LONDON: The former US beauty queen who drew headlines after mortgaging her home to have her dead dog cloned was outed by a British newspaper yesterday as the same woman who, 30 years ago, fled England after being charged in a bizarre sex crime case.
Bernann McKinney, 57, became the first paying customer of the commercial cloning industry this week when she had her beloved pitbull Booger cloned in South Korea. She appeared in media reports around the globe with her five cloned puppies.
But Britain's Daily Mail newspaper reported yesterday that the woman shared a striking resemblance, a similar history and the same last name as the pit bull-loving former US beauty queen Joyce McKinney.
That Ms McKinney thrilled British tabloid readers in 1978 when she faced charges over kidnapping a 110kg male Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, whom she chained to a bed with mink handcuffs and forced to have sex. She famously said of her victim: "I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mt Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."
The pair had a brief affair when they were both studying drama in the US. A few years later, Ms McKinney, then 28, tracked Mr Anderson, 21, to Ewell in Surrey, where he had been posted as a missionary, and kidnapped him.
After failing to persuade him to marry her and father her children, she donned see-through lingerie and forced him to have sex with her, reportedly resolutely overcoming his Mormon chastity belt. He finally escaped and Ms McKinney was arrested.
Mr Anderson 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."
Ms McKinney's counsel said of Mr 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."
The Times reported yesterday that after three months on remand, Ms McKinney was released on bail because of failing mental health. She fled the country using a false passport.
She was eventually tracked down and appeared topless in magazines before the authorities caught up with her, but Britain never attempted to extradite her.
The Daily Mail reported yesterday that Joyce McKinney resurfaced in 1984, when she was arrested near Salt Lake City Airport, where Kirk Anderson was working. In her car, police found rope and handcuffs.
By the late 1990s, Joyce McKinney was back in her home state of North Carolina, dogged by ill health and often in a wheelchair, living on benefits in a remote holding with three ponies and a fiercely devoted pit bull called Hamburger for company.
"I love those pit bulls," she explained. "They're such sympathetic animals."
When Bernann McKinney was contacted by the Daily Mail this week and asked if she was 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." As the paper reported, "Not exactly a flat-out denial."
A Joyce Bernann McKinney is registered as living in Avery County, North Carolina - birthplace of the Mormon sex slave kidnapper, it reported.
But when contacted by The Times yesterday, Bernann McKinney denied she was the same woman. "That's garbage, that's rot," she said. "If that is what you want to talk about, then I don't want to talk to you."