General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Manacled Mormon case

The Manacled Mormon case, also known as the Mormon sex-in-chains case, was a 1977 incident in England in which the American former beauty queen Joyce McKinney was accused by a young American Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, of kidnapping him from outside his church, chaining him to a bed in a Devon cottage and raping him over three days. McKinney maintained that the encounter was consensual, and because she and her companion skipped bail and fled to the United States, the case never came to trial. The name came from the Daily Mirror, whose headline "The Case of the Manacled Mormon" caught on when the story broke in 1977 and 1978.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Date and place	September 1977, a cottage in Devon, England³
Principal figures	Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming; Kirk Anderson, a Latter-day Saint missionary from Utah; Keith May, her companion²^•⁴
Charges	Kidnapping and sexual indecency, brought after Anderson's complaint¹
Outcome	No trial: McKinney and May jumped bail in 1978, returned to the United States, and were never extradited⁴
Conflicting accounts	Anderson said he was tied up and raped for three days; McKinney said the sex was consensual, and admitted only that she had tied him to the bed with ropes, not chains³
Later treatments	Errol Morris's documentary Tabloid (2010); Anthony Delano's book Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon (2009); the announced feature film Sinner V. Saints (2022)⁵^•⁶^•⁷

Background and the trip to England

McKinney met Anderson in Utah during college, before he left to undertake missionary work for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She always maintained that her trip to England was an effort to rescue Anderson, whom she claimed had been sent to England because of his relationship with her. By her account, the church had deliberately concealed his whereabouts, and she hired a private investigator who located him serving at a branch in Ewell, Surrey.³^•⁵

McKinney flew to England in September 1977 with her friend Keith May, a purported bodyguard named Gil Parker, and a pilot, Jackson Shaw. Parker and Shaw left shortly after arriving and play no further part in the story. Within a few days McKinney located Anderson and, according to her, took him to a cottage in Devon for a three-day weekend together, in which she said they planned to be married and the sexual relations were consensual.³

The three days and the complaint

Anderson asserted that McKinney had abducted him from the steps of a church meetinghouse, chained him to a bed and raped him. After three days he slipped away and telephoned the police, asserting she had kidnapped and raped him. McKinney, in interviews including one with the BBC, admitted that she had tied Anderson to the bed but insisted this was with ropes rather than chains, and that everything else was consensual; she said she had consulted a demure book of instruction for newlyweds that advised experimenting with bondage, to cure his impotence. The Guardian's later account noted that the tabloids discovered a different explanation for her interest in bondage: a secret, Bettie-Page-style career in soft porn.²^•³^•⁵

Law enforcement arrested McKinney and charged her with kidnapping and sexual indecency. Reports arising from the pretrial court proceedings, some from law enforcement sources, said a fake gun, handcuffs and a bottle of chloroform had been found in McKinney's and May's belongings; reports she denied. According to Scotland Yard's account, she had kidnapped Anderson and tied him to a bed in what the press called a Devon "love cottage."¹^•⁸^•⁴

The tabloid war

When the particulars of the story and Anderson's religion became known, the British tabloids erupted. Headlines giggled and brayed about "The Case of the Manacled Mormon" and "The Mormon Sex-in-Chains Case"; the moniker itself was the Daily Mirror's. As the London police put McKinney in a paddy wagon, she scrawled a "Help me!" note and held it against the rear window.²^•³

The Mirror and its rival the Daily Express fought over the story along opposed lines. The Mirror, which had lost McKinney to a rival, dug into her modeling past and published nude photographs of her. The Express took her side with what the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called gallantry and humor, publishing photos of her dressed as a nun, and gave her exclusive interviews; its reporter Peter Tory was tasked with squiring her about town. At a court hearing McKinney gave the papers their most durable copy when she said of her love for Anderson: "I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose." The two papers' editors, Mike Molloy at the Mirror and Derek Jameson at the Express, deployed teams of reporters to track her down after she later vanished from bail.⁵^•⁹

Escape from bail and the absence of a trial

McKinney was released on bail and then vanished. She and her accused accomplice Keith May jumped bail in 1978 and returned to the United States, and no effort was made to extradite them back to the United Kingdom, so the charges were never tested at trial. In her later accounts she described the trip as a mission to de-brainwash Anderson and bring him home to marry her. May died in 2004.⁹^•⁴^•⁵

The case stayed dormant for decades, then generated two waves of renewed attention. In 2008 McKinney resurfaced when a Korean company announced it had successfully cloned her pit bull, a story she met in person with one of the cloned dogs. In 2010 the Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris released Tabloid, built on extensive interviews with McKinney herself and archival BBC news reports, which revived the story for a new audience.⁴^•⁸

McKinney v. Morris

McKinney turned on the film. In 2011 she filed a defamation and misappropriation lawsuit against Morris, producer Mark Lipson, distributors Sundance Selects and IFC Films, and several other defendants in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. She claimed Morris had approached her about a TV series on victims of paparazzi and had obtained photos and newspaper clippings from her under false pretenses; the pleading charged misappropriation of likeness, defamation, misrepresentation, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and breach of contract.⁴

A California Court of Appeal panel found for the filmmaker in 2013 in McKinney v. Morris. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade reported the result as a judge finding for the filmmaker in the "manacled Mormon" case.¹⁰^•³

Books and screen adaptations

The fullest published account of the tabloid side of the case is Anthony Delano's Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon. Delano had been the Daily Mirror's chief US correspondent and one of the team that tracked down the story; the book, first published and then republished by Revel Barker in 2009, describes the Mirror's prepared exposé and what happened to McKinney after she fled to avoid being tried at the Old Bailey.⁶^•⁹

In 2022 the Salt Lake Tribune reported that a feature film adaptation of the case, Sinner V. Saints, was in the works, starring Freddie Highmore and Maisie Williams, with the production based on Delano's book. The film joined a string of screen projects about episodes from recent Latter-day Saint history, and its makers told the New York Times they aimed to be as detailed and accurate as possible and to respect the religion.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Law and justice › Criminal law and penal justice › Offenses › Crimes against the person › Kidnapping and false imprisonment

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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