My wife leaves the TV on NBC when she leaves for work. So the first face I saw on the tube when I woke up this morning was a woman in rapture over 5 cloned Boogers. She was being interviewed on the Today show. She truly looked ecstatic. The journalist asking questions looked more and more uncomfortable as the interview progressed. It looked as though the journo -- Natalie Morales -- could feel the craziness closing in on her.

The woman with the 5 cloned Boogers was Bernann McKinney, and Booger was, once upon a time, her pet pit bull. Booger died two years ago from cancer. Bernann McKinney missed Booger so much she got a wild hair and contacted a lab in South Korea that said it could clone dogs and other animals. Bernann spent many thousands of dollars to end up with 5 cloned puppies. Five copies of her precious Booger.

The look on Natalie Morales's face mirrored my feelings as I watched Bernann talk about her Boogers. Bernann said, "He became my service dog [...] I was in a wheelchair, and my arms were in braces for a long time -- I couldn't use my hands. He could unlock a door with his teeth, he could answer the phone, he could do the laundry. He was my hands."

Writing that out it doesn't look nearly as crazy as it sounded. Bernann's hyper way of speaking over-emphasized certain points, like how her dog could do laundry. When the camera came back to Morales, she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.

So, I turned the channel, because I could only take so much. Still, I kept wondering about the story. I had the feeling something was up with Bernann McKinney. I wasn't sure what, though. Perhaps the cloned puppies deal was a scam, a hoax. No, I decided -- too many articles were out there about the puppies; they, at least, appear to be real. So maybe it was just Bernann -- after all, the woman was so obsessed with getting her doggy back that she spent a small fortune to do it. That kind of commitment is rare, and can often result in, well, commitment. To a hospital, perhaps.

I went about my day. Since my day involves sorting through the news and finding interesting stuff to cover for this blog, I eventually ran across this, in the UK's Daily Mail: "A cloned dog, a Mormon in mink-lined handcuffs and a tantalising mystery." From the article:

Could the new owner of the world's first commercially cloned pups be the same woman who had gone on the run from British justice 30 years ago, having been the star of one of the most bizarre, entertaining and downright saucy court cases in living memory?

Bernann McKinney had tripped my spidey-sense for a reason.

See, thirty years ago, an American beauty queen named Joyce McKinney jumped bail in the United Kingdom. She'd been charged with kidnapping and accused of raping a strapping, 6'4" Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson.

McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, met Anderson at Brigham Young University in Utah. They were both drama students. The pair allegedly had a little thing, but Anderson broke it off. Since he was a truly devout Mormon, Anderson's beliefs were at odds with the sexual nature of the relationship.

By 1977, Kirk Anderson was living in England, in Surrey. Joyce McKinney tracked the young man down. She flew to the UK that summer with a friend named Keith May in tow. Using a fake gun and chloroform, the pair allegedly took Kirk Anderson hostage as he left church one day.

Inside a remote cottage, Anderson was allegedly chained to a bed with mink handcuffs. McKinney tried to convince him to marry her. That didn't work, so she eventually climbed on the chained and spreadeagle young man and had her way with him.

Anderson finally freed himself by lying to McKinney, saying he would marry her, after all. She loosened his chains, and he lit out for the nearest police station.

McKinney and her accomplice were arrested.

Joyce McKinney was in prison for 3 months before what the Daily Mail termed her "failing mental health" prompted a release on bail.

McKinney and her pal created false passports and disguises and they took off for Canada. The Daily Mail reports that the pair were shamming as "deaf-mute mime artistes."

By 1979 Joyce McKinney had come out of hiding. She was arrested in Asheville, NC. In September that year she pled guilty to using a fake name to get a passport. She received a two-year suspended sentence and a fine. She caught a break overseas -- the English seemed to have no interest in extraditing the voluptuous blond.

McKinney posed nude for mens' magazines and for a brief time seemed to embrace her sexy, bad-girl image. But then, the British paper states that McKinney "allegedly vanished into an increasingly desperate world of prostitution, drug abuse and psychiatric problems."

Joyce McKinney re-appeared in June of 1984, under familiar circumstances. She was arrested near the Salt Lake City International Airport. Kirk Anderson worked there at the time. Police said she was shadowing Anderson, making notes of what he did each day, taking photos. Anderson claimed he felt harassed. For her part, McKinney said she was simply researching a book or perhaps a movie about her 'relationship' with Anderson.

Three years later McKinney was in the news again. She sued the editor of the tiny Avery Journal in McKinney's home county of Avery, NC for $6 million. The suit was over a front page story about a dispute between McKinney and one of her neighbors -- over barking dogs. The editor had included the story of McKinney's strange odyssey to and from Great Britain. In her suit, McKinney made it clear that the Avery Journal had gone too far. The inclusion of McKinney's troubles abroad was, according to the suit, "false, defamatory and libelous." According to McKinney, the paper had done "immeasurable damage to her good name."

Five years passed before McKinney was once again litigious in a public way. In 1992 she sued Hard Copy for running a segment on her activities overseas. McKinney denied once again that she'd ever raped anyone -- her contention had always been that Anderson was complicit in the act. She told the Associated Press that she was "trying to lead a quiet life." She called Hard Copy's coverage a "nightmare" that had "started it all up again." That suit was dropped in December of '92.

When the Daily Mail reached Bernann McKinney this week to ask her if she was Joyce, she said, "Are you going to ask me about my dogs, or not? Because that's all I'm prepared to talk to you about."

To the London Times, McKinney said, "If that is what you want to talk about then I don’t want to talk to you. If you print that rot I will sue you."

The Daily Mail determined that a Joyce Bernann McKinney has resided in Newland, NC, Avery County, since at least 1988. I confirmed this for myself -- basic voter registration info for North Carolina voters can be found online. Via genealogical records, I found an August 6, 1950 birthdate for a Joyce Bernann McKinney in Avery County, NC. That Joyce Bernann McKinney's parents had similar names to the names given for Joyce McKinney's parents in news articles in the 1980s.

So newspaper accounts from the 1980s, particularly the article about the lawsuit against the little county paper, place the Joyce McKinney from the so-called Mormon sex case in Avery County, near a little burg named Minneapolis. North Carolina voter registration records dating from 1988 state that a Joyce Bernann McKinney lived in Avery County. Her voting precinct was in Minneapolis, NC. North Carolina birth records show a Joyce Bernann McKinney was born in Avery County on August 6, 1950. Bernann McKinney celebrated a birthday this week.

There are numerous commonalities between Joyce McKinney and Bernann McKinney otherwise, not to mention the obvious facial resemblance seen in photos published by the British papers. It's pretty hard to not just conclude that Joyce and Bernann are one and the same.

In her strange interview on Today, McKinney said she wanted to turn the story of cloning Booger into a book or a movie deal. She said, "I hope to sell the rights and have a place called Booger’s Place, which would be his legacy, a training center for service dogs for handicapped people."

That's all well and good, but it seems like that's not the story here, no matter what the first owner of cloned puppy dogs would like to think. And people would probably be much more interested -- and pay more money for -- the real story of Joyce Bernann McKinney. Cloned animals are fascinating, but mink manacles sell.

[Today/MSNBC; TimesOnline.co.uk; DailyMail.co.uk]