from AP via Commercial Appeal Memphis
Cloned pups expose 31-year mystery woman
SALT LAKE CITY — A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her beloved pit bull Booger looked very familiar to some who saw her picture.
She’s the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.
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 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-eagle to a bed with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs.
There, investigators say, he was repeatedly forced to have sex with McKinney before he was able to escape and notify police.
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.
In her call to the AP on Saturday, McKinney repeated the same argument her lawyer made all those years ago: There’s no way she could have overpowered the young Mormon because he was much bigger and stronger.
“I didn’t rape no 300-pound man,” she said. “He was built like a Green Bay Packer.”
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. 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.