Woman Who Cloned Dog Had Brush With Law In Carter County, Tenn.

ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. – One-time beauty queen, international fugitive and now dog-cloner Joyce Bernann McKinney has graced court dockets on both sides of the Atlantic and across the United States – including here, where a three-year-old arrest warrant awaits her.

The 58-year-old native of Newland, N.C., surfaced to international attention last week in South Korea, where she had her deceased pit bull dog cloned. Old media hounds in Great Britain recognized her beaming face from the tabloid splash she made three decades ago when she was accused of abducting and forcing a Mormon missionary she’d become obsessed with to have sex with her.

Media around the world reported that McKinney recently had Seoul-based RNL Bio clone five puppies from her beloved pit bull, Booger. The firm claimed the puppies that cost McKinney $50,000 were the first successful commercial canine clones.

McKinney’s strange life trajectory brought her to Carter County, Tenn., in 2004 with a different pet-oriented mission impossible: obtain money to buy a prosthesis for her three-legged horse, said an attorney who represented her.

To aid her, she brought a black wig, bought gloves from a discount store, and enlisted a 15-year-old boy off the street to help her burglarize a house, authorities allege. The caper ended badly, with the teenager wearing a wire to record her, and law enforcement officials charging her with conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, contributing to the delinquency of a minor – and speeding.

“Really, really weird,” is how the arresting officer remembered his brush with McKinney.

“She was mentally not all there,” Laverne Julian, who retired from the Carter County Sheriff’s Office in 2006 and now works as a Realtor, said in an interview Wednesday.

“Everything was so perfectly planned out,” Julian said, referring to a drawing of the house’s interior he found on McKinney. But once he arrested her, “It was like she just woke up from a dream.”

It was never clear, Julian said, how or why McKinney targeted the residence in question, and the owners did not know her. McKinney, in keeping with a blanket declaration of her innocence of all criminal charges, denied that she intended to break into the house, Elizabethton attorney David Crockett said in an interview.

“She wanted an artificial leg put on a three-legged horse she owned. She said she was trying to raise money,” Crockett said, adding that he was aware of her “bizarre conduct over in England.”

Crockett said he had planned to negotiate a plea deal, but she missed a court date and racked up a felony failure to appear charge. He never heard from McKinney again, and withdrew from the case in 2006.

When confronted by reporters last week inquiring about her past, McKinney at first denied she was Joyce McKinney before admitting her identity to the Associated Press last Saturday.
The criminal allegations are a “figment of the tabloid press,” she told the wire service. “I don’t want that garbage in the puppy story.”

McKinney’s life does in fact read like distinct, fantastical chapters: Miss Wyoming USA in 1973. British tabloid sensation and international fugitive in 1977. Lovestruck stalker in Utah in 1984, pursuing the same missionary, according to press reports.

She and a male charged in connection with the kidnapping allegation jumped bail shortly before the trial date and were never brought to justice. McKinney has maintained the sexual encounter was consensual.

More recently, she surfaced on the criminal dockets in her native Avery County, N.C., where a warrant is active alleging she threatened another woman; and in Washington County, Tenn., alleging burglary of a building.

In 1993, McKinney donned a wig and applied for a job at the Washington County Animal Shelter in an effort to gain access to pit bulls dogs slated to be euthanized for attacking a couple, the Johnson City Press Chronicle reported on its Web site Wednesday.

She threatened officials who voted to have the dogs put down, and tried to scale the fence at the shelter, the newspaper reported.

Her recent history has similarly been marked by extreme attachment to dogs. When she arrived at Crockett’s office, she came in a vehicle with three dogs who – to the attorney’s eyes – appeared to be living there; oblivious to the stench emanating from the “two or three feet deep” pile of “newspapers and debris.”

“She was a pretty girl in her youth,” Crockett said. “Quite frankly, her bloom had faded by the time I met her.”

When she was booked on a $2,500 bond in Carter County, McKinney gave her occupation as “disabled” according to corrections officers, and was bailed out the same night by her father.

Julian, the retired investigator, recalled McKinney’s parents as the “best people you could ever meet.”

He recalled they told him their daughter suffered a mental breakdown while in college, but that she had earned a doctorate. McKinney’s father, who signs his name as D.L. McKinney in court documents, did not return a phone call Wednesday seeking comment.

Published reports indicate that McKinney attended East Tennessee State University and Brigham Young University in Utah, but the Herald Courier could not immediately confirm McKinney’s educational background.

About a year and a half ago, Julian said, D.L. McKinney contacted him at his real estate business. He commissioned Julian to list the sale of an Elizabethton residence owned by his sister. The house has not sold, he said. The father did not bring up his daughter, Julian said, and he didn’t ask.

“I was out of law enforcement,” he said.

Carter County Sheriff Chris Mathes was unfamiliar with McKinney’s case when questioned about the outstanding warrant.

“We’re obviously interested in clearing our docket,” he said in an interview. But the county is unlikely to pursue extradition unless McKinney is found in a contiguous state or the district attorney general orders it, he added, citing the cost of dispatching officers across the country.

“If someone arrests her, we would love to hear that,” he said.

The Associated Press reported that McKinney took a plane from South Korea back to the United States and that she is a California resident, but her whereabouts are unknown.

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