I still love my manacled Mormon: 'Madam Mayhem' Joyce McKinney who kidnapped missionary with mink-lined handcuffs is still defiant as film is made of her lifeBy Tom Leonard
www.dailymail.co.ukLast updated at 10:59 PM on 12th August 2011
The way Joyce McKinney tells it today, the world should have thanked her for trying to ‘save’ her lover from the mind-bending control of a vicious cult. Instead she was branded ‘Madam Mayhem’ and locked up in Holloway Prison.
Even then she was loath to accept that kidnapping a man at gunpoint and chaining him to a bed in a remote Devon farmhouse for three days of enforced sex was a strange way of showing you loved him — especially when he was a blushing Mormon missionary.
Thirty-four years after her bizarre exploits scandalised Britain, it is hard to reconcile the overweight figure who now shuffles around a scruffy Californian home with the curvy blonde bombshell whose story created such a splash of colour in the depths of the dreary, strike-torn Seventies.
'I’m elderly now, I have a heart condition, I’m crippled and partially blind,’ she told me this week. ‘I’m just a little old lady, looking back, eyes misting, on an incredible lost love.’
Quite whether those who are old enough to remember Joyce McKinney will regard this unconvincing romantic vision with anything other than cynicism remains to be seen.
But now, thanks to a new documentary film in which she is interviewed at length, a new generation is about to absorb the extraordinary story of the manacled Mormon and the lovesick beauty queen who pursued him across the Atlantic, armed with ruthless determination, a bottle of chloroform and a pair of mink-lined handcuffs.
Tabloid, a new movie from the American director of the Oscar-winning Vietnam documentary The Fog Of War, has once again thrown a spotlight on McKinney, still larger than life but — if it’s possible — nuttier than ever.
Ravished: Kirk Anderson, McKinney's kidnap victim
Joyce McKinney was 25 when she met Kirk Anderson, a hulking 19-year-old Mormon, in drama class at Brigham Young University in Utah. McKinney, the overindulged only child of two school teachers from North Carolina, was a former Miss Wyoming beauty queen.
They had a brief affair (she says she became pregnant but miscarried), and a guilt-stricken Anderson went for advice to his bishop, who arranged for him to come to England on missionary work.
Undaunted, a besotted McKinney set a private detective on his trail and, discovering he was working at a church in the Surrey village of Ewell, set off in pursuit.
Accompanied by a bodybuilder ‘bodyguard’ she’d hired from a Los Angeles gym, a pilot and a devoted friend named Keith May, they flew on a commercial flight to Britain in the autumn of 1977.
The pilot, Jackson Shaw, recalls in the new film being ‘impressed’ by McKinney’s ‘outstanding figure’, particularly when she wore a see-through blouse and no bra at their first meeting. ‘She had this strange wig she called Matilda which she wore whenever we went out,’ he adds.
But Shaw and the bodybuilder bailed out of the adventure when they saw the fake gun and chloroform which Joyce had brought with her, realising this was not the ‘rescue’ mission she had described.
Renting a 17th-century cottage near Okehampton, she and May drove to Ewell, where May engaged their quarry in conversation by posing as a potential convert.
Waving a fake .38 revolver at the missionary in front of his church, May led him to McKinney — who giggles on screen during the documentary as she recalls the moment — in the car.
With Anderson — 6ft 4in tall and 17st — lying in the back quaking under a blanket, they drove to the cottage.
McKinney cooked dinner and May then manacled their prisoner to a bed — spreadeagled — with a 10ft chain. McKinney says she had made up the bed with blue silk sheets with Anderson’s initials on them. She then attempted to relax him with a cinnamon oil back rub.
McKinney recalls in the film how she ripped off and burned what she describes as his special ‘magic’ Mormon underwear with its protective ‘occultic symbols’.
She says: ‘There was only one way to make Kirk get out of Mormonism, and that was to make love to him . . . because for a Mormon missionary to have a love affair is totally taboo.’
She insists that she never raped him. It’s impossible for a woman to do so, she argues, observing crudely: ‘It’s like trying to put a marshmallow into a parking meter.’
Deluded: McKinney today, with a puppy. A new generation will be able to absorb her extraordinary story in a new film
Eventually, after promising to marry her and having his chains loosened, Anderson managed to escape and went to the police. He told them that during his ordeal McKinney said she would ravage him until she was sure she was pregnant.
His two captors were arrested three days later by officers who pulled over their car in Devon. Recalling her arrest this week, McKinney told me the police had been ‘corrupt cops’ in the pay of the Mormons.
While the film suffers from having to rely on McKinney’s dubious account of events — Keith May died in 2004 and Kirk Anderson, now a travel agent in Utah, refused to speak — its producers say they wanted to take her version of events ‘at face value’.
The question which still hangs over the whole saga — whether the bondage sex was consensual or coerced — is never answered. Tabloid’s producer, Mark Lipson, believes that even if Anderson had willingly gone to the cottage and slept with McKinney, once the story broke, he would have been under enormous pressure from his church to pin the blame on her.
McKinney said she loved Anderson so much that she 'would have skied down Mount Everest nude with a carnation up my nose for the love of that man'
One former Mormon missionary, Troy Williams, says in the film that the guilt that a pure young believer like Anderson would have felt over his pre-marital sex ‘could have been overwhelming’.
Williams, who does confirm the idea that Mormons wear ‘sacred’ protective underwear to guard their chastity, said the McKinney story had become a cautionary tale told to young Mormons about the dangers of rapacious women.
To most of the public, however, it was simply a jaw-dropping saga of sexual obsession.
McKinney’s first court appearance was a melee, the media gratefully leaping on her comment to the judge that she loved Anderson so much she ‘would have skied down Mount Everest nude with a carnation up my nose for the love of that man’.
She was sent to Holloway prison to await trial for false imprisonment, but amid concerns over her deteriorating mental health, she was released on bail after three months.
The Press whisked her off to parties where she met members of the Rolling Stones and the Bee Gees, and even — in a Rolls-Royce — to the premiere of the film The Stud, where she managed to upstage its star Joan Collins.
But then she disappeared. She and Keith May jumped bail, allegedly dressed as nuns, escaping to Canada on false passports while pretending to be deaf-mute mime artists. ‘I left, I didn’t flee,’ she insisted, unconvincingly, this week.
Glamour: The former American beauty queen pictured at a premiere in Leicester Square while she was awaiting trail for kidnapping
In suitably barmy fashion, disguising herself as a nun for several months, she learned that Scotland Yard considered itself well rid of her, and was certainly not going to try to get her back.
At that point, having made her way to Atlanta, she offered to sell her story to a British newspaper. The journalist sent to meet her describes in the film how he found her in another of her bizarre disguises, this time dressed as a Red Indian.
When a rival paper dredged up adverts and nude pictures which revealed her to be a former call girl, she became hysterical with rage.
Certainly her very public humiliation had not cooled her ardour for Kirk Anderson.
In 1984, she was arrested for stalking him outside the office where he worked in Utah. Police reportedly found chains and handcuffs in the boot of her car, suggesting she was hoping to repeat her sexually motivated kidnapping.
Improbably, she made headlines again three years ago when a woman claiming to be a Hollywood scriptwriter and calling herself Bernann McKinney turned up in South Korea.
For veteran journalists, there was something oddly familiar about the chubby dog lover who had paid a scientist $25,000 to have five puppies cloned from her pit bull, Booger. Initially she denied it, but eventually she had to admit that, yes, she was Joyce McKinney.
As she admitted this week, sitting in her small, junk-filled house outside the California town of Riverside — which she shares with an elderly male friend named Elliott — the years have not been kind to Joyce McKinney.
There has been no romance in her life since the manacled Mormon, she says. ‘I was afraid to have a love affair of any kind after Kirk, I was afraid to kiss a man. So I chose just to be celibate. As Bridget Bardot once said: “I gave my youth to men and I give my old age to dogs.” Dogs and children love Joyce McKinney, they sense in me an innocence, a gentleness.’
Now 60, she says she remains an ‘incurable romantic’ — yet the overriding impression is of a woman whose entire adult life has been defined by the fallout from those extraordinary days in Okehampton. (In his only public pronouncement since his kidnap, Kirk Anderson said 13 years ago that revisiting the episode was ‘like scraping a scab off a wound’.)
For her part McKinney — who even recently rang the Utah cinema showing Tabloid to see if Anderson had come to watch it — will not let go.
‘He loved me, too,’ she says bluntly. ‘This is not a story of unrequited love. Kirk chased me. The guy was an incredible romantic.’ So determined is she to prove that it was not a kidnap but a consensual stay in the cottage that she is working on a book that she says will set the story straight.
She remains as pathetically deluded as ever, seeing an international Mormon conspiracy to ruin her behind every setback in her life. She even claims that the faith financed the new film (it didn’t), though that has not stopped her attending half-a-dozen screenings across the U.S.
Typically eccentric, she likes to arrive in disguise, then jump up at the end, stunning the audience by yelling: ‘I’m Joyce McKinney!’
Wheels of justice: Joyce pictured with her mother Marilyn and father Davis after walking free from court
When she is at home, she would have us believe she spends much of her time taking calls from Hollywood producers and stars clamouring to turn her life story into a film. ‘Kirsten Dunst called me the other day. She wants to buy the rights to my story,’ she revealed breezily. ‘I was kind of flattered. But she doesn’t look like me.’
No one seems to know quite how McKinney supports herself, given that there is no evidence she has ever had a job since the 1977 scandal. The handful of people who know her believe she survives off money that her elderly father gives her from his savings.
She may have few human friends, but she has her animals. She says she wants to rescue dogs from the local pound and train them to help handicapped people. ‘I’m really good at training dogs,’ she says.
This week in her home town of Minneapolis — a tiny, working-class community nestled among the thick woods of North Carolina’s Appalachian mountains — the locals had a rather different story to tell about the woman who moved from there to California six years ago.
Several recalled the time she threatened to set her snarling pit bull on the sheriff and his deputies when they went to serve papers on her for a local misdemeanour.
The new film may portray her as a loveable eccentric, but few people here remember the funny side of Joyce McKinney. Her parents still live in the small weatherboarded house where she grew up, and the consensus among the neighbours is that she was the sort of person you wanted to avoid.
She had a reputation for suing anyone for anything, including a neighbour whose barking dogs McKinney claimed were disturbing her. She was in trouble with police on several occasions, including alleged burglary and soliciting in 1994.
In the same year, she was briefly committed for psychiatric treatment and doctors found she had been abusing cocaine, morphine and cannabis.
During 2004, she was charged with instructing a 15-year-old boy to break into a house in the neighbouring state of Tennessee, apparently to raise money to buy a false leg for a beloved horse. She left Minneapolis for California soon afterwards.
So will there be another chapter in the strange story of Joyce McKinney? The new film’s producer, Mark Lipson, believes her exploits would make a great musical.
‘She sees herself as this princess and she crosses the ocean with her conspirators to save her prince,’ he says. ‘There’s something really operatic about this story.’
So could we yet see the story of the Mormon and the pneumatic blonde retold on the stage? Where Joyce McKinney is concerned, sadly anything seems possible.
