Dog Cloning, Mormon Kidnapping Former Beauty Queen also Sought on Bizarre Theft Charges

As if it couldn’t get any weirder….

(Joyce) Bernann McKinney sold her house to get the money to clone her beloved pitbull Booger – and put herself into the international limelight.  As reported by the TimesOnLineUK:

The publicity led to her identification as the fugitive suspect in the sensational British case of the alleged kidnapping and rape of a Mormon missionary in 1977.

It is alleged that the former Miss Wyoming stalked the missionary, a former lover she met at university in America, to a tabernacle in East Ewell, Surrey, and kidnapped him and held him in a cottage in Devon. The 17st missionary, Kirk Anderson, claimed that the petite beauty queen tied him to the bed with mink-trimmed handcuffs and forced him to have sex.

Now, according to the TimesOnLineUK:

The “manacled Mormon” kidnapper who was exposed after cloning her pet pitbull terrier in South Korea is wanted on burglary charges involving a three-legged horse in the United States.

Joyce McKinney is accused of telling a 15-year-old boy to break into a house in Tennessee so that she could get money to buy a false leg for her beloved horse, her lawyer said.

Ms McKinney, 58, was charged in 2004 with criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

A story in today’s Telegraph states:

David Crockett, Miss McKinney’s lawyer in the Tennessee case, said she hoped to get money to buy a false leg for the animal. “She loved it dearly,” he said.

He said he had not heard from his client since she missed a court appearance for the alleged 2004 offence but after seeing media coverage of the dog cloning, said he was certain she and the dog lover calling herself Bernann McKinney were the same person.

The Black Dog of Meridan

My two absolute favorite things are dogs and geology.  Surfing around the net today as the mortar was ground off my kitchen floor (thank doG for the wireless internet access that let me do it somewhere besides inside my house…) I came across an absolutely wonderful post on the Connecticut Windows on the Natural World blog.

The Hanging Hills of Meriden: Legend and Geology is the story of an ethereal black dog said to haunt the West Peak of the Hanging Hills of Meriden.  The first person to write about the legend was geologist W.H.C. Pynchon, whose account was published in the Connecticut Quarterly.  Pynchon wrote that “Many have seen him once, a few twice—none have ever told of the third meeting.”  “Men have seen it bark, but have heard no sound; and it leaves no footprint behind it on the dust of summer or the snow of winter.”  Seeing the dog for the third time was supposed to be a harbinger of one’s impending death.

The Hanging Hills are a traprock range.  The term traprock comes from the Swedish word trappa, for ‘steps’ referring to the characteristic shape of the rocks and outcrops that make up the deposits.  Traprock is comprised primarily of basalt, a fine-grained, high-temperature igneous rock with a high iron content.  According to Bowen’s reaction series (wow – that makes for a major trip down a collegiate nostalgia lane…), rocks like basalt are highly susceptible to chemical weathering.  The traprock of the Hanging Hills is also highly fractured and faulted and contains small bubble-like openings call vesicles in many areas.  These features make rock prone to physical weathering.  This physical and chemical weathering is so common in traprock that piles of talus at the base of the steep outcrops are one distinguishing characteristic of traprock ranges.

Read Brendan Hanrahan’s excellent post about the black dog of the Hanging Hills and the mysterious deaths of Pynchon and his friend, Herbert Marshall.  Decide for yourself whether their deaths were due to the parapsychological effects of a canine apparition — or to climbing accidents related to rotten rock in the Hanging Hills outcrops.

Either way — it’s a really cool story.  Enjoy!