Standalone Volume

Three Days In Devon: The Beauty Queen, the Missionary, and the Kidnapping the World Called the 'Manacled Mormon' Case

By Vivienne Ashcroft

Quick Summary

She said she would have skied down Mount Everest in a bikini for him. Instead, she bought a gun, a set of chains, and a plane ticket - and flew three thousand miles to prove it.

She said she would have skied down Mount Everest in a bikini for him. Instead, she bought a gun, a set of chains, and a plane ticket - and flew three thousand miles to prove it.

In the autumn of 1977, former beauty queen Joyce McKinney tracked a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson to a quiet English town, approached him outside his own church at gunpoint, and drove him to an isolated cottage in Devon - where he was chained to a bed frame for three days. She called it a rescue. The British press called it kidnapping. The world would spend the next four decades unable to decide which of them was right.

What followed was one of the strangest true crime sagas of the twentieth century: a courtroom defense built on love rather than denial, a tabloid bidding war between Fleet Street's fiercest rivals, a scandal-ending photo leak, and a fugitive's escape from British justice disguised as a member of a traveling mime troupe. Joyce McKinney vanished for thirty years - only to resurface in 2008 at the center of an entirely different international headline: the world's first celebrity dog-cloning scandal.