Joe Metheny, also known as “The Cannibal” Metheny, stands out with his 1.85 cm height and 205 kg body weight.
So, why and how did Joe commit these unbelievable murders, and what was so infuriating as to make hamburgers from his victims?
Born in the USA in 1955, Joe Metheny had a tragic childhood.
The unfortunate boy, who lost his father at a young age, grows up with his 5 siblings and has a very indifferent mother. Joe, who stands out among his siblings with his quick wit and school success, takes part in the army in the first place during his youth.
After leaving the army, he works in sawmills and then makes a living as a truck driver. Continuing his life as a very ordinary person, Joe starts living with his girlfriend in 1994 and they have a son.
Joe, who is always on long journeys due to his job, comes home one day and cannot find his girlfriend and son there. At this point, things start to spiral.
A drug addict like his girlfriend, Joe is furious at this abandonment and thinks his girlfriend is cheating on him with another man. Joe searches every corner for his girlfriend, and as a last resort, he visits a bridge under which his girlfriend went when he was on drugs.
However, here she meets two homeless men, not her lover. Unable to learn where his lover is from these people, Joe kills them both with the ax he brought with him, as if taking all his anger out on them. Meanwhile, he does not hesitate to kill a fisherman whom he suspects to have committed this murder.
Panicked, Joe Metheny dismembers the bodies and throws them into the river to hide the evidence.
After these 3 murders, he was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for the innocent killing of homeless people in 1994, but was released at the end of this period. As soon as he gets out of prison, he commits 2 more murders. Their victims this time are women.
Joe, who was working in the factory and continuing his life in the trailer at the time of these murders, cuts these corpses, which are claimed to be prostitutes, to pieces and freezes some of them. The hard reason why he freezes and hides these corpses is to make hamburgers from these parts.
The ruthless man prepares hamburger meatballs by mixing these parts, which the women separated from their bodies, with beef and pork.
But they don’t stop there and Joe, thinking that pork and human meat are very similar in taste, starts selling these hamburgers mixed with human meat by setting up a roadside barbecue stand in Baltimore.
Even more terrifying, Joe Metheny turns it into a business over time and begins to commit new murders as he needs human meat to make his hamburgers, which he calls “special meat”.
Known to have committed 10 more murders for the sake of obtaining human flesh, this ruthless man is caught in 1996 when a victim he kidnapped goes to the police.
When Joe is caught, he confesses to committing 8 murders in total, but is tried for 2 murders due to lack of evidence. He also claims to the police that he is addicted to drugs and works in Vietnam, but the necessary evidence cannot be found.
Joe says that he eventually caught and killed the parts of the people he had put into storage containers and frozen this way, selling hamburgers he prepared by mixing human meat at the barbecue stand, and that no one could tell the difference between human meat and pork.
He also added in his statement that he attempted to kill another woman because he could not find meat to put in his hamburgers and that he was in great sadness because he could not kill this woman.
The sentence of Joe Metheny, who was sentenced to death in the first place after these crimes, was later converted to life imprisonment.
Unable to find any other evidence regarding the murders he committed, Joe wanted to be sentenced to death for years, but his wish was not fulfilled and he spent the last 22 years in prison. Jon Metheny was found dead in a prison cell in Cumberland in 2018 at the age of 62, and his cause of death, like some things in his life, remains a mystery.
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