matter’.
• Who changed the death sentence: CBS Baltimore, citing the Sun, says an appeals court overturned it and sent him to life without parole; the Court of Appeals opinion shows the court vacated it and sent the case back to the Baltimore County circuit court for resentencing; All That’s Interesting says a judge overturned it in 2000 and imposed two consecutive life terms.
• The acquittal: Grunge says he was acquitted for lack of evidence; All That’s Interesting and La Tercera say the bodies of the two men were never found; the AP says only that he was acquitted and later said he had lied. All That’s Interesting dates those killings to 1994; El Diario says he was charged in 1995.
• Where the remains were: CBS Baltimore, citing police, said both women were buried under his trailer; the Court of Appeals record places the 1994 grave in a wooded area by the yard, where he said he dragged her body, and El Diario says the 1996 victim was found under a trailer.
• Which part of Baltimore: the AP and The Independent say south Baltimore; CBS Baltimore and the court record say south-west Baltimore.
• The barbecue claim: The Independent described it as an unverified written account; All That’s Interesting, Grunge, La Tercera and El Diario recount it as his confession or testimony without reporting any confirmation.
• How he died: the AP and CBS Baltimore reported only that he was found unresponsive and that an investigation was under way; La Tercera wrote in 2023 that he had taken pills in an apparent suicide attempt, a claim not found in any other source consulted.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Metheny bald, with a full beard, against hanging lengths of knotted rope. An axe stands on one side; a syringe and a spoon lie on the other, beside medallions holding a fixed-blade knife and a coil of rope. In one corner is a map of the United States with Maryland marked and labelled; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figure 10, which echoes his own claims rather than his two convictions. The nameplate reads “Joseph Roy Metheny” and “1976 – 1995”, with a judge’s gavel and a figure behind bars beneath it. For other case files, see Ed Gein, Richard Kuklinski and Anthony Sowell.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Metheny v. State, No. 149, September Term 1998 (opinion by Harrell, J.; dissent by Cathell, J.)Court of Appeals of Maryland, 24 July 2000
2. Murderer of 2, who claimed he killed more, dies in Md. prisonAssociated Press (WJLA), 7 August 2017
3. Convicted Baltimore serial killer found dead in cellCBS Baltimore (WJZ), 8 August 2017
4. Joe Metheny dead: Serial killer who claimed he put women’s remains into barbecue sandwiches dies in prisonThe Independent, 8 August 2017
5. The grizzly crimes of Joe MethenyGrunge, 2 December 2020
6. El desgarrador caso del asesino que vendía hamburguesas con la carne de sus víctimasLa Tercera, 25 October 2023
7. En diciembre de 1996 la policía de Baltimore arrestó a Joseph Roy MethenyEl Diario (Ecuador), 2 June 2025
8. Joe Metheny, the killer who made his victims into burgersAll That’s Interesting, 10 February 2026

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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