Joyce McKinney
Film & TV rights on option to Zero Gravity Management, Los Angeles
Synopsis
Joyce McKinney made blinding headlines in Britain when she stormed over from the United States, abducted a young Mormon missionary and forced him to have sex with her. Her speech from the dock after being arrested and charged, in effect, with rape made her even more notorious. No wonder the Daily Express was ready to pay a fortune for the story she had to tell once she had been tried at the Old Bailey. But there was no trial. Joyce jumped bail and fled the country disguised as a nun. The headlines were bigger than ever but the Daily Mirror was less inclined than the Express to accept Joyce's account of her weird romance. The story its reporters uncovered burst into print on the same day that the Express published Joyce's fantasy version. Joyce, though, did not fade away.
Time and again some ludicrous claim or stunt put her back in the news, eventually attracting the attention of the celebrated film maker Errol Morris, who drew on this book for his documentary Tabloid. Only in print, however, can the intertwined stories of a great newspaper scoop and a blindly obsessive romantic fantasy be properly told. Like Slip-Up, this title has appeared in several editions, at the moment on paper from Barker and the ebook from Kindle and elsewhere.