The Case of Joyce McKinney

One of the figures who captivated my adolescent imagination and who has subsequently continued to shape my adult understanding of sexuality, was twenty-seven year old American beauty queen Joyce McKinney; a woman who achieved tabloid notoriety in the UK due to her unusual relationship with a young Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in the summer of '77.  

Abducted with an imitation revolver from the steps of a Mormon meetinghouse in Surrey, Mr. Anderson reported to the police several days later subsequent to his escape, that he had been chloroformed and driven to a cottage in Devon, where he was fastened to a bed with a ten-foot chain and mink-lined handcuffs by Miss McKinney - with whom he had previously had a brief romantic relationship - and forced to be her sex slave (something he claimed to find extremely upsetting).    

Without wishing to make light of kidnap, false imprisonment, and indecent assault - or even to cast doubt on the veracity of Kirk Anderson's story - there were not many teenage boys in Britain at the time who didn't envy him and wish that they too could be subject to a crime of passion and perversity at the hands of a former Miss Wyoming.

Arrested on 19 September, McKinney denied all police charges, claiming her former lover had, in fact, fully consented to his part in this kinky escapade. Released on bail for health reasons, she fled the country with an illicitly obtained passport, disguised in a wig and glasses whilst pretending to be a deaf-mute. Two years later she was picked up by the FBI, having returned to the United States. Although not extradited, the McKinney case was eventually heard in a UK court and, having been found guilty of assault under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, she was sentenced in absentia to a year in jail.

Coverage of events in the British press was extensive and highly sensational. The Daily Mirror famously published the above photo of McKinney, taken during her nude modelling days, on the front of one of their editions, causing a Church of Scotland working party on obscenity to object that this was the sort of image that would have only been sold to adults under plain sealed cover ten years earlier.

Such has been the continued fascination with this tale, that Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris recently directed a documentary about it - and the media circus surrounding it - entitled Tabloid (2010). Although made with McKinney's co-operation, she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Morris and his producer, Mark Lipson, on the grounds of defamation; claiming that the film portrayed her as a kinky prostitute and an insane sex offender. 

Whether the film does or does not do this and whether such a characterization does or does not constitute defamation of character, for me, Joyce McKinney - now living in Palm Springs with her cloned dogs - will always be an object of great affection. As I think J. G. Ballard once wrote, those events and those people which impress themselves upon the imagination of a boy in his fourteenth summer will stay with him for life.