Who is Joyce Bernann McKinney?
To the family of 91-year-old Gennady Bolotsky, McKinney is a 69-year-old woman accused of running over and killing the Holocaust survivor from Ukraine with her truck as he walked his dog in the San Fernando Valley last summer.
To the Los Angeles County mental-health system, she’s the patient it received after a judge ruled her mentally incompetent to stand trial.
British tabloid readers of the 1970s, well, to them McKinney was a former Miss Wyoming, the woman behind the so-called Manacled Mormon case in which she was accused of flying to London and kidnapping a Mormon missionary she was infatuated with before the charges went away.
More than a decade ago, she popped up in the news again, this time as tabloid and mainstream-media fodder for reportedly hiring a South Korean firm for $50,000-plus to clone her dead pit bull Booger from skin cells, a move that reaped her five Booger puppies.
Hers is indeed a flamboyant tale, a wild wave of a life that has left its mark on others.
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In a 2010 documentary, “Tabloid,” parts of McKinney’s life play out over 87 minutes – the slices about the Manacled Mormon case and her public re-emergence years later as the owner of the five cloned pit bulls.
She is a willing participant of the film: bubbly, confident, bright.
Directed by Oscar-winner Errol Morris, “Tabloid” has McKinney narrating her early days as a North Carolina girl and then as a Wyoming beauty queen who met and fell in love with Kirk Anderson when both attended Brigham Young University in Utah.
In September 1977, “Tabloid” explains, with Anderson on his Mormon mission in London, McKinney followed him there with an accomplice.
Using a fake handgun and chloroform, the documentary says banking off of news reports at time, the pair allegedly kidnapped Anderson outside a Mormon meeting house, taking him to a cottage and handcuffing him to a bed – with London police later arresting her.
She posted bail and, while awaiting trial, became a sensation in British tabloids.
While in London, in 1978, she was photographed with Keith Moon of The Who, one of the world’s all-time drummers, at a premiere of the film “Saturday Night Fever.” They are cheek to cheek, with one of McKinney’s arms around his neck as if she had pulled him close.
McKinney and the accomplice, a friend, slippped out of the country. But, The New York Times and other outlets reported, authorities ending up declining to pursue their extraditions.
“I mean, I could never understand the public’s fascination with my love life,” McKinney says in the “Tabloid” doc. “I’m not a movie star. I’m just a person, a human being that was caught in an extraordinary circumstance.”
In 2011, McKinney attended a question-and-answer session in Salt Lake City following a screening of “Tabloid” with a pit bull in tow.
“I had no idea they were going to do this trashy movie,” she told the audience, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Hollywood, she figured, might tell her story as the love story she preferred.
“Kirsten Dunst is running around all over Hollywood saying, ‘I have to have this part!’” she said that day. “I’m more a Katie Heigl type – she’s an ex-Mormon like me.”
McKinney ended up suing the “Tabloid” filmmakers for defamation, invasion of privacy and fraud.
The filmmakers showed the court a release McKinney signed. Their lawyer also argued that she was a limited public figure and that they were covered under the First Amendment to document her story.
The California Court of Appeal tossed out the suit in October 2013, records show: Judge James Steele found the making of the documentary “was undeniably … defendants’ exercise of their free-speech rights.”
Early in the project, producer Mark Lipson recalled, McKinney gave him a tour of her Riverside home – she wanted to show him her truck, which she said had been broken into with research materials for a book about her life stolen.
Lipson took photos of the truck and of parts of her property. Some of those images appear in the final credits of “Tabloid.”
McKinney was living in “borderline squalor,” he said. “Her day-in, day-out living just seemed to be kind of extreme.”
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Then, once again, McKinney slipped from public view.
A couple of years ago, authorities in Los Angeles County started coming in contact with her.
“I’m very familiar with Joyce McKinney,” said Stacie Wood-Levin, a senior animal-control officer for the Burbank Animal Shelter. “We’ve had many check-condition calls on the animals over the years.”
The calls came in, Wood-Levin said, from those who reported they had seen dogs confined in crates in McKinney’s white pickup with a camper cover.
McKinney had named the five puppies after herself and the South Korean scientists who created them: Booger Hong, Booger Lee, Booger McKinney, Booger Park, and Booger Ra.
Three of those pit bulls would end up at the Burbank shelter, with two euthanized for health and behavioral problems. It is unclear what happened to the fourth and fifth pit bulls.
Just Booger Park, perhaps the last of the world’s first commercially cloned pet dogs, waits these days at the shelter to be adopted.
He had serious behavior issues around other dogs. At 11 years old, he has heath concerns, too.
To the shelter workers, he’s just Park.
“Park has a sensitive stomach, but he loves to eat, and he loves to play,” said Stacey Deveikis, a shelter volunteer. “Behavior-wise, he’s very sweet.”
The shelter’s website hints at Park’s past:
“I am a male, gray pit bull terrier mix. The shelter staff think I am about 11 years old. I have been at the shelter since Jun 21, 2019,” it says.
“Owner unable to care (of him) any longer. Very sweet and affectionate boy. Really spry for his age.”
A smiley face emoticon.
“He sadly lived in a crate for the last several years, so he will need help with some training/house-breaking. Would do just fine in an apartment, even a studio apartment as long as you have a nice cozy couch for him to nap on.”
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At 5:35 a.m. on June 17, surveillance video from the Valley Village neighborhood caught Bolotsky getting struck while walking his small, white dog across Magnolia Boulevard.
In the video, the truck plows into the 91-year-old while he is in the middle of a crosswalk. The driver, later determined by police to be McKinney, pauses for a moment, then continues on.
Bolotsky’s dog is hit, too, but ended up being OK.
The suspect was gone.
Bolotsky’s death made headlines, with his family appearing on television. There were shots of the suspect’s truck, too.
“I had over 20 leads to follow up on the next day,” LAPD Detective Holly Fredo said.
On June 21, a tip that came in was pretty good: There was a truck police might be interested in parked near Hollywood Burbank Airport.
The hit-and-run was just one of dozens of cases Detective Fredo was working. Not all are resolved within days.
Fredo and another detective immediately went out to take a look at the truck.
Approaching the pickup, the detectives could see McKinney in the driver’s seat. They pondered how they would get the woman out – then she stepped out on her own.
Apparently unaware of the detectives, McKinney dropped her pants and urinated as the officers looked on, Fredo recalled. The detectives then got out of their car and walked up and started questioning her.
Detective Fredo said the woman was evasive, avoiding questions about whether she frequented Valley Village.
The detective said she learned from employees of the Pizza Hut just west of the crash scene that McKinney was a regular there. And security camera footage showed her at the restaurant the night before the incident.
“She claimed she didn’t know anything about (the crash),” Fredo said. “She did admit she was the only driver of her vehicle.“
Fredo and the other traffic detective took McKinney into custody based on two warrants, one related to suspicion of battery: McKinney had gotten into an altercation while trying to use a shower at a local LA Fitness, Fredo said.
The three remaining dogs were taken to the Burbank shelter.
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In August, weeks before the first mental-competency hearing, at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley Operations Bureau, Fredo talked about the case with a reporter.
The detective said she believed McKinney was narcissistic: In previous encounters with police, McKinney would tell them about a potential book and a hoped-for feature movie about her life, conversations picked up by officers’ body-worn cameras.
McKinney had brought up the book idea to Fredo, too, during the arrest. McKinney was coherent, and chose her words carefully, the detective said.
“What she was saying was making sense,” Fredo said. “If anything, I don’t know that she had the ability to care about anybody but herself.”
At the Burbank Animal Shelter on Wood-Levin’s desk sat two hand-written letters, about 20 pages each. McKinney sent them from an L.A. County jail.
In the letters, McKinney says she’s being held against her will, and that she wants to reunite with her dogs, which she names.
“She’s very intelligent,” Wood-Levin said. “She constantly plays the victim. She has not acknowledged what’s she done in any of the letters.
“She just says she’s been falsely accused and is being held captive by the Sheriff’s Department.”
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Fifteen or so years ago, Bolotsky was hit in that same Valley Village crosswalk.
Neither that first incident, nor his age, kept him down.
Family members, after the fatal hit-and-run, shared videos of Bolotsky dancing at his 90th birthday.
“He was supposed to live to 100 or more,” a son told KABC7.
Bolotsky had survived Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He fled his native Ukraine and settle in the United States.
He lived just around the corner from the crosswalk and would take his small dog, Leelah, for walks.
Bolotsky’s family took over care of Leelah, the LAPD detective said. But the dog clearly missed her owner.
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On July 2, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office filed against McKinney one felony count each of assault with a deadly weapon, hit-and-run resulting in death, and vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence.
Two days later, records show, McKinney’s public defender declared doubt about her mental competency to stand trial. Twenty days after that, a judge ordered a mental-competency hearing for McKinney.
And on Sept. 9, in front of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Harrison, McKinney’s second public defender, William Edwards, said at first he believed some of the details she told him about her life could be “delusions.”
“I wasn’t sure if some of the things she was saying were true or not,” Edwards told the judge.
When her lawyer looked for himself, he found how much of it really was.
“I encourage you to Google her name,” Edwards said. “She’s a fascinating figure in our culture.”
Judge Harrison declared McKinney mentally unfit to stand trial and ordered her housed in a mental-health facility.
McKinney was taken to the Metropolitan State Hospital, a sprawling, leafy 162-acre facility nestled in the heart of Norwalk.
In February, a judge in Van Nuys ruled, once again, she was not competent.
McKinney’s next hearing is scheduled for August.
