Once inside, McKinley nailed the slats back into place, wrapped a blanket around himself and waited. An hour later he was lifted on to a flat-bed truck and taken to Newark airport. Fifteen hours and four plane journeys later he was delivered to his parent's address 1,500 miles away in Dallas, and within days McKinley had made international headlines.

Sitting outside the local branch of Starbucks in his hometown of DeSoto, Texas, McKinley looks like any intelligent university graduate (he has a degree in microbiology). He is neatly dressed in a short-sleeved Ralph Lauren shirt, jeans and brown shoes and constantly checks his mobile phone for text messages. Eleven months after his adventure, he is no longer under his attorney-imposed gagging order and is free to explain why he risked his life posting himself home.

"I wanted to end it all," he says, staring at the floor. "I was tired of everything. My girlfriend and I had split up and I had begun to live past my means. I was only earning $2,500 (£1,370) a month working in retail. With rent and bills it was killing me. I spent $15,000 (£8,220) in less than three months living in New York."

Last summer McKinley moved in with a friend in Florida to try to alleviate his debt. He got a job with a financial company and, in his words, "finally began to get a leg up". He was ready to return to New York with some money in his pocket. "My girlfriend and I had ended on a bad note and I wanted to smooth things over," he says. "But that was a big mistake and it just made things worse. While I was away she had gone overdrawn on our joint credit card and checking account and I was back to square one and ready to give up."

He says he was "too chicken" to kill himself, but "decided to go home to Dallas where I knew there was a safety net. Mum and dad always said I'd never make it in New York because I was a small-town boy and they were right. So at the end of August last year I told them I was coming home.

"I had left my computer and some clothes at a friend's house in Long Island while I was in Florida, so I went and picked that stuff up and walked back into Queens. It was while I was passing a local church that I noticed the large wooden crate and told some church workers to keep an eye on it for me as I wanted to use it to ship some stuff back to Dallas. That's when it dawned on me that this would be the cheapest way to get home."

Asked whether he can now see this wasn't, perhaps, very sensible, McKinley smiles. "I had no choice," he says. "I had far too much pride to ask mum and dad or my friends for the money. And I had literally no money of my own and no credit card that would work. But I did have a UPS [United Parcel Service] charge card which I could pay off in instalments. Even though it cost more money than a passenger flight it was the only way."

McKinley called UPS to schedule a pick-up for 4pm on September 5, and was quoted a price of $688 (£377). "I was told it would be an overnight delivery," he says. "I had measured the box before to make sure I could sit straight up and that I had enough elbow room." A flight on local budget airline America West for the same date this year costs $240 (£130) for a single trip to Dallas.

"I was taken to a warehouse before being loaded into the first cargo plane. I now realise I was lucky to have been placed in a pressurised hold. I had called three times to tell them I was shipping expensive computer equipment and didn't want any of the microchips to go bad but I later discovered the information they gave me was for a commercial airline, not a cargo plane, so I could have been placed in a non-pressurised hold. I could have died.

When he was being loaded, he says, he tried not to cough or sneeze. "I was put on a conveyor and started bumping into other containers. I could hear beeping noises and somebody calling out numbers. Finally someone said: 'Everything tagged. Give the pilots the information they need.' Then the voices disappeared and I heard the door close.

"We taxied on the runway for a while and I knew it was too late to turn back. After about 20 minutes I removed the slats from my crate and squeezed myself out. I noticed some NBC TV equipment and I walked around a couple of feet within the container. I was happy to be going home but I was nervous."

An investigation by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) later revealed that McKinley had flown from Newark, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York, and on to Fort Wayne, Indiana. There the crate was transferred to another cargo plane in the early hours of the following morning. He arrived in Dallas at 7am on September 6.

"The second plane was hell," McKinley recalls. "That's when I really wanted to get out. It was so cold when we stopped at Fort Wayne. I could hear dogs barking in the warehouse and it felt like I sat there for hours. I could see a US customs building and other containers heading for huge scanners and I remember thinking, 'That's it. I'm going to get caught.' But I was one of the first palettes to be put on the plane.

"I began to feel sleepy and when I woke up we had landed. I just knew we'd made it to Dallas. You can just feel it when you're home.

"My mum signed for the crate at the front door. The driver climbed back into the truck and backed it into the alleyway at the side of my house. Suddenly, as he was letting the lifting gate down, the slats fell out of my crate. I quickly leant out and picked them up but as he came round to the back he saw me peeking through the gaps. He just let out this sigh and said 'Oh man.'"

McKinley says his mum and dad were standing there looking bemused. "My dad said, 'This is like something you see on TV.' Mum just said, 'I don't know what you've done and I don't want to know, but you're home and safe now.'"

The delivery driver called the police, however, and by the time McKinley had showered and changed, two DeSoto officers were in his living room. "I was interviewed and they accused me of lying about the whole trip," he says. "They suggested I was a terrorist and could have climbed out of the crate and attacked the pilot. He was imprisoned for almost a month, charged with 10 felonies, mostly connected with terrorism. Only one eventually went to court. "On February 4 I pleaded guilty to a charge of 'misdemeanour stowaway' and was given four months' house arrest and a $1,500 (£823) fine. The charges that were dropped carried a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 so I think I did OK."

McKinley's journey exposed several loopholes in cargo security in the US and his success in slipping through security sparked a debate around screening packages. His father, a chemical engineer, paid around $7,000 (£3,843) in restitution to UPS to compensate the company for its troubles.

But for McKinley, who is currently working in a local branch of Wal-Mart, the journey hasn't quite ended. "I'm being flown to Japan next month by a TV company," he says. "They want to interview me and do a re-enactment of what happened. I don't know how much money I'm getting for it. My lawyer is dealing with that." There is also an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show "in the works". "I know they'll make a joke about it like everyone else, but I'm used to it now."