I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the new film by acclaimed documentary-maker Errol Morris was about the Joyce McKinney story which dominated the British press in 1977 — when they weren’t frothing at the mouth over the Sex Pistols, that is. It’s a doozy of a story too, involving a former beauty queen who became obsessed with a Mormon missionary, followed him to England where she kidnapped him and handcuffed him to a bed (with mink-lined cuffs) in a Dorset cottage for three days while she forced him to have sex with her (according to him anyway, McKinney always claimed it was consensual). He eventually escaped, she was arrested but skipped bail, fled the country, and was found in Atlanta a week later hiding out disguised as a nun.

It really doesn’t get much more perfectly tabloid than that so it’s no wonder Fleet Street had a collective orgasm over it, especially when at the centre of the story was a colourful, curvy blond given to statements like “I loved him so much that I would have skiied naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he had asked me to.”

But perhaps the most surprising thing about McKinney is how completely forgotten she is (or was, before this movie.) Despite the lurid, you-couldn’t-make-it-up nature of her story she vanished and tumbled down the memory hole pretty soon after she left England (though she continued with her highly eccentric behaviour.), even people who were around in England in 1977 might have a hard time remembering what she was infamous for. That’s how things were in the old-media world of the 1970s, only one cheapo book was published about the case and yesterday’s tabloid sensation quickly became tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.

She obviously picked the wrong decade (wrong century, actually) to kidnap a Mormon missionary and chain him to a bed. Today there are plenty of ways for a person to milk their Warholian fifteen minutes for all they’re worth and even people who don’t seem to actually do anything can become world-famous, so the sky should be the limit for a character like Joyce to turn her notoriety into money and celebrity: hire Max Clifford to keep her in the papers, a reality television show, a tell-all autobiography, her own line of fitness videos, make-up, shoes, perfume, and probably her own brand of fur-lined handcuffs to sell on QVC too.

Now we need someone to make movies about Lord Lucan and John Stonehouse.

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