Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, and this week on Pushing Up Lilies, we’re revisiting one of the most disturbing cases we’ve ever covered – Joe ‘The Cannibal’ Metheny. This bone-chilling episode takes a deep dive into the twisted world of a serial killer who didn’t just take lives… he served them up.
Metheny ran a roadside food stand, where unsuspecting customers may have eaten more than just burgers.
Join me as we dissect the dark details of his gruesome crimes, his twisted confessions, and the unimaginable horrors behind his so-called business. You might want to think twice before your next roadside meal.
* Listener discretion is advised.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I’m your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 I always wonder when I see little fly by night food trucks, if they’re legit and I know that they are inspected and are supposed to be on the up and up as far as what they’re serving.
0:45 But it always kind of made me wonder like, what exactly am I eating in this story?
0:52 It’s going to make you wonder even more.
0:55This is a story of John Methane.
0:58 This guy was born on March 2nd of 1955 in Baltimore, Maryland and he lost his father at a very young age.
1:09 I know that in the past we’ve talked about different serial killers and people who have a history of murdering and injuring people many times have a troubled childhood.
1:21 But this guy lost his father at the age of six.
1:25 His mother didn’t spend a lot of time with him.
1:29 Mother had six kids and she worked double shifts as a lot of us mothers do.
1:38 And the father was an alcoholic and actually died in a car accident when John was six.
1:45 So John suffered from depression, oftentimes his parents would send him to live with other families, not even necessarily related to him.
1:58 Many times he falsely claimed that his mom was dead.
2:02 They were very poor, and she worked as a barmaid waitress and also a food truck driver.
2:11 Although he was a polite guy and was an above average student, he was 6 ft one and very overweight.
2:21 And so in the nineties, his nickname was Tiny.
2:26 He had a bit of a different childhood in 1973.
2:33 At the age of 18, he joined the army.
2:36 And at that time, he cut off all ties with his mom in the nineties, he spent time in bars and occasionally would live in homeless camps.
2:49 I don’t know if they have a lot of homeless camps in the area where you’re at.
2:54 But I know here there are many and they’re basically off in a wooded area.
3:00 A lot of them have tents, some don’t, but they just kind of live off the grid basically.
3:07 And he would smoke weed and drink alcohol.
3:12 And he did occasionally work as a forklift driver when he did get married.
3:17 He became really bitter when his wife left him.
3:21 And that’s when his revenge began.
3:25 So reportedly that was around 1995.
3:30 A few months after his wife, who was said to be a drug addict left him and took their six-year-old son.
3:39 In a rage, he brought an ax under a bridge where he thought her drug dealers would be and his intention was to harm or injure them, maybe kill them.
3:51 I’m not sure because they had in a sense, ruined his marriage and her drug addiction had caused him to lose his child.
4:01 So at that time, he instead found two homeless men under this bridge and chopped them to death with this ax.
4:12 Now, even though it is believed that he did commit these murders, he was later acquitted due to lack of evidence, but he told police that he had killed three more people that night and he weighted them down with rocks and threw them in the river.
4:32 Three years later, divers never found anything again, the case was dropped.
4:39 Later, he claimed to have lured Cathy Ann Magaziner who was 45 and Kimberly Spicer who was 26 to his trailer killed, dismembered, and ate them prior to preparing the rest of the remains as burger meat.
4:59 Ok.
4:59 This is where it gets weird y’all.
5:02 He confessed to eating and grinding up victim’s body parts which he mixed with pork and beef and served to customers at his roadside, open pit barbecue stands.
5:17 At that point, he was nicknamed cannibal and of course no one who ate at his barbecue stand was the wiser.
5:28 Although I can say that I saw a picture of this guy and I would not order any food from anybody who looked like that.
5:35 He is a completely scary person.
5:39 His victim, Kathy Magaziner was actually a 39-year-old prostitute.
5:46 He strangled her and buried her in a shallow grave and then dug her up.
5:52 Six months later, removed her head, put it in a box in the trash and then of course, buried her in this grave.
6:00 And it was over two years before her body was actually found.
6:07 Randall Brewer and Randy Picker were the homeless men that he had supposedly murdered prior, there was not enough evidence for him to be convicted of that.
6:20 But in 1996 Kimberly Spicer was stabbed with a knife.
6:27 Now he asked a friend to help him bury her and the friend told the police at that point he was arrested for murder.
6:36 So he was arrested in 96.
6:39 He did confess to his crimes.
6:42 And that’s when he told the police that he had actually murdered some people and thrown their bodies in the river.
6:47 But again, they could never be found, but it seemed like he had thought it out quite a bit because he had talked about weighing them down.
6:56 But it’s disturbing that he actually served these people as burger meat at his roadside stand.
7:06 He claimed to have cut the meat up and put it in Tupperware in the freezer.
7:12 And then he opened an open pit beef stand where he served real pork and roast beef sandwiches.
7:21 But then he said that humans tasted similar to pork and when mixed together, no one would be able to tell the difference.
7:31 Now, all of this came to an end again in 96 when he kidnapped Rita Kemper, who was also reportedly a prostitute.
7:41 She actually survived a beating and was able to escape from him and went to notify police.
7:50 Now this all happened in Maryland, mind you, he’s in a barbecue stand making burgers and people that ate there were unaware that they were actually consuming human flesh.
8:05 Supposedly, when he kidnapped Rita Kemper, she refused to have sex and ran away, but he chased after her and beat her and then he tried to rape her and told her that he was going to kill her and then she managed to escape through a window.
8:23 He typically chose young white sex workers who were addicted to heroin and cocaine because obviously that would make his job a little bit easier if they were somewhat debilitated.
8:36 But he had said in the long run that he killed up to 10 people.
8:42 His attorney said that drugs and alcohol actually made him violent and that was the excuse basically that was given.
8:52 He did say that he would never say he was sorry because he wasn’t.
8:58 He actually admitted to enjoying, it was willing to give up his life for what he’d done.
9:05 So this is obviously a sick individual.
9:09 After two hours when this went to court, he was convicted of the murders of Spicer Magaziner and then Tony Angracia who was a 28-year-old.
9:21 He received the death penalty initially.
9:25 Well, I believe first of all, in 97 he was sentenced to 50 years and then again, in 98 he actually received the death penalty, but the sentence was decreased to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
9:44 What would you do if years later, you’ve discovered that you actually ate at that roadside stand and had eaten human flesh instead of what you thought was barbecue.
9:59 I cannot even imagine this guy was found dead in his cell in the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland in 2017 at the age of 62.
10:12 So he’s not been dead that long, only about five years.
10:17 It makes you really think about this story when you eat barbecue.
10:22 And of course, we all heard the story of Ed Gein.
10:26 You know, there were a lot of that he ate his victims, and this is the movie that Texas Chainsaw massacre was made about Ed Gein, even though, you know, he reportedly made lamp shades out of human flesh and made soup bowls out of skulls and all those kinds of things.
10:46 Ed Gein was not one who ever ate his victims.
10:51 But of course, in the movie, you know, it depicts them hanging on hooks out in his garage.
10:56 And that’s the first thing we picture is, oh my God, you know, he’s serving these people up.
11:02 But this guy was actually doing this, making money off of it, which is just sickening.
11:10 Of course, you know, his mom denies that he was abused.
11:16 She said that if he was abused, it was his own fault.
11:20 And of course, he had lied about her being dead when he joined the military.
11:24 He claimed that he served in Vietnam.
11:27 But his military records only indicated that he served in Germany for a brief time in 73.
11:34 So his mom also denied that he served in Vietnam.
11:37 But she did say that a lot of his problems were because of his drug addiction.
11:43 His known body count stands at 10.
11:46 But there may be more if all of his confessions are to be believed, we don’t really know for sure.
11:55 But he claimed that in 95 he murdered five people in the span of seven hours.
12:01 So that sounds, you know, a little bit farfetched.
12:04 But of course, there was lack of evidence.
12:07 There was also some confusion as to whether or not you could kill that many people in such a short time.
12:13 Magaziner, his first victim was positively identified after her skull was found and they were actually able to use dental records to identify her.
12:26 Now, when he killed Spicer, he brought her to his trailer and then he killed her and dismembered her body, and he discarded parts of her body under some wooden pallets where he worked.
12:39 The third person that he claimed to have killed the night he killed the two homeless men was a fisherman near the bridge where he said that he murdered him with a metal pipe.
12:53 He claimed he dumped the six workers and the fisherman’s body into the river.
12:59 This guy has, I mean, who knows, who knows exactly how many people that he murdered.
13:05 But to say that he actually enjoyed killing and that he wasn’t going to apologize because the apology would be a lie.
13:14 He went on to say that God knew all about what he did and that he was happy to be judged.
13:20 His murder rampage started out as revenge but ended up as a passion for the taste of blood and the overwhelming sense of power that you get from taking the life of someone else.
13:32 Definitely crazy.
13:36 But I mean, you know, someone is like that is truly evil when they say that they’re not going to apologize because it would be a lie.
13:45 So to openly say that and to say that he is open to God’s judgment, he would have had to have been nuts.
13:52 This guy was 48 years old.
13:54 He weighed about 450 pounds.
13:57 And so there’s a couple that also did very much.
14:00 The same thing.
14:02 There is actually a documentary about it too.
14:06 This is where a serial killer and her husband chopped up and killed her former lover and then served his remains at a neighborhood barbecue.
14:17 And this happened in 2014.
14:20 She later injected her husband with a lethal dose of heroin in 2016.
14:26 But there’s a docuseries on investigation discovery called Dead North that talks about Cochran who was 36.
14:36 She admitted in court that her and her husband lured her lover who was Chris Regan inside their home and shot and dismembered him.
14:44 This happened in Michigan in the upper peninsula and made a pact that they would get rid of anyone involved in extramarital affairs.
14:53 Neighbors said they believed that they were served human remains, possibly that of Cochran’s lover at a barbecue.
15:03 One friend who was interviewed on the documentary said that the burgers that they ate were strange tasting and of course, didn’t realize at the time that they could have possibly been human.
15:17 Cochran later told investigators that she killed her husband two years after that because he took the only good thing in her life, which was her lover, the one that they served to the neighbors.
15:30 Cochran’s family also told investigators that she may have killed as many as nine people and buried their bodies in various spots across the Midwest.
15:41 I mean, Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee, Minnesota and the identities and locations of all these bodies still remain a mystery.
15:50 But she was sentenced to life in prison without parole in May of 2017 for Regan’s murder.
15:57 And that again was her lover.
16:00 She was then convicted later of murdering her husband in May of 2018.
16:06 And she was sentenced to another 65 years in jail for that.
16:10 Apparently people have decided that that’s one way to try to hide some of the evidence is to serve them up to friends.
16:20 Apparently, he would go out and find another homeless person or a sex worker when he really needed additional human meat to make burgers for this roadside stand.
16:34 But he did say that he regretted that he wasn’t able to kill the two people that he really wanted to kill, which were his girlfriend who took his six-year-old away from him and the guy that she left him for.
16:50 So think twice next time when you stop at a roadside stand to eat barbecue.
16:57 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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17:11 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.