The Manacled Mormon: The Kidnapping Case That Had British Tabloids in a Frenzy
- Jun 13
- 9 min read
In the autumn of 1977, police in Devon received an unusual call. A 21-year-old Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson told them that a woman had kidnapped him at gunpoint, driven him 200 miles across England in the back of a car under a blanket, chained him spread-eagled to a bed in a remote 17th-century cottage, and raped him repeatedly over three days. He said he'd only managed to escape by promising to marry her.
The woman, Joyce McKinney, told a completely different story. She said it was a romantic reunion. She said he'd wanted to be there. She said she loved him so much she would, in her own words, "ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose" if he asked her to.
The British tabloids, faced with a case involving a former beauty queen, a Mormon missionary, mink-lined handcuffs, and a 17th-century Devon cottage, responded in roughly the way you'd expect. The story dominated the front pages for weeks. It produced one of the great tabloid headlines of the decade. And it ended without a trial, because McKinney fled the country in disguise before the case could be heard.
The full story is stranger than any of the headlines suggested.
Miss Wyoming and the Mormon
Joyce McKinney was born in North Carolina and had, by the mid-1970s, accumulated a fairly unusual set of achievements. She was a former beauty pageant winner with a claimed IQ of 168. She had studied drama and reportedly held or was pursuing a postgraduate degree. She had converted to Mormonism and enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, which is where she met Kirk Anderson.
Anderson was around 19 at the time, a broad-shouldered young man standing six feet four inches and weighing around 17 stone. McKinney was approximately five years his senior. By her account, they fell deeply in love, had a sexual relationship, became engaged, and were planning to marry. By his account, they dated briefly and it ended.
What happened next depends entirely on which version you believe. McKinney later claimed that Anderson had confessed their relationship to church elders, been pressured to end it, and was subsequently sent to England on a mission as a way of removing him from her orbit. She claimed the church had effectively brainwashed him. Anderson said he simply left, and that McKinney's subsequent behaviour was the behaviour of someone who couldn't accept that.
Either way, when Anderson left for England, McKinney didn't let it go. She hired a private detective to track him down. She found out he was serving as a missionary in Surrey. And she made a plan to bring him back.
The Kidnapping
McKinney arrived in England with an accomplice, 24-year-old Keith May, and at least two other associates. They rented a 17th-century cottage near Okehampton in Devon, about 200 miles from where Anderson was based. Then they went to Surrey to collect him.
On 14 September 1977, a man calling himself Bob Bosler contacted the local Mormon tabernacle in Ewell, announcing that he was interested in converting. May, posing as Bosler, arranged to meet with representatives at the meetinghouse. When Anderson stepped outside with him to look at a map, May produced what appeared to be a .38 revolver. It was a non-functioning replica, but Anderson didn't know that. McKinney was waiting in a beige Ford Cortina nearby.
According to Anderson's account, he was ordered into the car at gunpoint, where McKinney pointed another replica weapon at him. May used chloroform to subdue him. Anderson, who was considerably larger than either of his abductors, lay in the back of the car under a blanket as they drove south for four hours. When they arrived at the cottage, May manacled him spread-eagled to the bed using leather straps, padlocks, chains, rope, and, according to the committal proceedings, mink-lined handcuffs.
May then left the room.
Anderson's account of the three days that followed was reported at the committal proceedings at Epsom magistrates' court in November 1977. He said McKinney tore his pyjamas from his body and subjected him to repeated forced sexual intercourse, telling him she wanted to become pregnant and "rescue" him from the influence of the church. She also reportedly burned his Mormon temple garments, the sacred undergarments worn by devout members of the LDS faith, as a symbolic act of liberation from his religion.
He said he was restrained so tightly he couldn't move, and that he was deeply distressed throughout. He said he finally secured his release on 17 September by convincing McKinney that he would inform his church he planned to elope with her, at which point she unchained him. He went directly to the police.
McKinney's Version
Joyce McKinney's account was, from first to last, that none of it had happened the way Anderson described. She maintained that he had come willingly, that the whole thing was a consensual romantic reunion, and that the chains and restraints, if they existed at all, were part of something both of them had agreed to. She said that Anderson was a man who had been so thoroughly conditioned by his church that he was incapable of acknowledging his true feelings. She said he was sexually impotent as a result of Mormon brainwashing and she was trying to help him.
She denied having worked as a call girl to fund the trip to England, though reporters from the Daily Mirror would later obtain what they described as evidence of advertisements she had placed for bondage-related services. She denied it all, at length, with considerable theatrical flair.
"I loved him so much I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to," she told reporters at one point. It was exactly the kind of line that made the tabloids love her, and exactly the kind of line that made it harder for anyone to take her account of events seriously.
On Remand in Holloway
McKinney and May were arrested and charged with kidnapping and indecent assault. They were remanded in custody at Holloway Prison in London while the case worked its way toward trial. McKinney, being Joyce McKinney, did not pass this period quietly.
She held press conferences from prison. She corresponded extensively with journalists. She accumulated celebrity of a sort, becoming a fixture in the tabloid press even before her case was heard. She attended film premieres while on bail, including the London premiere of The Stud, where she reportedly upstaged Joan Collins. She maintained her innocence loudly and entertainingly throughout.
The British press divided predictably between the Daily Express, which ran sympathetic coverage based on McKinney's own account as told to reporter Peter Tory, and the Daily Mirror, whose photographer Kent Gavin had obtained material suggesting McKinney's background was considerably more complicated than she was letting on. The two tabloids were essentially running competing versions of the same story, each trying to out-scoop the other. The actual legal proceedings were almost secondary.
The Disguise and the Disappearance
A few weeks before the trial on the main charges was due to begin in 1978, McKinney and May did not appear in court. They had jumped bail and left the country.
McKinney had fled to Canada disguised as a deaf-mute mime artist, wearing a red wig. The pair had obtained American passports using the identities of two dead people. The FBI was eventually informed and investigated, but did not pursue extradition. Britain made no formal extradition request. McKinney and May were convicted in absentia of skipping bail, sentenced to one year's imprisonment, and that was the effective end of the legal proceedings against them in England. They were never tried on the kidnapping or indecent assault charges.
McKinney returned to the United States and, not long afterwards, was arrested in Salt Lake City in 1984 for stalking Kirk Anderson. She had tracked him down again. Charges were eventually dropped.
For another case of obsessive pursuit that ended in violence, read about Jodi Arias and the killing of Travis Alexander, a relationship that ended in one of the most brutal crimes in American true crime history.
The Legal Question Nobody Answered
The case raised a question that British courts of the time largely found preposterous: can a woman rape a man? The legal and judicial establishment in 1977 was not well-equipped to engage with this seriously. The prevailing assumption in the courts, in the press, and in much of public opinion was that male rape by a woman was essentially impossible, and that if a woman had sex with a man, it was difficult to characterise it as assault in the conventional sense regardless of the circumstances.
This assumption is the reason the case was treated as lurid entertainment rather than a serious crime. Anderson's account, if believed, described a sustained sexual assault over three days by someone who had abducted him at gunpoint and chained him to a bed. The fact that the gender roles were reversed from the usual pattern meant that the tabloids could play it for laughs, that McKinney could be portrayed as a lovesick eccentric rather than a predator, and that the case could dissolve without a verdict when she chose to run.
It's worth sitting with that for a moment. A person described in court testimony as having been kidnapped, drugged, manacled, and repeatedly assaulted over three days ended up as a tabloid punchline, while his alleged attacker became a minor celebrity. Anderson has spoken about the case only once publicly, saying that revisiting it was "like scraping a scab off a wound." He has declined every interview request since.
Dog Cloning in South Korea and the Documentary
The story might have ended there, consigned to the archives of 1970s tabloid excess, had McKinney not surfaced in 2008 in rather spectacular fashion. She was discovered in South Korea, where she had paid a biotechnology company to clone her late pit bull terrier, Booger. The cloning produced five puppies. The story made international news. Journalists who had covered the 1977 case recognised her immediately.
Initially she denied being the same Joyce McKinney. Then she admitted it. She told reporters she had been celibate since Kirk, saying: "As Brigitte 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."
The renewed attention brought Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to her door. His 2010 film Tabloid, released widely in 2011, told the story of the Manacled Mormon case through McKinney's own extensive interviews, alongside accounts from the tabloid journalists who had covered it, the pilot she hired to fly her to England, and others connected to the case. It received strong reviews, with a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, praised for Morris's skill in letting his subjects reveal themselves.
McKinney later sued Morris, claiming she had been tricked into the interview and that the film misrepresented her. The lawsuit was eventually settled. Keith May, her accomplice, had died in 2004 and was never able to give his own account. Kirk Anderson refused to participate in the film.
What the Case Became
The Manacled Mormon case is remembered primarily as a tabloid story, which is both accurate and misleading. It was absolutely a tabloid story, exploited enthusiastically by both the Mirror and the Express, and McKinney's gift for quotable excess made her an irresistible subject. But beneath the headlines was a serious allegation that was never properly adjudicated because the defendant fled, and a victim whose account was largely disbelieved or ignored because the gender dynamics didn't fit the era's template for sexual assault.
McKinney has never wavered from her version of events. In interviews conducted decades after the fact, she still describes herself as an incurable romantic who followed the man she loved to England and was persecuted for it. She has called Anderson the love of her life. She rang a Utah cinema screening Tabloid to ask if he had come to watch it.
The British tabloid press, as Errol Morris's documentary notes with some irony, became the story as much as McKinney did. The Mirror and the Express were in open competition to define who Joyce McKinney was, shaping public perception of a criminal case that never reached a verdict. It's an early example of a media dynamic that has only become more familiar in the decades since.
Kirk Anderson has never commented on any of that. He asked to be left alone, and for the most part, he has been. For another story of an abduction that the public found hard to process in its full reality, read about the kidnapping and burial of Barbara Jane Mackle, who survived 83 hours underground.
SOURCES
Crime Library: Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon — https://crimelibrary.org/criminal_mind/sexual_assault/joyce-mckinney/
The True Crime Database: Joyce McKinney — https://www.thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/joyce-mckinney/
Deseret News: Joyce McKinney Resurfaces in Errol Morris' Tabloid — https://www.deseret.com/2011/7/15/20203879/joyce-mckinney-resurfaces-in-errol-morris-tabloid/
NPR: A Bizarre and Now Serendipitous Tabloid Tale — https://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/137774450/a-bizarre-and-now-serendipitous-tabloid-tale
Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law: Crossing the Line? Errol Morris vs Joyce McKinney — https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jsel/2016/01/crossing-the-line-director-errol-morris-will-go-to-trial-against-film-subject-joyce-mckinney
Glenn M Stewart via Medium: Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon — https://glenn-stewartm.medium.com/joyce-mckinney-and-the-manacled-mormon-bd45169b9b6d
