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Dog cloner Joyce McKinney sought over burglary to fund horse's wooden leg

Mark Frauenfelder at 5:19 pm Fri, Aug 15, 2008

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Remember the story about the pit bull cloner who is suspected by many of being the same woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary 30 years ago to be her sex slave? Well, she is now suspected of plotting a burglary in Tennessee to procure funds for an artificial horse leg.
Joyce Bernann McKinney, a former beauty queen who earlier this year paid £25,000 to have her dead pet recreated, is accused of instructing a 15-year-old boy to break into a house because she needed funds to help another beloved animal, her three-legged horse.

...

The Tennessee charges stem from McKinney's arrest in November 2004 after being found in a van with the teenager. According to prosecutors in Carter County, an area in north eastern Tennessee, she instructed the boy to burgle a house and was charged with criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Dog cloner Joyce McKinney sought over burglary to fund horse's wooden leg (Thanks, Teresa!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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  • Marcel

    “Say woof to mama. Say woof to mama.”

    “Wif. Wif”

    “NO! NO! NO! You’re doing it WRONG! You’re not my little Ceasar!”

  • Anonymous

    @#60 – In the parlance of our times, the term you seek is “jack Mormon.”

  • Loggerhythm

    She had me at Booger.

  • eustace

    Relax, Xopher! Re-read my first sentence. The use of the word “justly” in particular.
    My point is just that in situations where you or I might see one or two possible courses of action, how many must she consider in order to make such bizarre choices? Escaping authorities disguised as a mime!?!

  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

    As Xopher keeps pointing out, kidnapping someone at gunpoint, chaining them up, and forcing sex on them is rape, no matter who’s doing it.

  • Xopher

    Yeah, she’s creative all right. Having no inhibitions really IS a practical advantage. I understood you. The upside of complete lack of inhibitions is increased creative flow; the downside is complete amorality.

  • cassius chaerea

    Coming next: she and Clark Rockefeller are the same person.

  • mdhatter

    Some part of my brain is trying to explain this away as performance art.

    Then again, truly crazy people sometimes just live that way, but without artifice, and quite unselfconsciously.

  • Bookyloo

    The common denominator in much of her antics is a complete, terrifying inability to let go.

    Love a guy to the point of nude Everest nasal carnation slalom but he doesn’t love you back? Why, kidnapping and sexual assault will do just the trick to keep him close at hand! Love your deceased pooch? Why, bring him back from the dead (at least genetically) with cloning! love an injured horse who can’t walk? Don’t humanely euthanize him, oh no! Hire a teenager to “do the legwork” for some “walking around money”!

    If interpol starts closing in, just break out the ol’ deaf mute mime routine! works every time!

    It all makes perfect sense!!

  • manicbassman

    the infamous phrase: “I love him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to,”

    I was of the distinct impression that she kidnapped him so that she could be his sex slave… she had to manacle him to the bed so that she could have sex with him…

  • hubbledeej

    Question: what happened to Mormon sex slave?

  • El_Cid

    Wow! And just when you thought this story couldn’t get any crazier, the crazy just keeps flowing!

  • mongo

    I missed where she admitted she’s the Joyce McKinney wanted in the U.K. The last I read she was threatening to sue the AP reporter for asking the question.

  • frankieboy

    @27 Bobkat, “her own venomous lactations” made milk squirt out of my nose.
    @58 Xopher, love the footnotes. But please, be serious in future.
    Finally, a story that makes the New York Times read like the Weekly World News (RIP)

  • Avram

    I’m exhausted after just reading that first paragraph.

  • Anonymous

    You can’t make this stuff up. For real…

  • brownhb

    I love this story. I hope we are hearing about this woman for a long time.

  • Cpt. Tim

    the crazy is in her eyes.

  • SeamusAndrewMurphy

    The worst sort of sexual innuendo or, at the least, bad sex joke is obvious from the headline.

  • Darth Obvious

    When I first read of the it was on the register.uk. In the article they stated that when her slave escaped from captivity, he impersonated a mime to get out of the country without her finding him. This is the story of the century! Ok, maybe I am wrong, but with a love goddess like that I don’t want to be right!

  • Ratbus

    Apparently she was a mime and a nun as well. Here’s a passage from this link.
    http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23528166-details/A+cloned+dog,+a+Mormon+in+mink-lined+handcuffs+and+a+tantalising+mystery/text/article.do

    Now the case, which had already become a worldwide cause celebre, was about to be given a new lease of life with a sensational twist.

    McKinney met the similarly bailed May and the pair fled to Canada, using false passports and disguised as deaf-mute mime artistes.

    It was later alleged that McKinney was helped to escape by her former landlady, an Irish woman, who went with her to a West End theatrical outfitters.

    There, they bought the wigs and glasses which were later used in their flight from justice.

    By now an international fugitive, McKinney reappeared staying at the Hilton hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, disguised as a nun.

  • Shawn Wolfe

    What’s next? Are we going to find out that she cheated on the scratch-offs to pay for a platinum grill for her vaginal dentata?

    Oh wait… I know… she caught space herpes from an astronaut in the ’70s and now she’s married to the CEO of Pillsbury because she needs the Food Sticks…

    or… wait, I know…… she… she…. ……. . !!!!!!!

  • Darth Obvious

    Damn you Joyce! The waves of passion for you, my Goddess of Crime made me typo all over the place. Just don’t make me wear that pink tutu again, or eat out of the zircon encrusted dog bowl.

  • Shawn Wolfe

    Actually I recognize her.

    It’s that French woman who had the face transplant last year after he dog chewed her face off.

  • jplkeekif

    Ok, so she’s been a beauty queen, taken up her own sex slave, had one of her pets cloned, and now is accused of committing burglary in order to help her 3 legged horse? She’s starting to sound pretty awesome

  • aldasin

    Marry me, you crazy minx!

  • minTphresh

    why didn’t she just clone the horse? or maybe a pitbull-horse spliceclone! mmmm, spiceclone.

  • Falcon_Seven

    She is ‘Insane in the brain’; without a doubt.

  • jvdarcy

    She had me at “former beauty queen”…
    The rest is just gravy.

  • takeshi

    Joyce McKinney, if you’re reading this, I want to be your agent.

  • Vicki

    She hasn’t admitted it. But if it is her, she’s got no incentive to admit it–Joyce McKinney is in fact a fugitive from British law. The thing is, if it isn’t her, there’s something odd about the denials. An actually unrelated person could just point out that there are a lot of people named McKinney in the world, and possibly point to evidence of the difference (a birth certificate in her current name, for example). Threatening to sue someone who asks strong suggests that she is uncomfortable with the question on a level beyond that you or I would feel if asked, randomly, whether we were the same person who was wanted for that crime. (Nobody wants to be asked “Did you rape a Mormon missionary?” but those of us who can calmly say “no, of course not” will do so.)

  • W. James Au

    I’m truly impressed, Mark, every single word in this paragraph is redolent with fail:

    “Remember the story about the pit bull cloner who is suspected by many of being the same woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary 30 years ago to be her sex slave? Well, she is now suspected of plotting a burglary in Tennessee to procure funds for an artificial horse leg.”

  • jesushootscores

    I LOVE this lady!!

  • Xopher

    Wow, this woman really needs to be in prison.

    OK, maybe a mental hospital. Anyway, off the fucking streets.

  • John Coulthart

    A simple check of public records in North Carolina yesterday confirmed that Joyce and “Bernann” are, indeed, one and the same person, and that the predatory beauty queen of 1977 has matured into the pit bull-loving 57-year-old of 2008.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/08/usa

  • Anonymous

    Where’s the “happy mutants” tag?

  • Xopher

    W. James Au, do you mean that it describes a completely amoral absolute loser from hell? Because that’s what I get from that para.

  • Antinous

    I believe that Anonymous @18 has correctly summed up this post.

  • Xopher

    I’ve entertained fantasies about having (consensual) sex with Mormon missionaries (who conveniently come in pairs, no pun intended). I’ve never wanted to rape one, and the actual missionaries I’ve seen around occasionally (skinny pimply boys in too-large shirts with name tags that say “Elder”*) are not at all sexually appealing, at least to me.

    Also, they appear to be scared to death of me, even though I smile pleasantly at them and almost never wear my “Nuke Salt Lake City” t-shirt out in public.** I suspect this is because I’m muscular and shave my head and wear a lot of black. Or maybe it’s just that they intuit (correctly) that talking to me would be at best a complete waste of their mission time.

    So they’ve never bugged me, but even if they had, and no matter how much they did, I would not wish being kidnapped at gunpoint, chloroformed, and tied up and raped on them. PIV rape of a man by a woman was a concept that was laughed at in 1978, and maybe other people think it’s impossible, ridiculous, or funny, but it is none of these. I would remind you that Mormon boys aren’t even allowed to masturbate, which is so grotesquely cruel and unhealthy that it really does make me angry—at the CJCLDS, not those poor misguided boys on their clunky bicycles.

    At any rate, when you’re 18 or 19 and haven’t even performed that-for-which-God-gave-us-hands in a long time, it doesn’t take much in the way of sexual stimulation to get you aroused, and someone with whom you’ve already had an illicit affair knows all your buttons and how to push them…not to mention that the poor guy was already conditioned (classical) to respond to her sexually, beyond his own freedom and dignity, as it were.

    Yes, she’s ridiculous and funny. But she’s also a criminal, and a violent criminal at that (even absent the rape, threatening someone with a firearm (even a fake one, even by proxy) and chloroforming them are both violent acts).

    And if the allegations regarding the burglary are true, she has another young victim (and I can only GUESS what techniques she used to persuade him) in the 15-year-old: his life could have been ruined or even ended if he’d been confronted by an armed homeowner. People who do their own crimes are bad enough; this woman keeps herself safe and talks gullible men into taking all the physical risks. I especially hate her kind of criminal.

    She needs to be locked up. She won’t stop committing crimes until she stops getting away with them.
    __________
    *I always have to stifle a laugh at this. ‘Elder’ in common English means someone who is advanced in years, or at least older than some other specific person; everyone these boys are older than is still in school, or should be. (I’m well aware that it’s a specific (low) rank within the CJCLDS.)

    In my own religion it has an even more specific meaning: it’s someone who has been Wiccan for a while (who is not, as we say, “young in the Craft”), and who is in fact fully able to start and run a Wiccan Coven, and instruct others; if we say “She’s one of my Elders,” we mean “If I have wisdom it comes partly from her.” So these naïve wide-eyed boys on their first trip away from their families wearing that label is bizarrely incongruous.

    **This is a JOKE, in case anyone is in doubt. I have no such t-shirt, would not wear it if I did, and would in fact think ill of anyone who wore or even owned one.

  • Anonymous

    I like the fighting ninjas ideas! Keep them coming!

    Like she’s so in trouble now that she has to placate the Feds, so she agrees to fight ninjas for the CIA as her community service, but escapes to a llamasery in Tibet where she tries to find inner peace but is kicked out after she’s discovered to be corrupting young monks in a tantric skiing ritual.

    Then she surfaces at a temple in that giant abandoned hotel in North Korea where she’s worshipped as a Communist deity.

  • OM

    …Didn’t she also help swipe the Pentagon Papers by hiding them up her skirt?

  • RJ

    Further evidence that the stupid and/or insane lead much more exciting lives than the rest of us. I bet she fights ninjas before breakfast each morning. Why? Because it’s insane, that’s why. Because it’s insane.

  • OM

    “This is a JOKE, in case anyone is in doubt. I have no such t-shirt, would not wear it if I did, and would in fact think ill of anyone who wore or even owned one.”

    …Damn. I was going to ask whether there was a Polo shirt version :-(

  • Perla

    People, people, IT WAS RAPE. I’ve seen some gorgeous Mormon missionaries that I would love to have sexytime with but I wouldn’t lock them up and rape them. I know men being raped is funny to many but rape isn’t cool. it’s bad enough when it happens to women, they are often disbelieved but at least they arent’ laughed at.
    She’s insane. I knew someone who cloned her puppies wasn’t all there. Apparently she’s skipped South Korea without paying for the puppies.
    I’m sure something else will pop up. What’s next, she’s been kidnapping countless Texans disguised as a flying saucer?

  • jvdarcy

    I certainly hope the Koreans got paid in cash…

  • W. James Au

    I mean I’d be impressed with just a single fail, but one paragraph has a whole goddamn salad bar of fail:

    - pit bull cloner
    - kidnapped a Mormon missionary
    - her sex slave
    - plotting a burglary
    - for an artificial horse leg

  • Takuan

    is it rape if you eat them afterwards?

  • Xopher

    *now thinks OM is an ex-Mormon*

    *or is it former Mormon? I can never remember*

  • Chuck

    Hey! I know who she is!

    She invented the Nigerian E-mail scam to raise the funds needed to upload her parrot’s genetic code and personality into a network of Timex Sinclairs.

  • aldasin

    “predatory beauty queen of 1977″

    That’s a John Prine song right there.

  • Muscato

    #68:

    Actually, my understanding is that she and an accomplice escaped from the UK disguised as members of a mime troupe. There just can’t be any detail of this whole saga that isn’t perfectly, exquisitely insane. I hope John Waters is working on the script right now, to star Kathleen Turner as today-McKinney.

    And is it just me or does 70s-McKinney look scarily like Squeaky Fromme?

  • bobkat

    No, no, no. After she helped Elvis fake his death by supplying him with a body double, she travelled back in time with him and assumed the identity of Priscilla Presley, while he killed his past self off and assumed his own identity. After years of her outrageous shenanigans, however, he fell out of love, and in revenge, she poisoned his Mountain Valley Spring water with her own venomous lactations, killing him on the very same day she had previously helped him fake his death upon.

    //whew.

  • erissian

    We’ve been lacking a proper supervillian in the real world, but I think Joyce McKinney is coming close.

  • acb

    I thought Clark Rockefeller was Cory’s evil twin.

  • minTphresh

    RJ, #22 is 100% WIN!

  • Wingo

    MINTPHRESH, you took the words right out of my fingers.

    This is pure awesome. Now excuse me while I go try and write my wacky new story about what we find out about her next…

    Oh, wait. Nevermind. You can’t make this stuff up.

  • redthoughts

    She is now ready for the next big reality TV show!

  • buddy66

    #30,

    Bye.

  • miss_ali1984

    This is the most interesting woman EVER!

  • Xopher

    FrankieBoy, I’m almost sure you’re being sarcastic…but the only joke in the comment you refer to is the one labeled as such by the second footnote. Everything else in that comment is intended seriously.

    Yeah, I really think masturbation is a health necessity for adolescent male humans, and for adults (though less frequent “treatments” are sufficient) who are not having sex regularly. Argue with my urologist if you don’t think so, as it’s off-topic here, but I wasn’t joking about that.

  • Stefan Jones

    Where did she get the cloning money?

    Could she be Mrs. D.B. Cooper?

    Did she sell a kidney?

    Did she blackmail Karl Rove after stumbling into the motel room where he indulges in his lard, llama, and rubber sheet fetish?

  • eustace

    There are many harsh things one might justly say about this woman, but I would like to say this; she has a broader sense of the possibilities inherent in life than most, if not all, of us.

  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

    HuronBob, I’ve given the tiny Japanese anthropomorphic pom line the night off. I’d hate to make them break off their dates early.

  • OM

    “Where did she get the cloning money?”

    …She ran a counterfeit ring? :-)

  • ShadowDancer

    “Where did she get the cloning money?”

    According to the article in Daily Mail (linked here) last week, she sold her house to pay for the cloning.

  • Ugly Canuck

    Nice to see people keeping active.

  • Stefan Jones

    #36: You’re link wasn’t put together properly.

    But . . . sheesh. This woman doesn’t need pets, she needs a friend. But I’m going to guess that would be a really tough job.

    • Antinous

      I’d say that she’s a prime candidate for one of those fake babies.

  • andyhavens

    Fighting ninjas before breakfast isn’t really crazy. It’s hard, and it’s unusual. But not crazy like wooden horse legs.

    Now… fighting with ninjas over what to eat? Maybe. Fighting on behalf of starving, breakfast-less ninjas? Closer…

    Forcing ninjas to fight the people who bought your house so that you could clone your pet, so that you can get back in and dig up the pet’s dessicated [deleted by NSA] from the hidden “Kansas” room in the basement…

    Now we’re getting somewhere.

  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

    I’m thinking Erissian is right, and that Joyce McKinney is our first satisfactory supervillain.

    • Antinous

      She’s got the Jabba the Hutt mouth down pat in that right-hand picture. It looks like she’s going to eat the dog.

  • Patrick Nielsen Hayden

    “a whole goddamn salad bar of fail”

    #24 for the win!

  • Roschelle

    this has got to be the craziest or should I say most bizarre story I’ve seen in a long time…can someone say “psychiatric counseling”!

  • Apashiol

    Well. Who hasn’t thought of kidnapping a Mormon missionary as their very own sex-slave. Isn’t that why they send them out in pairs?

  • holtt

    They say she’s going to pay for cloning that bigfoot body, once she can sell off the cloned pitbulls for cash.

  • everythingiknow

    I like her more and more.

    I see a great movie there, with the feel of Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’.

  • franko

    dollars to doughnuts she’s gonna make another bundle selling the rights of her story to someone from hollywood.

  • Xopher

    Yes, Eustace, a refusal to rule out the possibilities that involve the grossly immoral, utterly unethical, and flat-out criminal WOULD lead to a broader sense of possibility, wouldn’t it?

  • Phikus

    She is the new bat boy.

  • hassan-i-sabbah

    @Apashiol-”Isn’t that why they send them out in pairs?” yup,One for the sex slave business and the other..well, just to watch!

  • humbuzz

    Obviously she is vying for a vice presidential bid…