Obsessive love

I've had a couple of posts recently about women who have sacrificed their families, careers, and dignity to have sex with young teenagers. I've wondered why, and what would make them throw away everything for sex with such a young partner. When it comes to sex, sometimes people just do bizarre things.

In 1977 Joyce McKinney was a worldwide tabloid sensation. She had kidnapped a Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in England, taken him a rented cottage in Devon, tied him to a bed and had sex with him repeatedly.

She spent her life savings on this endeavor. She dragged along an accomplice, a man as obsessed with her as she was with Kirk Anderson. They both ended up in jail, both ended up skipping out on their bail, getting back to the States by posing as mute Irish actors. Wow.

McKinney had been a beauty queen; although born in North Carolina she had once been Miss Wyoming. She converted to Mormonism and attended BYU, where, by some accounts, she went after Wayne Osmond of the famous singing Osmond family. Wayno said no, no, and she moved on, changing her obsession to the young, tall, dark and handsome Anderson.

If the story ended there it'd be good enough, but it actually gets better. McKinney moved back to North Carolina, and ended up in the news again when she paid to have her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a South Korean company. She traveled to Korea to pick up the puppies, and used the name Bernann McKinney, but the British press wasn't fooled. They realized quickly that the eccentric American woman who had paid $50,000 to get her doggie duplicated was the same American woman who had kidnapped and had sex with the Mormon missionary. She initially denied she was the same woman, but later changed her story.

Now that is a really great story of obsessive love. We've seen it in movies like Fatal Attraction, we've read about people stalking or killing the objects of their obsessions. Unfortunately, it's all too common. But rarely had the events come together like McKinney and Anderson. The images of him spread-eagled on a bed, handcuffed to the bed posts, and McKinney in a see-through negligee having her way with him were irresistible.

It was a short-lived story, though, and until she popped up again in 2008 to claim her puppies in Korea it had been mostly forgotten. Probably not by Anderson. In 1984 she was caught in Salt Lake City where Anderson lived, in what everyone assumed was another run at getting him alone. The ropes and bondage gear in her trunk led police to that conclusion.

Spending your life savings to have sex with a guy thinking that will make him yours...spending $50,000 to have a dog cloned...these are all part and parcel of obsession. When more stories surfaced about McKinney after the cloning story broke, she was shown to be a litigious person who sued others over trivial matters. Obsessive with love, and all-in-all, a real pain in the ass.