Joe Metheny was convicted of murdering two women in Baltimore in the 1990s. He was a forklift worker who lived alone in a small trailer on the lot of a pallet company on a dead-end street in Southwest Baltimore. In December 1996 the body of Kimberly Spicer was found under a trailer a few feet from where he lived, and he was arrested. Within hours he began telling detectives about a woman he said he had strangled and buried in 1994. On December 18 her remains, later identified as those of Catherine Magaziner, were dug up.
He told police and others that he had killed about 10 people. Searches found no evidence for the other claims, and he was never charged with any killing beyond those two, apart from an earlier case in which a jury acquitted him. A Baltimore County jury sentenced him to death in 1998 for the Magaziner murder. In 2000 the Court of Appeals of Maryland, the state's highest court, vacated that sentence in a ruling that turned on her clothing and purse. He spent the rest of his life in prison and died in his cell in 2017.
The Baltimore Sun described Metheny in December 1996 as 41 years old and living in a truck trailer at the pallet company where he worked. The Court of Appeals, setting out the facts agreed at his guilty plea, described the trailer as a small one-room unit standing against the south fence of the company's lot.
The court's description of the lot explains why no one saw anything. It was about the size of a city block and stood on a dead-end street with little foot traffic, next to a wooded area. Thousands of wooden pallets were stacked on it. It had a locked gate and an eight-foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire. No business was done there, or at the neighboring companies, in the evening.
Little about his earlier life was reported. The Sun reported in 1996 that he had prior convictions for assault and for drug possession. At his 1998 sentencing, his lawyers told the jury about his family background, a difficult childhood, a history of substance abuse, his military service, his steady employment and the fact that he was a father, according to the Court of Appeals. Some of the jurors, though not all, found his life history and his drug history to be mitigating.
Before he was ever charged with killing a woman, Metheny stood trial for killing two men. Randy Piker and Randall Brewer, both 33, lived in a homeless camp known as Tent City under the Hanover Street Bridge in South Baltimore. Their bodies were found on August 2, 1995. They had been killed with an ax.
Metheny was charged with their murders. In July 1996 a Circuit Court jury found the evidence insufficient to convict him, and he was acquitted, the Sun reported. Police said there had been arguments and threats among the camp's residents before the killings, including threats to kill everyone in the camp. On the same day the two men were found, another homeless man was killed. A man from a rival camp, whom police linked to the ax, was charged with first-degree murder in that third death; he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to eight years with all but six years and three months suspended.
The acquittal stands. In law Metheny did not kill Randy Piker or Randall Brewer. Years later, according to the Associated Press, he said he had lied and gotten away with those killings. That is his claim only; no court ever tested it.
Kimberly Spicer lived in South Baltimore. Her mother reported her missing on November 11, 1996. The Sun gave her age as 26 in its December 18 report and, in a correction attached to the same page, as 23.
According to the Sun, police believed that Metheny met her at a tavern shortly before she was stabbed to death, and that she was killed inside his trailer. Her body was found under a trailer less than 10 feet from where he lived. Detective Homer Pennington of the Baltimore police homicide unit told the paper that furniture had been taken out of the trailer and that someone had tried to clean up bloodstains.
At about 1:40 a.m. on December 15, 1996, Baltimore police and members of an FBI task force arrested Metheny in South Baltimore as a suspect in Kimberly Spicer's death, the Court of Appeals recorded. The Sun reported that he and the owner of the pallet company were arrested together as they left a Christmas party. The owner was charged as an accessory after the fact, accused of disposing of evidence; how that charge ended was not reported. Metheny was charged with first-degree murder.
The same afternoon, at 3:05 p.m. on December 15, Metheny gave a statement to Detectives Pennington and Newton of the homicide unit. In it he admitted strangling a woman and burying her, and he drew a diagram of where she was. The account that follows is the one the Court of Appeals set out from his statements, and as the court noted, his own words were the only account of her death.
He said he met Catherine Magaziner one night in July 1994 and took her back to his trailer. About an hour after he brought her there, he strangled her, first with his hands and then with an extension cord. He buried her body in a shallow grave about two feet deep. He said he buried her clothes and her purse in a different place, and described that burial as "more like kickin' dirt over top of 'em."
He said that about six months later he went back to the grave and removed part of her remains, which were never recovered.
Asked why he had killed her, he answered, "Sense of power. I don't know. Vulnerable." He also told detectives, "I had no real excuse why other than I like to do it." In statements given later with his lawyer present, on December 31, 1996, and January 3, 1997, he dated the killing to July 3, 1994, saying he knew the Fourth of July "was right around that area."
The first search failed. Cadaver dogs alerted in the wrong places, the court recorded, because Metheny had pointed to the wrong spot and because of the slope of the ground and the way rainwater drained across it. On December 17 he gave an audio-taped statement and pointed out the burial area to Detective Pennington. Pennington then obtained a court order to bring him back to the site from jail, and Metheny indicated a place about 10 feet from where the team had dug. On December 18, in another taped statement at about 3:50 p.m., he described the exact location, and the remains were recovered that day.
The excavation was led by the forensic anthropologist Dr. William C. Rodriguez. He estimated that the body had been in the ground for two to three years. He found no remnants of clothing at all, and he reported that items such as rivets, zippers and the seams of jeans would be expected to survive if a body had been buried clothed. Her clothing and purse were never found. A forensic dentist, Dr. Bernard Levy, identified the remains as those of Catherine Magaziner. Dr. Margarita Korell performed the autopsy on December 19, 1996, and concluded that she had most probably died of asphyxia.
The court's record describes Catherine Magaziner only as an adult white woman. Nothing more about her life, her work or her family was reported.
Within days of his arrest, Metheny was telling detectives that he had killed others. The Sun reported on December 18, 1996, that he claimed two further killings unrelated to Kimberly Spicer, but had given no names or other details. Police searched two places in the city and went through dozens of missing-persons reports. "I don't think detectives have been able to pinpoint" any victims, said Sam Ringgold, a police spokesman.
By the end of his life the number he gave was 10, according to the Associated Press. He said he had thrown other bodies into the Patapsco River. Those bodies were never found. Apart from the two women and the two men of whose deaths he was acquitted, no killing was ever charged against him on the strength of his claims.
He was convicted of the murder of Kimberly Spicer and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, the Court of Appeals recorded. The court opinion does not give the date of that judgment or say whether it followed a trial or a plea.
CBS Baltimore reported in 2017 that he was serving two life sentences for kidnapping, sexual assault and two counts of murder. The kidnapping and sexual assault convictions concerned a woman who survived. The details of that case were not reported.
The Magaziner charges were filed first in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City and later moved to the Circuit Court for Baltimore County because of pretrial publicity. The State charged him with first-degree premeditated murder and robbery, and gave notice that it would seek either the death penalty or life without parole.
On September 25, 1998, Metheny pleaded guilty in Baltimore County to premeditated murder and to robbery, and chose to have a jury decide his sentence. The robbery charge rested on one fact: he had taken her clothing and purse and buried them. Under Maryland law at the time, a murder could carry a death sentence only if the State proved at least one of a list of aggravating circumstances. The one the State relied on was that he had killed her while committing a robbery.
The sentencing hearing began on November 9, 1998. Four days later, the jury unanimously sentenced him to death. It found the robbery aggravator proved and found that it outweighed the mitigating evidence. The judge added a concurrent sentence of 10 years for the robbery.
The jurors were not fully at ease with their own finding. On the verdict sheet they wrote: "There is some concern that the circumstances of the robbery constitute sufficient aggravating circumstances." The trial judge shared the concern. In his sentencing report to the Court of Appeals, he wrote that he had personal reservations, that the defendant "was only eligible for the death penalty because of the robbery," and that another defendant who had buried the victim in her clothes would not have qualified for death at all.
On appeal Metheny's lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Julia Doyle Bernhardt, argued that the State had not proved a robbery, that the evidence did not support the robbery aggravator, that the jury instructions on it were wrong, and that the verdict sheet showed the jury had not been unanimous. Assistant Attorney General Rachel Marblestone Kamins argued for the State.
The court decided the case on July 24, 2000. Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. wrote for the majority. On the first question the court upheld the plea: the facts in the record were enough for the trial judge to find a robbery, including the intent to steal. It also held that a defendant who pleads guilty to premeditated murder, rather than felony murder, can still be eligible for death under the robbery aggravator, so long as the State proves it.
The case turned on timing. The words "while committing or attempting to commit" a robbery, the majority held, require more than a coincidence between the killing and the taking. On Metheny's own account, which was the only evidence of what happened, she was dead before he formed any intent to keep her clothing and purse. The robbery was an afterthought. A rational fact-finder, the court said, "could not have found that Appellant murdered Ms. Magaziner while committing the robbery."
The court affirmed both convictions and the 10-year robbery sentence. It vacated the death sentence and sent the case back for a new sentencing that could not include death, because no valid aggravating circumstance remained. It did not need to reach his other two arguments.
Three members of the court, Chief Judge Bell, Judge Eldridge and Judge Cathell, dissented. The dissenting opinion agreed that the death sentence had to be vacated but disagreed with the majority's reasons, arguing that the agreed facts did not show a robbery in the first place. It was blunt about what lay behind the case. "Mr. Metheny, if the record and the statement he gave at his sentencing hearing are accurate, is a serial murderer," it said. "As such, he is the ultimate characterization of evil." But, it went on, "The Legislature, however, has not established serial murder as a death qualified offense." In the dissent's view the prosecution had sought death on the premise that he robbed the victim, when the real reason was his record as a serial murderer, a ground the law did not allow.
With death no longer possible, Metheny was resentenced. CBS Baltimore, citing the Baltimore Sun, reported in 2017 that the appeals ruling had sent him to life in prison without parole. The Associated Press reported in 2017 that he was serving two life sentences for the murders of two women in the 1990s.
He was held at Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. On a Saturday afternoon in August 2017, officers found him unresponsive in his cell, and he was pronounced dead, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services told CBS Baltimore. He was 62. No cause of death was given; corrections officials said they were carrying out a routine investigation. The Baltimore Sun reported his death first, and CBS Baltimore and the Associated Press reported it on August 8, 2017.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Kimberly Spicer, and the first-degree premeditated murder and robbery of Catherine Magaziner. CBS Baltimore also reports convictions for kidnapping and sexual assault of a woman who survived.
Tried and acquitted: the 1995 ax killings of Randy Piker and Randall Brewer at Tent City. He later said he had committed them, but a jury acquitted him.
Claimed only: a total of about 10 killings, including bodies he said he threw into the Patapsco River. Police searches in 1996 found no evidence for his claims, and no further victim has been identified.
Details that vary between sources: Kimberly Spicer's age (23 or 26 in the same Sun report); and the date of Catherine Magaziner's death, which rests entirely on his own statement that it was about July 3, 1994.
Later stories in books, television and websites have repeated more lurid claims he made about what he did with victims' remains. None of them is supported by the court record or by reliable news reports.
About July 3, 1994 (his own dating): Catherine Magaziner is killed after he takes her to his trailer at the pallet company.
August 2, 1995: Randy Piker and Randall Brewer, both 33, are found dead at Tent City under the Hanover Street Bridge.
July 1996: a Baltimore Circuit Court jury acquits Metheny of their murders.
November 11, 1996: Kimberly Spicer's mother reports her missing.
December 15, 1996, about 1:40 a.m.: Metheny is arrested in South Baltimore as a suspect in the Spicer killing; at 3:05 p.m. he admits strangling and burying a woman and draws a diagram.
December 17, 1996: taped statement; he points out the burial area.
December 18, 1996: after a failed first search, he indicates a spot about 10 feet away, and the remains are recovered.
December 19, 1996: autopsy; probable asphyxia.
December 31, 1996, and January 3, 1997: statements with counsel dating the killing to July 3, 1994.
February 10, 1997: Dr. Rodriguez's anthropology report.
Before 1998: sentenced to life without parole for the Spicer murder.
September 25, 1998: pleads guilty in Baltimore County to the premeditated murder and robbery of Catherine Magaziner.
November 9, 1998: sentencing hearing begins; four days later the jury sentences him to death.
July 24, 2000: Metheny v. State; the Court of Appeals vacates the death sentence and bars death on remand.
After 2000: resentenced; reported as life without parole.
August 2017: found unresponsive in his cell at Western Correctional Institution, Cumberland, on a Saturday afternoon; dies at 62.