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Cloned puppies may have exposed 31-year mystery
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-10 09:45 The story of Joyce McKinney is the stuff of pulp fiction: a North Carolina-born beauty queen who moved west, won the title Miss Wyoming USA, converted to Mormonism and went on to college at Brigham Young University, where she became obsessed with a Mormon fellow student.
When that young Mormon took a missionary trip to England, authorities say McKinney hired a private detective so she could locate and follow him. She and a male accomplice were accused of abducting the 21-year-old missionary as he went door to door, taking him to a rented 17th-century "honeymoon cottage" in Devon and chaining him spread-eagled to a bed with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs.
In a 1977 court hearing mobbed by the British press, Joyce McKinney said she'd fallen head-over-heels in love with the Mormon man and acknowledged tracking him to England. "I loved him so much," she told a judge, "that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to." But she denied a sexual assault, saying the young man was a willing partner. "I have been played up as a very wicked and perverted woman," she told the court. "It's not true." McKinney and her accomplice spent three months in a London jail before being released on bail. Press reports at the time that said the pair then jumped bail, posing as deaf-mute actors in Ireland to board an Air Canada flight to Toronto and eventually a bus to Cleveland, where investigators lost their trail. Joyce McKinney surfaced again in Utah in May 1984 and was arrested for allegedly stalking the workplace of the same Mormon man she was accused of imprisoning in England. News reports say that police found a length of rope and handcuffs in the trunk of McKinney's car, along with notebooks detailing the man's daily activities. Set to stand trial for lying to police and harassment in 1986, McKinney again disappeared just before proceedings and the case was dismissed. It now appears Joyce McKinney may have escaped justice in the long-ago British case also. London police said they've consigned the case to the history books because of its age and won't seek McKinney's extradition. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the 1984 Salt Lake County booking documents, which lists McKinney's full name, address, Social Security number and birth date. The AP compared the data to court and address records on file in North Carolina. In both states, documents list McKinney's full name as Joyce Bernann McKinney and cite an Aug. 6, 1950, birth date, along with a hometown of Newland, N.C. A comparison of Social Security numbers on the documents show an exact match of the first five digits, the only numbers typically available in public records. At the Avery County courthouse in McKinney's hometown of Newland in the western North Carolina mountains, a clerk said she instantly recognized the woman snuggling puppies as the Joyce Bernann McKinney who has a been a frequent defendant in court cases there. "She is a person of note in our little community," said clerk Julia Henson. Avery County Sheriff Kevin Frey said there are several charges on file against Joyce McKinney, including an active warrant seeking her arrest on a 2003 charge of communicating a threat against another woman. Other charges include passing bad checks, an assault on a public officials and an 2004 animal cruelty charge alleging she failed to take proper care of a horse. That charge was dismissed. James Stamey, the husband of the woman McKinney was charged with threatening, said McKinney left Newland about two years ago and no one had really seen or heard from her. Until she showed up in the news about the cloned puppies. "That's our Joy," Stamey said from his home in Newland. Years ago, Stamey said, McKinney was a beautiful girl worthy of the Miss Wyoming USA crown. "She's ugly as sin now," he said. "But, sure enough, that's her." |
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