I was never a proper reporter. Meanwhile, in London, the Mirror had got wind of the Express 's "scoop". In one sense the Mirror team was disappointed.
They hoped that it would be the Sun that swallowed McKinney's apple-pie ramblings. But it also meant that the Express was going to risk contempt of court charges, which strengthened the Mirror 's own case for publishing. In any event the word Molloy was hearing was that neither the British police nor judiciary were keen to see McKinney back in the country or the dock. To all intents and purposes, the trial was history. She was photographed in a roll-neck sweater, smiling with a carnation in her teeth.
On the same day, the Daily Mirror also had McKinney on its front page. This time she was naked and staring at the camera with a less-than-innocent expression. But there was another side to the runaway beauty queen Joyce McKinney.
Seldom can two newspapers have run such graphically contrasting versions of the same story on the same day. Holed up in a hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, McKinney, Tory and the rest of the extended group waited to hear news of how the Express story had fared in Britain, all of them utterly unaware of the Mirror 's contribution. When a friend of McKinney's phoned and told her what had happened, she became hysterical.
She ran for the balcony and tore the curtain down. I thought, God, she's going to go over the edge and there were these American tourists underneath in deck chairs — she would have taken them with her. Tory and Vine took McKinney to a nearby hospital, where she was sedated. They then called her parents who arrived at the hotel early the next morning.
By then the effects of the sedative had worn off and McKinney became upset again, going so far as to sink her teeth into her father's arm. The commotion drew attention, as Tory recalls: "Two state troopers turned up in cowboy hats and dark glasses in this small hotel room that had all these people in there: me, Brian, the photographer, Keith May, the parents and Joyce. Joyce was sitting there looking like Ophelia in a nightie, staring eyes and her hair all over the place, and Keith May looked very alarmed.
The state troopers asked us what was going on, so we tried to explain the story to them. One of them — it was like Laurel and Hardy — he actually took his hat off and scratched his head at one stage as we were talking about East Grinstead, Mormon church, tied to the bed. They were completely baffled by it.
They weren't the only ones. The following day the Express tried to dismiss claims of a "lurid past". The Express gave up. Jameson, the editor, walked into the pub next door to the Mirror , announced his "surrender" and bought everyone a drink, and his paper made no further mention of McKinney.
But the Mirror ran still further revelations, illustrated with images of McKinney in various states of undress with whips and other suggestive props.
Only the announcement on the Friday of a crisis in the Lib-Lab pact finally forced McKinney off the front page. In her car were a set of handcuffs, some rope and a notebook detailing Anderson's movements. In Tabloid , Morris sensibly avoids taking sides, allowing the various protagonists to put forward their own recollections without editorial comment.
The result has not pleased McKinney, who turned up at several screenings around the States protesting against a film in which she had been a willing participant. By contrast, Tory and Gavin both sing Morris's praises. What they are less positive about is the current state of tabloid papers.
Molloy agrees. The pops now are not a vestige of what they were in my day. They simply report celebrity culture. Fleet Street became coarser and more competitive, and it ended with phone hacking. But in a sense the McKinney story was a prototype of today's celebrity culture, in which dreams dwarf talent and attention trumps application.
Her misfortune was to live in an era before X Factor and Big Brother. Had she been a young woman today, she might have lived out her starry ambitions in her 15 minutes of fame. As it was she put her creative energy into a romance with a man who didn't want to be tied down, at least not in the way that McKinney wanted.
It is unclear what happened to the fourth and fifth pit bulls. McKinney, who is accused of a Valley Village hit-and-run that killed a year-old Holocaust survivor, was living in a truck for about a decade with her cloned dogs in kennels. The two dogs are up for adoption and live in adjoining kennels. The shelter staff think I am about 11 years old.
Very sweet and affectionate boy. Really spry for his age. Would do just fine in an apartment, even a studio apartment as long as you have a nice cozy couch for him to nap on.
At a. In the video, the truck plows into the year-old while he is in the middle of a crosswalk. The driver, later determined by police to be McKinney, pauses for a moment, then continues on.
On June 21, a tip that came in was pretty good: There was a truck police might be interested in parked near Hollywood Burbank Airport. The prosecution argued that McKinney was a stalker whose "all-consuming passion" had led her to abduct Anderson and force him to have sex. The barrister for the crown read out Anderson's submission: "She grabbed my pyjamas from just around my neck and tore them from my body.
The chains were tight and I could not move. She proceeded to have intercourse. I did not want it to happen. I was very upset. In McKinney's extraordinary final speech to the court, she held forth to the magistrates on the psychology of sexual submission. He has a lot of guilt about sex because his mother has overprotected him all his life He has to be tied up to have an orgasm.
But the quote that was a sub-editor's fantasy came during the extended declaration of her feelings for Anderson. It was as if McKinney had studied the tabloids and served them exactly what they wanted. Given that she had little else to occupy her for almost three months in Holloway prison, that is probably precisely what did happen. But if she had the reporters eating out of her hand, the magistrates were less impressed.
They referred the case to trial, although they did now grant her bail. And that's when the fun really started. Although she was obliged by her bail conditions to live with her parents, who had travelled to Britain, and their temporary landlady in north London, McKinney soon set about enjoying her new-found fame. She promised to expose the Mormon church and the Osmond family, and took out an advertisement in Variety seeking the attention of agents and film studios. Her sharp routine in and out of court didn't go unnoticed.
If she was capable of such show-stealing turns, news editors began to wonder, could her story of a sheltered life really make sense? And what had she been up to in the two years between leaving Utah and coming to England? It turned out that he was a real freak but he opened the doors for us," Gavin said. He also told Gavin that the former Mormon had worked as an escort and that reporters from the Sun had been in touch with him, though he had told them nothing.
Fearing that the Mirror's rivals would beat him to the story, Gavin trawled through McKinney's phone bill, searching for soft-porn photographers and the all-important negatives. He also dug out adverts for McKinney's services in the classified sections of free magazines. The whole investigation took him around three weeks but he found what he was looking for and headed back to London with a bulging file of lurid evidence. The only problem was that the Mirror couldn't run the story. There were no moral doubts.
Molloy and Gavin both thought that McKinney deserved to have her secret past exposed. Yet anything published about McKinney before the trial would be contempt of court and in April , the trial suddenly looked like being indefinitely postponed. Photographs of the event show a beaming McKinney in the kind of dress Elizabeth Hurley would later make a career falling out of.
Whatever McKinney was projecting, it wasn't an image of God-fearing modesty. Tory recognised a fellow performer, someone who slipped so effortlessly into a role that she became the act and the act became her. One of the most striking contrasts in this story is between the female teetotaller McKinney and the hard-drinking male hack pack. For a while at least, it was the sober American who outwitted the inebriated Britons. Within days of The Stud premiere, McKinney had vanished.
She didn't turn up at the police station as required by her bail agreement. These plans involved kidnapping the man of her dreams. According to the widespread coverage in British tabloids and court documents, McKinney was arrested and charged with abducting Kirk Anderson from the front steps of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was imprisoned and chained to a bed in a cottage by McKinney and an accomplice.
But, there is more to this complicated narrative.
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