A cloned dog, a Mormon in mink-lined handcuffs and a tantalising mystery



The saucy Joyce McKinney



At first it seemed a straightforward example of the oddball stories which emerge during the long, slow, news days of high summer.

A 'Californian woman' had paid £25,000 to a South Korean laboratory to have her dead pitbull terrier cloned, in the first transaction of its kind.

'Bernann McKinney' had saved tissue from the ear of her beloved 'Booger', which was frozen after the dog died, and then used as DNA source material to produce five pitbull pups.

So far, so silly season. (But as the eccentric Miss McKinney beamed joyfully from the world's television screens on Tuesday, vague bells began to ring.)

The face was familiar, albeit older and heavier. The surname was the same.

So was the alleged American, ex-beauty queen background and the unusual devotion to pitbull dogs.

Surely it wasn't? Could the new owner of the world's first commercially cloned pups be the same woman who had gone on the run from British justice 30 years ago, having been the star of one of the most bizarre, entertaining and downright saucy court cases in living memory?

In 1978, Joyce McKinney jumped bail and disappeared after being charged with kidnapping a 17-stone male Mormon missionary, whom she had chained to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs and forced to have sex.

At the time, she famously said of her victim: 'I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.'

Were these two blonde, American, dog-loving and, yes, quite possibly barking mad, Miss McKinneys one and the same person?





Last night, when we spoke to 'Bernann' on the telephone, having tracked her down to a Seoul hotel room, her hostile reaction hardly quashed the intrigue.

Asked: 'Are you really Joyce McKinney?' she snapped: "Are you going to ask me about my dogs, or not? Because that's all I'm prepared to talk to you about."

Not exactly a flat-out denial, then.

Puppy love: 'Bernann' with one of the pitbull pups cloned from the ear of her beloved 'Booger'



So, dear readers, let us turn back the clock 30 years to Joyce and the sensational circumstances of what became known as the 'Mormon Sex Slave Case'.

Joyce McKinney was born in Avery County, North Carolina, in August 1949, the daughter of two school teachers.

She first made the headlines, albeit local ones, in 1972 when she was crowned Miss Wyoming, but soon tired of the world of beauty pageants and enrolled as a drama student at Brigham Young University, in Utah, the heartland of Mormon America.

It was there that she met 19-year-old Kirk Anderson, a 6ft 4in fellow drama undergraduate, some seven years her junior, from a small town near Salt Lake City.

There was a brief fling, and McKinney later claimed that she had miscarried his baby.



Overcome by guilt, Anderson, a devout Mormon, apparently sought advice from his bishop, who told him to sever ties with McKinney and move away from Utah.

A topless Joyce poses for the camera



She was not prepared to be spurned so easily. Private detectives were hired to trace Anderson from the U.S. to Ewell in Surrey, where he was living as a door-to-door Mormon missionary.

In the summer of 1977, McKinney flew to England with an architect friend called Keith May.

Armed with an imitation revolver, May confronted 21-year-old Anderson on the steps of Ewell's Church of the Latter Day Saints, and frog-marched him to a car in which McKinney was waiting.

Chloroformed and hidden under a blanket, the bespectacled Mormon was driven some 200 miles to Okehampton, where his kidnappers had hired a 17th-century 'honeymoon' cottage for £50 a week.

McKinney later said that she had packed the fridge with Anderson's favourite food and studied The Joy Of Sex in preparation for what was to come.

Joyce McKinney was a beauty queen in the 1970s and was a former Miss Wyoming before going to Brigham Young University, in Utah, to study drama



May chained the prisoner to a bed. For two days, McKinney tried to persuade the missionary to marry her and father her children. She even read Scriptures with him in bed.

When this failed to melt his opposition, McKinney reverted to Plan B.

This involved slipping into a 'see-through nightie', playing a cassette of 'romantic music', having Anderson 'spread- eagled' and sexually stimulating him.

She claimed this was a bondage 'game' played with his full consent.



He later told a court: 'I couldn't move. She grabbed the top of my pyjamas and tore them from my body until I was naked.



'I didn't wish it to happen. I was extremely depressed and upset after being forced to have sex.'

This 'rape' occurred three times.



Victim: Kirk Anderson was kidnapped and forced to have sex with Joyce



For the record, his pyjamas, later produced in court, were light blue and 'silky'. He also claimed to have been wearing some kind of Mormon chastity belt underneath. Alas, to no avail.

Fearing he would be kept prisoner for weeks (later there would be a body of male opinion which felt pangs of severe jealousy at his plight), Anderson promised to marry her.

But after she loosened his chains, he escaped and went straight to the police.

McKinney and May were arrested at a roadblock three days later and charged with false imprisonment and possessing an imitation firearm.

There was an entertaining, if not downright titillating, committal hearing at Epsom Magistrates' Court, during which her counsel said of Anderson: 'Methinks the Mormon doth protest too much... you have seen the size of Mr Anderson and you have seen the size of my client.'

McKinney spent three months on remand in Holloway Prison - to which she had been driven weeping through the bars of a Black Maria - before being released on bail on grounds of her failing mental health.

Now the case, which had already become a worldwide cause celebre, was about to be given a new lease of life with a sensational twist.

McKinney met the similarly bailed May and the pair fled to Canada, using false passports and disguised as deaf-mute mime artistes.

It was later alleged that McKinney was helped to escape by her former landlady, an Irish woman, who went with her to a West End theatrical outfitters.



There, they bought the wigs and glasses which were later used in their flight from justice.

By now an international fugitive, McKinney reappeared staying at the Hilton hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, disguised as a nun.

Before long, the Press caught up with her and she dropped her disguise to revel in her sexual notoriety - she posed topless for a number of glamour magazines before the U.S. authorities finally caught up with her and she was arrested.

Mysterious minx: Joyce with a carnation. She famously said she would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up her nose if Kirk Anderson asked her to

Once again, she was freed on bail and, by now - 1979 - there seemed to be no appetite in the UK for forcing her extradition.

McKinney, meanwhile, had allegedly vanished into an increasingly desperate world of prostitution, drug abuse and psychiatric problems.

She resurfaced once more in 1984, when she was arrested near Salt Lake City Airport, where Kirk Anderson - the Mormon she had kidnapped - was working.

In her car, police found a length of rope and a pair of handcuffs. The implication was clear that she was about to make a second kidnap attempt, but she failed to show up in court and the case was dropped.

By the late Nineties, McKinney was back in North Carolina, dogged by ill health and often in a wheelchair, living on benefits in a remote smallholding with only three ponies and a fiercely devoted pitbull called Hamburger for company.

On one occasion, she had broken into a dog pound to rescue a pitbull terrier - possibly Hamburger - which was to be put down for mauling a jogger.



'I love those pitbulls,' she explained. 'They're such sympathetic animals.'

Locals, who knew of her racy past, treated her with suspicion, if not fear. She had a taste for litigation and was described as 'one wild woman'.

In a rare comment on the Mormon affair, she said in 1999: 'I loved Kirk and all I really wanted was to see his blond-haired babies running round my home.

'Nobody can understand what it is to lose the man you love to a cult, and I believe that is what the Mormons are. Back in Britain [then] nobody knew what a cult was.'

May was last heard of selling plumbing supplies in California, while Anderson was an estate agent in Utah and understandably reluctant to rake over his past misfortunes.

What, then, of 'Bernann McKinney' who has had her pitbull Booger cloned and claims to be a Hollywood scriptwriter and university lecturer?

She says she is 57 and a former beauty queen. In an interview in a Korean newspaper, she was described as a grandmother, and initially alleged that she had sold her home to pay for the cloning.

(The company responsible says that it would normally charge £75,000 for the controversial procedure, but that it has cut the fee in return for Miss McKinney's co-operation in their publicity campaign.)

In another Korean interview, she described being the victim of an horrific attack by an enraged bull mastiff, that shredded her left arm to the elbow, tore open a leg and ripped three fingers from her left hand.

She survived only because her faithful Booger chased it off. Even then, the injuries were so bad that she was confined to a wheelchair while surgeons reconstructed her left hand and arm.



Booger remained by her side throughout her recuperation and gave her the will to go on.

She claimed to have been a university drama teacher before the accident. Now she planned to write a Hollywood film script about the cloning.



Let us look then at the similarities between our two Miss McKinneys.

Joyce will be celebrating her 59th birthday this week, while Bernann claims to be two years younger.



It is a fact, though, that former beauty queens (and even less celebrated mortals) often reduce their ages later in life.

Both Joyce and Bernann use wheelchairs, while the latter's late pitbull Booger sounds very similar in name to Joyce's faithful Hamburger.

There is no record of a Bernann McKinney living in Los Angeles, nor does anyone of that name belong to the Screenwriters' Guild.

No university drama department we contacted has heard of any such teacher. It is an undisputable fact, however, that Joyce was once a drama student.



But perhaps the most persuasive circumstantial evidence to suggest that Joyce and Bernann are the same woman, is that a Joyce Bernann McKinney is registered as living in Avery County, North Carolina - birthplace of the Mormon sex slave kidnapper.

She has been on the voters' register there since 1988.



'Who started all this?' Miss 'Bernann' McKinney demanded to know when she was phoned in Seoul, as she prepared to return to the U.S. with one of the puppies. (The others will remain in care among the scientists who have cloned them in the short-term.)

Told that there was a growing internet debate about whether she was indeed the Mormon kidnapper, Miss McKinney replied: 'I'm only going to talk to you about the dogs and the death of Booger. I've got people waiting to dine with me. I'm not talking about anything else.'



And that was that. She would neither confirm nor deny the link.



And yet, weighing the body of evidence, it would seem that 30 years on, the notorious Miss McKinney had once again gone to extraordinary lengths to get her longed-for 'babies'.

In the end, they were to be the offspring of a dead pitbull ear, rather than that of a bespectacled Mormon trussed in the missionary position in a honeymoon cottage on Dartmoor, next to a pair of ripped, light blue silk pyjamas.

• Additional reporting by George Gordon.