Puppy-cloner accused in '70s sex-slave case

SALT LAKE CITY — A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her pit bull Booger looked 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 for several days.

Bernann McKinney acknowledged in a telephone call Saturday that she is Joyce McKinney, who in 1977 became a British tabloid sensation when she faced charges of unlawful imprisonment in the missionary case. She jumped bail and was never brought to justice.

She tearfully explained that she went public with her efforts to replicate Booger, who died two years ago, hoping people would be able to focus on that story rather than the "garbage" of the past.

"I thought people would be honest enough to see me as a person who was trying to do something good and not as a celebrity," McKinney said.

"I think I gave people too much credit," she said.

British tabloid journalists first recognized the woman's smiling face when she appeared in photographs last week with the five pit-bull pups she paid South Korean scientists $53,000 to clone.

McKinney, 57, initially denied she was the woman in the sex-slave case and threatened a libel lawsuit.

She said Saturday that, as far as she's concerned, the Joyce McKinney of 31 years ago doesn't exist. She maintained her innocence and said the woman of all those years ago is a "figment of the tabloid press."

Her story is the stuff of pulp fiction: a North Carolina-born beauty queen who moved west, won the title Miss Wyoming USA and attended Brigham Young University, where she became obsessed with a fellow Mormon student.

When that man took a missionary trip to England, authorities said McKinney hired a private detective so she could 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 said, he was repeatedly forced to have sex with McKinney before he escaped and notified police.

In a 1977 hearing mobbed by the British media, Joyce McKinney said she'd fallen in love with the man and acknowledged tracking him to England. "I love him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to," she told the judge.

But she denied a sexual assault and said the man was a willing partner.

McKinney repeated the same argument Saturday that her lawyer made long ago: There's no way she could have overpowered the man 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."

McKinney and her accomplice spent three months in a London jail before being released on bail.

Reports at the time said the pair then jumped bail, posed as deaf-mute actors in Ireland to board an Air Canada flight to Toronto and caught a bus to Cleveland, where investigators lost their trail.

McKinney surfaced again in Utah in May 1984 and was arrested on suspicion of stalking the workplace of the same man she was accused of imprisoning in England. News reports said police found 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 and the case was dismissed.

London police said they've consigned the earlier case to the history books and won't seek McKinney's extradition.

At the Avery County courthouse in McKinney's hometown in the western North Carolina mountains, a clerk said she instantly recognized the woman snuggling puppies as the Joyce Bernann McKinney who has been a frequent defendant in court cases there.

Avery County Sheriff Kevin Frey said there are several charges on file against Joyce McKinney, including a warrant seeking her arrest on a 2003 charge of communicating a threat against another woman.

Other charges include passing bad checks and an assault on public officials.