Metheny was born in 1955 and worked as a labourer and forklift driver in Baltimore, living for a time in a trailer on the site of a pallet company in the south of the city.
He killed Kathy Ann Spicer, twenty-six, and Cathy Ann Magaziner, forty-five, in 1994 and 1995, and buried Magaziner on the pallet yard site. He was arrested on December 15, 1996 after a woman escaped from the trailer and went to the police.
He was convicted and sentenced to death on November 13, 1998. The Court of Appeals of Maryland overturned the death sentence on July 24, 2000, and he was resentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 2017.
The story that travels with his name is that he ran a roadside barbecue stand and mixed human flesh into the meat he sold, and that he had killed ten or more people. He gave that account in a written confession and repeated it to reporters. He later said he had made it up, and no evidence of a stand, of any additional victim, or of anything resembling it was ever found. The Maryland courts proceeded on two murders.
It is worth being direct about why the invention worked. It was quotable, it was unfalsifiable, and it was published widely without qualification, and it is now the first thing most sources say about him. The figure of four to ten and more is downstream of it.
Two established killings. The rest is a man in custody describing himself, and the entry says so.