‍CHARMER: Expressman Peter Tory with Joyce McKinney

‍“FUCK ME!” Editor Derek Jameson nearly fell off his chair when Peter Tory put his head round his office door and told him that sex-in-chains Mormon Joyce McKinney wanted the Express to buy her story.

‍“What does she want?”

‍“£40,000 in a suitcase!” said the Hickey team’s talented scribe and former Shakespearian actor.

‍It was the summer of 1977, and the woman who allegedly chained Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson to a bed while she had her way with him for three days in an English country cottage, was holding on the line from America.

‍“Well, give it to her, give it to her!” said Jameson waving is hand.

‍A week earlier Tory had used his legendary charm to take McKinney to the West End premiere of the new Joan Collins film Stud, in a Rolls-Royce, much to the annoyance of the Press pack chasing the Manacled Mormon story. He thought he had it in the bag until she fled to America fleeing rape charges.

‍She always denied raping Kirk, who feared the wrath of God, the Mormons and his parents for sex outside marriage, telling reporters: “Women can’t rape men, it would be like squeezing a marshmallow into a parking meter!”

‍Instead, it was true love … “I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose for Kirk, she said.” Every quote was a sub’s dream. Cartoons of a naked woman skiing down a mountain with a flower hanging out of her nose, appeared everywhere.

‍And so it was, that Tory arrived in the reception of the Hilton Hotel in Atlanta with the most valuable suitcase he had ever carried. He was met by McKinney and her kidnap partner Keith May, who worshipped her.

‍For Tory it was like a scene from an amateur production of Ali Baba. The pair were covered in greasepaint and wearing Arabian clothes to disguise themselves, fearing they were being followed by the FBI and Scotland Yard.

‍The Express sent along the chief of their New York bureau, Brian Vine, and a photographer, to help out because in Tory’s own words: “I was never a proper news reporter.” But McKinney trusted him.

‍It all started when Kirk pulled over on a Utah highway to admire her red Chevrolet. He had a white one. She fell in love with him instantly. He was 19, six years younger than her and they slept together. The former Miss Wyoming lost her virginity, and he was overcome with guilt, confessing his ‘vile crime’ to Mormon elders, after she had a miscarriage.

‍His parents and the Mormons shipped him out of sight to England for missionary work in Epsom. McKinney, also a Mormon, claimed he had been kidnapped by church extremists and gave chase employing a detective agency because she was attracted to its agents who looked like Hollywood boxing champ Rocky Stallone.

‍McKinney took with her a trunk filled with handcuffs, wireless microphones, a toy gun, chains, ropes and a vial of chloroform. With her sidekick, Keith May, who worshipped her, they kidnapped him on the steps of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Ewell, Surrey, and drove him at fake gunpoint, to a secluded cottage in Devon, where he was chained “spread-eagled” to a bed and repeatedly raped to get McKinney pregnant. He was freed after three days.

‍He phoned police from a telephone box and McKinney and May were held on remand for three months. She claimed she used bondage as a sex game to cure his religious hangups and help him function in bed. “He has a lot of guilt about sex because his mother overprotected him all his life,” she said. “He has to be tied up to have an orgasm.”

‍He said: “She tore my pyjamas off up over my neck and yanked them from my body. The chains were tight, and I couldn’t move. She proceeded to have intercourse. I didn’t want it to happen. I was very upset.”

‍When committal proceedings were held to decide whether the case should go to trial, McKinney demanded that reporting restrictions were lifted and made long speeches about the erotic benefits of oral sex. The media circus began.

‍McKinney and May fled bail to America with the passports of two dead Mormons and faked deafness, pinning ‘I am deaf’ labels to their clothes. They shunned conversations and weren’t heard of again until the day Tory received his phone call.

‍So it was that on Monday, May, 22. 1978, the Daily Express published Tory’s Joyce McKinney story under the front-page headline “My Undying Love” and she talked about her love for Kirk being “tender, profound and indestructible”. A love story in their “honeymoon cottage.”

‍On the same day, however, the Daily Mirror also had McKinney on its front page … but naked and claiming she had been “a sex hostess who earned $25,000 in 18 months on America’s shady vice circuit.”

‍As the war of words raged on and sales went up no one really knew the truth. But the Mirror’s tenacious photographer Kent Gavin had uncovered pictures of McKinney with whips and other sex props … and sitting naked on a horse.

‍Sometime later, Jameson walked into the local Mirror pub, The Stab, and announced his “surrender” to Mirror editor Mike Molloy and his hacks, buying everyone a drink, and the Express let the story die.

‍No one ever got to the truth. There was no attempt by the British authorities to extradite her.

‍As the years rolled by, McKinney was last heard of trying to clone dogs and was never tried for the alleged kidnap crimes. But in 2020 it was believed she was living in a psychiatric hospital, after a car crash in which a 92-year-old man was killed.

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‍WHEN IT CAME TO LONDON GHOSTS

‍NONE WERE A SCRATCH ON FANNY

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‍DID YOU KNOW? That Cock Lane was famous not only for the Cock Tavern, the favourite haunt of Dr Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens, and near where the Great Fire of London burned out on the corner in 1666, but also for the house that gave birth to the story of ‘Scratching Fanny’?

‍For in 1762, the ghost of “Scratching Fanny” haunted the lodging house at No. 20 and guests were terrified by the late-night knocking and scratching noises coming from a room where a young girl slept. Like a cat scratching a chair.

‍Things got so loud and scary that priests were called in and held a series of seances around the child’s bed, one attended by the Duke of York, who ruled that a commission be set up to look into the phenomenon.

‍When the newspapers such as the popular Public Ledger, the St. James’s Chronicle; the London Chronicle and The Times, broke the story, the public could not easily move along down Cock Lane for weeks because of the “throngs of people” from all over the country queueing to enter the room and hear Scratching Fanny themselves.

‍The landlord charged a fee to talk to his daughter who now slept in her haunted bedroom. She told visitors Fanny’s spirit felt like a mouse climbing over her shoulder.

‍The landlord, Richard Parsons, a methodist preacher and sometimes drunken thug, made a small fortune. People brought picnics and trade boomed in local Fleet Street shops. The Mayor of London even came along. And one of the seances had so many prominent people attending it had to be moved to St Bart’s Hospital.

‍One séance was attended by writer Horace Walpole who noted that when he came out later that night, the alehouses around Cock Lane and Fleet Street were doing a roaring trade filled with ghost hunters.

‍The royal commission set up to investigate Scratching Fanny included Dr Johnson; author and Quaker James Penn and eminent physician John Moore. It was believed the unsettled spirit was Fanny Lynes whom Parsons claimed was poisoned with arsenic by her lover.

‍Using a highly scientific system of one knock for a yes, two knocks for a no, it was to be determined that it really was the ghost of Fanny making these strange scratching noises.

‍“Did you die naturally?” Two knocks.

‍“By poison?” One knock.

‍It all began when a money lender named James Kent from Norfolk ran away with his sister-in-law, Fanny, and rented the room at No. 20, lending Parsons 12 guineas to be paid back at one guinea a month.

‍Fanny became close to Parsons’ daughter 11-year-old Elizabeth and she often slept with her when Kent was away on business. But later, when Kent tried to get repayment Parsons refused. The couple finally decided to leave the lodging house without paying Parsons rent and Kent immediately started legal proceedings to recover his loan.

‍Weeks later Fanny, now pregnant, contracted smallpox and died and an unexplained knocking and scraping noise, like a cat scratching a chair leg, began to fill young Fanny’s room at night. Guests who slept there were frightened and some left. The noises grew louder as time went on.

‍Parsons claimed that Fanny’s ghost haunted his property after she was poisoned by Kent and had possessed his daughter Elizabeth. Fanny, he said, had always promised to knock on her coffin in the vault if anything bad was done to her.

‍The legal case went on for months as Parsons tried to recover his rent and Kent full repayment of his loan. It involved the Methodist church; squabbles over Fanny’s will and relatives of the two families. The Archbishop of Canterbury even got involved.

‍On one occasion Elizabeth was spared no dignity and was undressed in front of a crowd, then strung up in a hammock, with her arms and legs pinned over the side, to find out if the knocks would manifest when she was held and was completely visible to spectators. The Committee even visited Fanny’s vault and opened her coffin.

‍In the end, the Commission ruled the scratches were a hoax after sticks of wood were found hidden in Elizabeth’s clothing during a séance and she broke down in tears in private interviews behind closed doors, admitting she had been ordered to lie by her father and because was frightened of being beaten.

‍A section of the wainscoting in an adjoining room to Fanny’s had been removed by a carpenter to allow a hiding place and access through at night to make the noises and frighten other guests.

‍In 1763, the jury took 15 minutes to return a verdict of guilty on landlord Parsons and four others, including the carpenter, on a charge of “a conspiracy to take away life by charging a person with the murder of Ms Lynes by giving her poison whereof she died”.

‍Elizabeth was jailed for a year, and her father sentenced to two years imprisonment and pilloried three times. But many people still believed her ghost story.

‍The haunting became a subject of a famous William Hogarth painting and was referred to in a Dickens book.

‍Cock Lane was demolished in 1979. In its place sits a row of nondescript office buildings. What must Fanny make of it?

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍21 July 2025

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