The Manacled Mormon: The Kidnapping Case That Had British Tabloids in a Frenzy
Updated: 4 days ago
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.
Quick answers
What was the Manacled Mormon case?
A 1977 British criminal case in which former beauty queen Joyce McKinney was accused of kidnapping and repeatedly raping Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson at a rented Devon cottage. She fled the country before the case reached trial.
Was Joyce McKinney ever convicted of kidnapping or rape?
No. She and her accomplice, Keith May, skipped bail and left Britain before trial and were only ever convicted, in absentia, of the separate offence of failing to appear in court.
What happened to Joyce McKinney afterward?
She returned to the US, was arrested again in 1984 for stalking Anderson, and resurfaced publicly in 2008 after having her pet dog cloned in South Korea. In 2019 she was charged over a fatal hit-and-run in Los Angeles and found mentally unfit to stand trial.
Why did the case get treated as comedy rather than a serious crime?
British courts and the press in 1977 largely assumed a woman couldn't meaningfully rape a man, which let the case be covered as tabloid entertainment rather than a genuine assault allegation.
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.
It wasn't the first sign of how far McKinney would take that inability to let go. According to detailed reporting on the case, she had also become fixated on Wayne Osmond of the Osmond Brothers around this period, and reportedly attempted suicide around the time of his wedding before being admitted to a Utah women's health centre, from which she escaped by climbing out of a window. Whatever was happening beneath the surface, by the time Anderson left for his mission, McKinney had already shown a pattern of responding to rejection with extreme, sometimes self-destructive behaviour.
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, a licensed pilot, 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.
What the Court Actually Heard
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.
McKinney's own testimony to the court complicated the picture further rather than simplifying it. She told the packed hearing that after the pair had slept together in Utah, they were, in her own phrase, “married in God's eyes,” that she had become pregnant, and that she had subsequently lost the child after being attacked by Mormons, a claim never substantiated. According to detailed case reporting from Crime Library, she also told the court that Anderson could only reach orgasm if he was tied up, an assertion presented as evidence that the restraints were consensual rather than forced.
Reporting from the case also surfaced a detail that sits awkwardly against the strict kidnapping narrative: at one point during the three days, McKinney and Anderson reportedly left the cottage together and travelled back into central London, where they had hamburgers at the Hard Rock Cafe, unaccompanied and unrestrained, before Anderson went off alone to buy a newspaper, in which he then read a report of his own kidnapping. Exactly what that outing means for the case has never been resolved. Both accounts, in their own way, survive the detail. Prosecutor Neil Denison told the court plainly that motive didn't change the offence: a kidnapping, he said, done for love is no less a kidnapping than a kidnapping for monetary gain.
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.
She was fond of that kind of line, telling reporters at various points that her love for Anderson was the kind that would have her doing something equally extravagant if he asked. It was exactly the sort of quote that made the tabloids adore her, and exactly the sort that made it harder for anyone to take her account of events seriously.
On Remand, and a Bidding War Fleet Street Couldn't Resist
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 and May reportedly tried to sell exclusive rights to their story for as much as £50,000, and McKinney took out advertisements in Variety hoping to attract a film studio's attention even before her trial had happened. She attended film premieres while on bail, including the London premiere of The Stud, where she reportedly upstaged Joan Collins, and was photographed socialising with The Who's drummer, Keith Moon. 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 tracked down one of McKinney's former Los Angeles boyfriends, Steve Moskowitz, flew him to London, and obtained nude photographs of McKinney along with his claims that she had worked as an escort in the United States. 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 rather than a disappearing act, 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 and manacled, then 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, quoting Brigitte Bardot's line that she'd “given her youth to men” and now gave her “old age to dogs,” adding that dogs and children sensed an innocence in her.
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 almost entirely through McKinney's own extensive interviews, since Anderson refused to participate and Keith May had died in 2004. Speaking to NPR about the film's central, unresolved question, Morris asked McKinney directly whether she thought a woman could rape a man. Her answer became one of the film's most quoted lines: “that's like puttin' a marshmallow in a parkin' meter.” The film received strong reviews, with a 92 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, praised for Morris's skill in letting his subjects reveal themselves.
A Lawsuit, and a Rejected Settlement
McKinney later sued Morris, alleging breach of contract, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress, claiming she'd been tricked into an interview she believed would clear her name and that the finished film misrepresented her. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the case dragged on for years before heading toward trial in 2016, by which point McKinney, then 66 and visually impaired, was adamant about seeing it through rather than settling, telling the outlet she'd turned down a $75,000 settlement offer and “told them they could kiss my butt.” The lawsuit was ultimately settled out of court on undisclosed terms.
A Far Darker Final Chapter
The story most people know ends with dog cloning and a lawsuit, but McKinney's own life took a much bleaker turn afterward. By 2019 she was living out of a truck in Los Angeles with three dogs. On 17 June that year, according to NBC News, a 91-year-old man named Gennady Bolotsky, a Holocaust survivor who had escaped Nazi-occupied Ukraine decades earlier, was struck and killed by a pickup truck while walking his dog in a marked crosswalk in Valley Village, California. The driver didn't stop. Police later identified her as Joyce Bernann McKinney, and she was arrested days afterward near Burbank Airport, still living in the truck involved.
McKinney was charged with hit-and-run driving resulting in death, vehicular manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon, facing a potential eleven-year sentence. She never stood trial. A judge, according to NBC Los Angeles, declared doubt about her mental competency within weeks of the charges being filed, and criminal proceedings were suspended pending psychiatric evaluation. She was found mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to a state mental health facility, with her competency reassessed at repeated hearings afterward rather than the case ever reaching a courtroom. Bolotsky's own family were left with no trial and no conviction, a second family, in a sense, denied the resolution Kirk Anderson's case never gave him either.
What the Case Became
For decades, the Manacled Mormon case was remembered primarily as a tabloid story, and on the surface that's 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. What came afterward, decades on, makes it harder still to treat any part of this story as simple entertainment.
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 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.
FAQ
Did Joyce McKinney ever apologise or change her story?
No. Decades later she was still giving the same account, describing herself as a woman who fell in love and was punished for pursuing it.
Why wasn't Joyce McKinney extradited back to Britain?
The FBI investigated but the US did not pursue extradition, and Britain never made a formal extradition request, so the matter was simply left unresolved.
Did Kirk Anderson ever participate in the documentary Tabloid?
No. Errol Morris said he attempted to contact Anderson by registered mail but never received a response, so the film is told almost entirely from McKinney's side.
What happened to Keith May, McKinney's accomplice?
He died in 2004, before Tabloid was made, and was never able to give his own account of the case on record.
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