J oyce McKinney is one of those names that for people of a certain age opens a doorway into the past. To mention it is to be transported back to the s, when there were only three TV channels, British food was awful, sex was naughty and Fleet Street was still the home of national newspapers. Back then computers were the preserve of boffins in white coats, but even if journalists had managed to lay their hands on some mainframe monster the size of a small house, and programmed it with all the ingredients of the perfect tabloid story, the results could never have matched the bizarre and compelling tale of a wannabe beauty queen's obsessional love.
Featuring a missionary, a kidnapping, bondage sex, naked photographs, a daring flight from justice, and even the Osmonds pop group, the story held the nation in its irresistible spell for the better part of a year. To some — not least herself — McKinney was the embodiment of the wronged woman. To others she was a kind of contemporary witch, able to manipulate people, particularly men, to her own ends and change identity at will. Yet while some aspects of the drama were as old as the battle of the sexes, its plot was radically unconventional.
Like some riotous postmodern novel, the McKinney saga boasted at least one unreliable narrator, a debate about the subjectivity of truth, a feminist subtext, a theme on artificial celebrity, and a kind of cruel authorial joke at the expense of all the characters, including the press itself. Thirty-four years on, the tale has been retold by Errol Morris in a jaunty and yet perceptive documentary entitled Tabloid. The film looks at how myths are created both in the media and our own minds and suggests that even the most incredible falsehoods grow out of heartfelt desires.
As Morris recently said about his film: "It's a ridiculous story. But people are wrong if they think the profound and the ridiculous are incompatible. When a Mormon missionary by the name of Kirk Anderson went missing on 14 September near Epsom, news editors scarcely blinked. There was plenty else going on at the time. In this disappeared world, pop star Marc Bolan was to meet his end in a car crash on 16 September, unions were in discussions to save British Leyland, the Paedophile Information Exchange was organising public meetings, George Davis , the freed armed robber was rearrested for robbing a bank, and the tropical holiday arrangements of Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn were held to be of national import.
But as the days, weeks and months unfolded, the back story to Anderson's abduction began to force its way into the headlines. By turns funny, kinky, sad and mystifying, it began in the Appalachian mountains, where McKinney, an only child, grew up in a small town in North Carolina.
