The Sad Strange Story of Miss Wyoming 1973: Joyce McKinney
Joyce Bernann McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming beauty pageant winner from 1973 and a mormon missionary, became infamous in 1977 in what is commonly known as the Manacled Mormon case.
She was arrested for kidnapping another Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, and holding him captive as her sex slave. According to Anderson, he was abducted from the steps of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints meetinghouse, chained to a bed, and raped by McKinney.
He was allegedly abducted by McKinney and a man named Keith May, then 24. May was reportedly obsessed with McKinney. Anderson reported to police that he was taken to a house where he was chained to a bed, at which point McKinney attempted to seduce him and then ultimately raped him.
At a hearing following her arrest, she claimed that, "Kirk left with me willingly!"
She also said, "I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."
Before their trial, McKinney and May fled the United Kingdom, using fraudulently obtained passports to get to the United States on April 12, 1978. Their trial was scheduled to begin on May 2. No extradition was sought by the British government, and they were never tried for the aforementioned crimes. They were sentenced in absentia to a year in prison for skipping bail.
In July of 1979, May and McKinney were arrested again, this time by the FBI in the United States on charges related to making false statements to obtain their passports. They both received suspended sentences.
The Daily Mirror obtained hundreds of photos as part of an investigation into evidence McKinney had funded her trip to England by working as a call girl in California. Many of the images show a nude McKinney performing BDSM acts, some of which were subsequently published in the Mirror.
In 1984, McKinney was arrested again in Utah for stalking Anderson, who by this time was married with children, at Salt Lake International Airport where he worked. McKinney was found living in her vehicle near the airport, a search of which turned up rope, handcuffs, and notebooks with detailed records about Anderson's routines. McKinney insisted that she only drove to the airport to book a flight, although she had driven several thousand miles from her home in North Carolina.
In 2008, she made headlines again when the press picked up a story about how she had cloned her pit bull five times in South Korea, allegedly as part of a scheme involving a teenager committing burglary to fund a prosthetic leg for her horse.
As a result of press from that story, in 2010, a documentary called Tabloid was produced by filmmaker Errol Morris. The film, in which McKinney is interviewed, includes details surrounding the case like McKinney's work as a call girl and bdsm model around the time she became obsessed with Anderson.
In 2016, McKinney attempted to take legal action against Errol Morris, claiming that she had been misrepresented in the documentary, that Morris and others related to the production had broken into her home, stolen personal items from her, and threatened her service dog to intimidate McKinney into signing release papers for the film. Morris subsequently said in an interview that the lawsuit had been dismissed as "frivolous."
In 2019, McKinney was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident in which she killed a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor with her truck. McKinney fled the scene, and when detectives located her truck near the Hollywood Burbank Airport, McKinney emerged from the vehicle, dropped her pants, and began to urinate in front of the officers.
According to detectives, McKinney and her three dogs seemed to be living in the vehicle, and she had outstanding warrants for battery and public nuisance from an unrelated investigation.
McKinney was found mentally unfit to stand trial and was confined to a mental health facility. She was last known to be in a psychiatric hospital as of 2020 but no further information is available as to the status of her charges or current whereabouts.