The Daily Mail today took the opportunity to reprise perhaps the greatest pull-quote in tabloid history.
Journalists who remember the 1970s will know it well, as: “I’d ski naked down Mt Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me.”
The Mail believes that the US woman “Bernan McKinney” who recreated her dog “Booger” by paying a South Korean laboratory to have it cloned is one and the same as Joyce McKinney – the woman at the centre of the “Mormon in Chains” story who was manna from heaven for the UK tabloids in 1978.
Former US beauty queen McKinney jumped bail and disappeared in 1978 after kidnapping a male Mormon missionary, chaining him to a bed in a Devon cottage and forcing him to gave sex with her.
She “raped” him three times, a court heard, after dressing him in silky pajamas and apparently used mink-lined handcuffs to spreadeagle him on a bed.
It was in a court case that McKinney uttered her infamous quote about skiing down Everest.
After absconding she later posed topless for US glamour magazines and revelled in her notieriety in the USl.
There have been internet rumours prompted by the apparent similarities between the two McKinneys.
And when the Mail asked the woman at the centre of the cloned-dog story if she is Joyce McKinney – she said: “Are you going to ask me about my dogs or not? Because that’s all I’m prepared to talk to you about.”
While the tale of the “Manacled Mormon” got widespread play in the UK – it was not really picked up in the US.
Press Gazette’s US correspondent Jeffrey Blyth noted at the time: “There is sometimes a sanctimoniousness in the US press about such stories.”
I wander if any of Press Gazette’s current readers were involved in the story?
And does anyone have a tabloid tale to better it?
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