So I was going to write a post about how it's no wonder Brits think we're all dangerous, mentally inferior religious zealots when they're always seeing people like Bernann McKinney on the news.
But then the story got weirder.
Turns out that Bernann McKinney is almost certainly a.k.a. Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen who did time in England after chasing down and kidnapping an American Mormon missionary and imprisoning him as her sex slave. The Mormon, Kirk Anderson, had apparently fled to England from Utah to get away from her. The Daily Mail has the whole story:
In the summer of 1977, McKinney flew to England with an architect friend called Keith May.
Armed with an imitation revolver, May confronted 21-year-old Anderson on the steps of Ewell's Church of the Latter Day Saints, and frog-marched him to a car in which McKinney was waiting.
Chloroformed and hidden under a blanket, the bespectacled Mormon was driven some 200 miles to Okehampton, where his kidnappers had hired a 17th-century 'honeymoon' cottage for £50 a week.
McKinney later said that she had packed the fridge with Anderson's favourite food and studied The Joy Of Sex in preparation for what was to come.
Years later, McKinney defended herself by implying that she was trying to save Anderson:
'Nobody can understand what it is to lose the man you love to a cult, and I believe that is what the Mormons are. Back in Britain [then] nobody knew what a cult was.'
I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day?
