South Korean firm delivers commercial dog clones

[Earl]

Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.

"It's a miracle!" McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers at a Seoul National University laboratory.

"Yes, I know you! You know me, too!" McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.

Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned more than 20 canines.

But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.

"RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone," the company said in a statement.

McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.

The Korean scientists brought the dog's frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.

Lee's team have identified the puppies as Booger's genuine clones, and his university's forensic medicine team is currently conducting reconfirmation tests.

McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size. The incident resulted in her left hand later being amputated, and injured her leg nerves and stomach. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.

McKinney said Booger acted as more than just a canine companion as she recuperated from the attack.

Her dog pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out. He opened her house door with his teeth and helped her take off her shoes and socks, even though she never trained him to do so.

"The most unusual thing about Booger was that he has a unique ability to reason," she said. "He seems to understand I couldn't use my hands."

McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will only receive $50,000 from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.

Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.

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This is fucking brilliant! I'm going to get some Noddy clones!

[Earl]

A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her beloved pit bull Booger looked very familiar to some who saw her picture: She may be the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.

A paper trail of court documents and jail booking information uncovered by The Associated Press suggests 57-year-old dog-lover Bernann McKinney is Joyce McKinney, who in 1977 faced charges of unlawful imprisonment in the missionary case. She jumped bail and was never brought to justice.

British tabloids first recognized the blonde woman's smiling face when she appeared in news photographs this past week with the five pit bull pups she paid South Korean scientists $53,000 to clone from her pet dog Booger who died two years ago.

There is indeed a striking resemblance between Bernann McKinney and Joyce McKinney. Arrest records and court documents for the two names over the years show other similarities: the same birth date and Social Security numbers, the same hometown of Newland, N.C., and Joyce McKinney's middle name is Bernann.

"It fits," said Utah filmmaker Trent Harris, who made a documentary about Joyce McKinney's case. He said photographs of McKinney and the dogs left him with no question about her identity.

"I said 'Oh my God, that's Joyce,'" he said.

Bernann McKinney has flatly denied any connections to Joyce McKinney and says she planned to take legal action against those who suggested otherwise.

"I'm filing a $10 million libel action and I don't think you want AP to be part of that," McKinney said before boarding a plane to return to the U.S.

While in South Korea, she told reporters she was a screenwriter and handed out business cards with a Hollywood, Calif., address. The AP found that address did not exist.

In a phone call later Friday to the AP, Bernann McKinney repeated she had nothing to do with the Mormon abduction story and only wanted to talk about the cloning of her dog.

"It's a story of courage, of a very brave service dog taking care of me. He passed away. I was so depressed. I had him cloned," she said.

The story of Joyce McKinney is the stuff of pulp fiction: a North Carolina-born beauty queen who moved west, won the title Miss Wyoming USA, converted to Mormonism and went on to college at Brigham Young University, where she became obsessed with a Mormon fellow student.

When that young Mormon took a missionary trip to England, authorities say McKinney hired a private detective so she could locate and follow him.

She and a male accomplice were accused of abducting the 21-year-old missionary as he went door to door, taking him to a rented 17th-century "honeymoon cottage" in Devon and chaining him spread-eagled to a bed with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs.

There, investigators say, he was repeatedly forced to have sex with McKinney before he was able to escape and notify police.

In a 1977 court hearing mobbed by the British press, Joyce McKinney said she'd fallen head-over-heels in love with the Mormon man and acknowledged tracking him to England. "I loved him so much," she told a judge, "that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

But she denied a sexual assault, saying the young man was a willing partner.

"I have been played up as a very wicked and perverted woman," she told the court. "It's not true."

McKinney and her accomplice spent three months in a London jail before being released on bail.

Press reports at the time that said the pair then jumped bail, posing as deaf-mute actors in Ireland to board an Air Canada flight to Toronto and eventually a bus to Cleveland, where investigators lost their trail.

Joyce McKinney surfaced again in Utah in May 1984 and was arrested for allegedly stalking the workplace of the same Mormon man she was accused of imprisoning in England. News reports say that police found a length of rope and handcuffs in the trunk of McKinney's car, along with notebooks detailing the man's daily activities.

Set to stand trial for lying to police and harassment in 1986, McKinney again disappeared just before proceedings and the case was dismissed.

It now appears Joyce McKinney may have escaped justice in the long-ago British case also. London police told The AP they've consigned the case to the history books because of its age and won't seek McKinney's extradition.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the 1984 Salt Lake County booking documents, which lists McKinney's full name, address, Social Security number and birth date. The AP compared the data to court and address records on file in North Carolina.

In both states, documents list McKinney's full name as Joyce Bernann McKinney and cite an Aug. 6, 1950, birth date, along with a hometown of Newland, N.C. A comparison of Social Security numbers on the documents show an exact match of the first five digits, the only numbers typically available in public records.

At the Avery County courthouse in McKinney's hometown of Newland in the western North Carolina mountains, a clerk said she instantly recognized the woman snuggling puppies as the Joyce Bernann McKinney who has a been a frequent defendant in court cases there.

"She is a person of note in our little community," said clerk Julia Henson.

Avery County Sheriff Kevin Frey said there are several charges on file against Joyce McKinney, including an active warrant seeking her arrest on a 2003 charge of communicating a threat against another woman.

Other charges include passing bad checks, an assault on a public officials and an 2004 animal cruelty charge alleging she failed to take proper care of a horse. That charge was dismissed.

James Stamey, the husband of the woman McKinney was charged with threatening, said McKinney left Newland about two years ago and no one had really seen or heard from her.

Until she showed up in the news about the cloned puppies.

"That's our Joy," Stamey said from his home in Newland.

Years ago, Stamey said, McKinney was a beautiful girl worthy of the Miss Wyoming USA crown.

"She's ugly as sin now," he said. "But, sure enough, that's her."



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[Ck]

The past always catches up then.

[Donachiel]

She could be a clone...

[Ernest Rants]

seems like only yesterday

[Ernest Rants]

Joyce McKinney

[Ernest Rants]

In 1978, Joyce McKinney jumped bail and disappeared after being charged with kidnapping a 17-stone male Mormon missionary, whom she had chained to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs and forced to have sex.

…

Joyce McKinney was born in Avery County, North Carolina, in August 1949, the daughter of two school teachers.

She first made the headlines, albeit local ones, in 1972 when she was crowned Miss Wyoming, but soon tired of the world of beauty pageants and enrolled as a drama student at Brigham Young University, in Utah, the heartland of Mormon America.

It was there that she met 19-year-old Kirk Anderson, a 6ft 4in fellow drama undergraduate, some seven years her junior, from a small town near Salt Lake City.

There was a brief fling, and McKinney later claimed that she had miscarried his baby.

Overcome by guilt, Anderson, a devout Mormon, apparently sought advice from his bishop, who told him to sever ties with McKinney and move away from Utah.

She was not prepared to be spurned so easily. Private detectives were hired to trace Anderson from the U.S. to Ewell in Surrey, where he was living as a door-to-door Mormon missionary.

In the summer of 1977, McKinney flew to England with an architect friend called Keith May.

Armed with an imitation revolver, May confronted 21-year-old Anderson on the steps of Ewell’s Church of the Latter Day Saints, and frog-marched him to a car in which McKinney was waiting.

Chloroformed and hidden under a blanket, the bespectacled Mormon was driven some 200 miles to Okehampton, where his kidnappers had hired a 17th-century ‘honeymoon’ cottage for ￠G50 a week.

McKinney later said that she had packed the fridge with Anderson’s favourite food and studied The Joy Of Sex in preparation for what was to come.

May chained the prisoner to a bed. For two days, McKinney tried to persuade the missionary to marry her and father her children. She even read Scriptures with him in bed.

When this failed to melt his opposition, McKinney reverted to Plan B.

This involved slipping into a ’see-through nightie’, playing a cassette of ‘romantic music’, having Anderson ’spread- eagled’ and sexually stimulating him.

She claimed this was a bondage ‘game’ played with his full consent.

He later told a court: ‘I couldn’t move. She grabbed the top of my pyjamas and tore them from my body until I was naked.

‘I didn’t wish it to happen. I was extremely depressed and upset after being forced to have sex.’

This ‘rape’ occurred three times.

For the record, his pyjamas, later produced in court, were light blue and ’silky’. He also claimed to have been wearing some kind of Mormon chastity belt underneath. Alas, to no avail.

Fearing he would be kept prisoner for weeks (later there would be a body of male opinion which felt pangs of severe jealousy at his plight), Anderson promised to marry her.

But after she loosened his chains, he escaped and went straight to the police.

McKinney and May were arrested at a roadblock three days later and charged with false imprisonment and possessing an imitation firearm.

There was an entertaining, if not downright titillating, committal hearing at Epsom Magistrates’ Court, during which her counsel said of Anderson: ‘Methinks the Mormon doth protest too much… you have seen the size of Mr Anderson and you have seen the size of my client.’

McKinney spent three months on remand in Holloway Prison - to which she had been driven weeping through the bars of a Black Maria - before being released on bail on grounds of her failing mental health.

Now the case, which had already become a worldwide cause celebre, was about to be given a new lease of life with a sensational twist.

McKinney met the similarly bailed May and the pair fled to Canada, using false passports and disguised as deaf-mute mime artistes.

It was later alleged that McKinney was helped to escape by her former landlady, an Irish woman, who went with her to a West End theatrical outfitters.

There, they bought the wigs and glasses which were later used in their flight from justice.

By now an international fugitive, McKinney reappeared staying at the Hilton hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, disguised as a nun.

…

In a rare comment … she said in 1999: ‘I loved Kirk and all I really wanted was to see his blond-haired babies running round my home.

‘Nobody can understand what it is to lose the man you love to a cult, and I believe that is what the Mormons are. Back in Britain [then] nobody knew what a cult was.’

[Alpha]

This story has gone from cloned puppies to a sex mad bail skipping on the run woman!!

[Donachiel]

This story has gone from cloned puppies to a sex mad bail skipping on the run woman!!

Ah, such is life at The Morningstarr*...

[Ck]

An American dog lover who garnered global attention after having her pit bull cloned and then admitted to being the woman accused in a 1970s British sex abduction case is now being sought on charges of plotting a bizarre burglary in Tennessee.

Joyce Bernann McKinney, a former beauty queen who earlier this year paid £25,000 to have her dead pet recreated, is accused of instructing a 15-year-old boy to break into a house because she needed funds to help another beloved animal, her three-legged horse.

David Crockett, Miss McKinney's lawyer in the Tennessee case, said she hoped to get money to buy a false leg for the animal. "She loved it dearly," he said.

He said he had not heard from his client since she missed a court appearance for the alleged 2004 offence but after seeing media coverage of the dog cloning, said he was certain she and the dog lover calling herself Bernann McKinney were the same person.

McKinney, 58, made headlines around the world earlier this summer when she had five puppies cloned in South Korea from her pit bull Booger. She said she was a screenwriter from Hollywood and gave an address that turned out not to exist.

Publicity surrounding the cloning led to her being identified as a woman who allegedly abducted a Mormon missionary in England, chained him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs and made him her sex slave.

The woman, Joyce McKinney, and a male accomplice allegedly abducted the 21-year-old and took him to a rented 17th-century "honeymoon cottage" in Devon. He was forced to have sex with McKinney before escaping, investigators said.

In a 1977 court hearing, McKinney said she had fallen in love with the man in Utah and followed him to the UK. "I loved him so much," she told a judge, "that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

But she denied a sexual assault, saying the young man was a willing partner. She and her accomplice spent three months in a London jail before being released on bail. She fled to America and was never brought to trial.

Miss McKinney initially denied being Joyce McKinney, but later admitted it was her, insisting she was innocent and the woman depicted in the media 31 years ago was a "figment of the tabloid press".

British police have said that due to the age of the case, they will not seek her extradition.

News of the Tennessee burglary charges emerged as the South Korean biotech company who McKinney commissioned to make clones of her Booger said she had left the country without the puppies.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said McKinney returned to the US last week, leaving behind the five dogs created from Booger's tissue. She did not say where she was going or if she would return although earlier the company said she was due to come back in November to collect some of the dogs after they had been given rabies shots.

The Tennessee charges stem from McKinney's arrest in November 2004 after being found in a van with the teenager. According to prosecutors in Carter County, an area in north eastern Tennessee, she instructed the boy to burgle a house and was charged with criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Mr Crockett described Miss McKinney, who lived in North Carolina at the time, as "a rather bizarre character, and seems to have a strange circumstance now."

"She is bold to put herself on worldwide television," he said. "She must know she's a fugitive in at least one state."

He recalled she had two or three dogs in her car when she met him to speak about her case. "There was a strong aroma about her, and I told her this needed to be taken care of before I went to court with her."

Prosecutors are reviewing charges against Miss McKinney to decide whether to pursue the case. Depending on "where she is now, how important the case is, how much it would cost the taxpayers and whether witnesses are still around," said Melanie Widener, an assistant district attorney.
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