On December 8, 1996, Rita Kemper was in a trailer at a pallet company in south Baltimore with Joseph Metheny. They had been using drugs, prosecutors said, and when she refused to have sex with him and ran, he chased her down, beat her and dragged her back. "I'm going to kill you and bury you in the woods with the other girls," he told her, by her account. She got out through a window and found police officers nearby. A few days later Metheny asked a friend to help him bury a body he had been hiding at the site for about a month. The friend went to the police. On December 15, as he and the company's owner left a Christmas party, both were arrested; the owner, Joe Stein, was charged as an accessory after the fact.
Metheny was born in 1955, worked as a forklift driver, and lived in the trailer on the pallet yard. He had been tried once before. He had been charged with killing two homeless men, Brewer and Piker, and in July 1996 a jury found the evidence insufficient to convict him. He later said he had killed them anyway, and told police he had weighted three people with rocks and put them in the river; divers found nothing.
The body under the tarp was Kimberly Lynn Spicer, whom he had stabbed in mid-November 1996. After his arrest he led police to a shallow grave at the pallet yard where he had reburied the decapitated remains of Cathy Ann Magaziner; much of the skull was missing, and she was identified from dental records. Reports of the two women's ages differ widely. Police said he chose young white sex workers who were addicted to heroin or cocaine. Magaziner's father had died in 1982 and no family came forward, and her high school alumni association paid for her cremation.
He confessed at length, to reporters as well as police, claiming up to ten killings, and said he had cut up victims, mixed the flesh with pork and beef and sold it from a roadside barbecue stand. No stand, no additional victim and no evidence of any such thing was ever found, and he was never charged with any killing but those of Spicer and Magaziner.
In 1997 he received fifty years for the kidnapping and attempted sex offense against Rita Kemper; the jury acquitted him of attempting to murder her. He was sentenced to life without parole for Spicer's murder. The Magaziner case was moved from Baltimore City to Baltimore County, and on November 13, 1998, a jury there sentenced him to death after hearing him ask for it. "The words 'I'm sorry' will never come out, for they would be a lie," he said. "I just enjoyed it." Some later accounts attach the death sentence to Spicer and the life term to Magaziner; the Baltimore Sun's report of the sentencing gives it this way. The Court of Appeals of Maryland overturned the death sentence in 2000 and he was resentenced to life. He was found dead in his cell at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland on August 5, 2017, aged sixty-two.