A US woman who made history this week by having her dead dog cloned has a bizarre skeleton in her closet — a sexual kidnapping crime which made world headlines 30 years ago.
Bernann McKinney, 57, became the first paying customer of commercial cloning this week after forking out $53,000 to have her pit bull "Booger" cloned five times in South Korea.
A media investigation has revealed that McKinney almost certainly is the same woman who 30 years ago was accused of kidnapping a Mormon man and forcing him to have sex with her, skipping bail before she could be tried for the crime.
Images published by the Daily Mail show that McKinney, besides sharing the same last name and a similar past, bears a striking resemblance to a beauty queen named Joyce McKinney.
That McKinney became tabloid fodder in 1978 when she kidnapped 110kg Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson, shackled him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs and forced him to have sex.
McKinney, who recruited the help of a friend, had Anderson chloroformed, hidden under a blanket and driven 300km to a 17th-century "honeymoon cottage" in Devon, England, where he was chained to a bed.
When McKinney's attempts to convince Anderson to marry her failed, she slipped into a see-through nightie and had sex with him.
Anderson 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."
McKinney's counsel told magistrates: "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 memorably 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."
Anderson escaped after McKinney loosened his chains.
Authorities later caught McKinney at a roadblock and charged her and her accomplice with false imprisonment and possessing an imitation firearm.
She spent just three months in remand due to failing mental health and later fled England using a false passport.
According to the Mail, McKinney resurfaced when she was arrested in 1984 near Salt Lake City airport where Anderson — the Mormon she had kidnapped — worked.
Police uncovered a length of rope and handcuffs in her car.
By the 1990s, McKinney was confined to a wheelchair and back in her home state of North Carolina, living with three ponies and her pet bull "Hamburger".
"I love those pit bulls," she said at the time.
"They're such sympathetic animals."
When the Daily Mail contacted Bernann McKinney and asked if she was Joyce McKinney, the 57-year-old spat back: "Are you going to ask me about my dogs, or not? Because that's all I'm prepared to talk to you about."
The newspaper reports that a Joyce Bernann McKinney is registered as living in Avery County, North Carolina — birthplace of the Mormon sex slave kidnapper.
McKinney has denied she and Joyce are the same woman, telling The Times newspaper: "That's garbage, that's rot".
Front page
RSS Feed