Utter the name Joyce McKinney to Britons of a certain age, and you are inevitably rewarded with the briefest flash of incomprehension, followed by a gasp as their memories take them tumbling back to the dark days of early autumn, 1977.

It was a miserable time: there were clashes on the picket line at Grunwick, inflation was sprinting away at 13%, Elvis had just died and a band called Baccara were at Number One with Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. And then, as if to lift the spirits of a nation, along came the most unlikely, the most baffling, the most downright weird news story.

A Mormon missionary from Utah called Kirk Anderson, who was going door-to-door in Ewell, Surrey, was kidnapped at gunpoint by McKinney, a former cheerleader and beauty queen from North Carolina. With the help of a friend, Keith May, McKinney drugged Anderson with chloroform and drove him to a rented 17th century cottage near Okehampton, Devon. There the unfortunate young man was chained, spreadeagled, to a bed, with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs, and over the next few days he was repeatedly required to have sex with McKinney, who later explained that she had been keen to bear his child.

Eventually the missionary wriggled free, dashed from the cottage and alerted police, who set up roadblocks around Okehampton, capturing both beauty queen and friend. The pair were charged with false imprisonment and possession of an imitation .38 revolver, and brought before Epsom magistrates.

McKinney explained at the commital proceedings that she had fallen head over heels for Anderson when they were at college together in Utah, adding: “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.” She had hired a private detective, tracked Anderson down and came to Britain with May….

read the rest at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/08/usa