Utter the name Joyce McKinney to Britons of a certain age, and you are inevitably rewarded with the briefest flash of incomprehension, followed by a gasp as their memories take them tumbling back to the dark days of early autumn, 1977.

It was a miserable time: there were clashes on the picket line at Grunwick, inflation was sprinting away at 13%, Elvis had just died and a band called Baccara were at Number One with Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. And then, as if to lift the spirits of a nation, along came the most unlikely, the most baffling, the most downright weird news story.

A Mormon missionary from Utah called Kirk Anderson, who was going door-to-door in Ewell, Surrey, was kidnapped at gunpoint by McKinney, a former cheerleader and beauty queen from North Carolina. With the help of a friend, Keith May, McKinney drugged Anderson with chloroform and drove him to a rented 17th century cottage near Okehampton, Devon. There the unfortunate young man was chained, spreadeagled, to a bed, with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs, and over the next few days he was repeatedly required to have sex with McKinney, who later explained that she had been keen to bear his child.

Eventually the missionary wriggled free, dashed from the cottage and alerted police, who set up roadblocks around Okehampton, capturing both beauty queen and friend. The pair were charged with false imprisonment and possession of an imitation .38 revolver, and brought before Epsom magistrates.

McKinney explained at the commital proceedings that she had fallen head over heels for Anderson when they were at college together in Utah, adding: "I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to." She had hired a private detective, tracked Anderson down and came to Britain with May.

Tabloid dream

It was a tabloid dream. Mormon Sex Slave Case, screeched the Daily Mail. McKinney and the Manacled Mormon, yelled the Mirror. Even the Guardian got in on the act with the only-slightly more coy: Missionary was "shackled for sex". McKinney's counsel told the magistrates that "methinks the Mormon do protest too much".

McKinney was remanded in custody at Holloway prison, north London, pending the full trial but released on bail three months later because of her failing mental health. May was also bailed and at this point they fled to Canada disguised asmime artists.

And that, perhaps, should have been the end of the matter.

But then last Tuesday, courtesy of the Associated Press news agency, came the delightful story of one "Bernann" McKinney, whose pet dog Booger the pit bull terrier had been successfully cloned by a team of South Korean scientists.

Announcing that she planned to give her identical pets the names Booger McKinney, Booger Lee, Booger Ra, Booger Hong and Booger Park, in honour of the team at Seoul National University that carried out the work, a delighted McKinney could be seen beaming from several news websites and newspapers, including the Guardian. And some of a certain age beamed back, thinking: "Ohmygawd!"

A simple check of public records in North Carolina yesterday confirmed that Joyce and "Bernann" are, indeed, one and the same person, and that the predatory beauty queen of 1977 has matured into the pit bull-loving 57-year-old of 2008.

The years have not been particularly kind to McKinney. She has put on a little weight (haven't we all?) and has used a wheelchair for more than a decade. After crossing the border from Canada she travelled to Atlanta, Georgia, where she went into hiding, disguised as a nun, according to some accounts. Then she returned to the tiny town of Minneapolis on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, where her parents had been schoolteachers, and moved on to her late grandparents' wooden farmhouse.

There were to be a few more scrapes with the law. In 1984 she was arrested after Anderson spotted her loitering near his place of work in Salt Lake City. When the police searched the boot of her car they found a length of rope and a pair of handcuffs, but charges against her were dropped after she once again jumped bail.

In 1993 she broke into a dog pound in Johnson City, Tennessee, to rescue a pit bull terrier that was about to be put down for mauling a couple of joggers. This raises the possibility that the Booger brothers, so skillfully cloned in Seoul, are exact replicas of a dog that once faced the death penalty because of its attacks on humans. But, as McKinney explained after the break-in: "I love those pit bulls. They're such sympathetic animals - they're my kind of dog."

Lawless

Minneapolis is in the heart of the southern Appalachians, the tough and somewhat lawless mountainous region that was the setting for the Burt Reynolds film Deliverance. Even here, however, some men say they are wary of her, and caution visitors not to stray on to her land, warning that they could be attacked by her pit bulls.

Anderson himself married after returning to Utah, and found work as a travel agent in the small town of Orem.

And by and large, McKinney has also led a blameless life over the past three decades. She could not be contacted for comment yesterday, but when a British reporter tracked her down and spoke to her nine years ago she said: "Now everybody understands, and they know what it means to have the paparazzi chasing around after you. I cried all night when Diana died. I may be just an ol' farm girl, but I've hit that wall with her. Everywhere I go, people will always remember me as a woman who did the unthinkable. Just try to imagine what that feels like."

In theory, however, McKinney remains a fugitive from British justice, and after breaking her cover to hail the success of the scientists in Soeul, could face extradition to stand trial back at Epsom.

Is this possible? We asked Scotland Yard. The young woman - clearly too young - who answered the call, listened patiently for a few minutes. "I'm sorry," she said finally. "I haven't a clue what you're talking about."