As a function of age and experience, I cannot hear the word Mormon without thinking back to Kirk Anderson, Joyce McKinney and the court case that hugely entertained the British nation (or scandalised it as The Guardian has primly suggested) in 1977.
It became known as the Case of the Manacled Mormon, and cropped up again in conversation (with a senior Mormon) when I was researching the US Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's days as a proselytising missionary in France.
But first Joyce McKinney. She, it will be recalled by some of my readers, was a slightly built former Miss Wyoming accused of following the burly Anderson to England, where he was serving as a missionary, and abducting him from outside a Surrey meeting house of the Mormons' Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He said she took him off to a cottage in Devon where she kept him chained to a bed and tried to seduce, effectively rape, him. She described it all as a spot of therapy to help him over his sex problems and get them together.
By the time she was found guilty, McKinney had skipped bail and left the country, She never served the one-year prison sentence imposed in her absence and the world was no poorer for that.
But she left behind one of the most striking courtroom quotes in contemporary judicial history. Versions vary but I was in court when the words were uttered and they went something like this: "I loved him so much that I would have skied naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."
McKinney still pops up in the media from time to time, talking about cloning her pet dog in South Korea in 2008, for example, and protesting about Tabloid, a filmed account of the case, in 2010.
Memories of her escapade, and the parts of the court case I covered, came back as I researched Romney's French connection. It was a story that could only be described as innocent, harmless and of passing historical interest; certainly, there was no threat from itrs detail to the church. Yes, Romney has been at the wheel in a car crash in which another Mormon died, but there had never been the least suspicion that he was other than blameless.
But the latter-day Mormons had decided to manacle themselves into a position of refusing to help.
It started well enough with Elder Gubbay, a young French missionary based in Geneva, returning my call to say he was not only aware from older colleagues of the Romney time in France, but knew a survivor of the crash, an elderly woman still active in the church. He seemed to agree it would be an interesting, controversy-free interview but said it was naturally her choice.
At the Paris headquarters, Elder Quinn - an American - responded with genuine enthusiasm when I described my mission. He said he found it fascinating, too, and promised the president of the French mission would get back to me soon. In the meantime, I had left messages with the Mormons' French public relations officer and spoken to people on his home number. He, too, would be returning my call.
Then it began going wrong. From Paris, not a word. Geneva passed on my details to a missionary in Bordeaux who courteously called to say the crash survivor did not wish to speak to me.
In the UK, Malcolm Adcock, the church European's assistant director and UK head of publicity, finally admitted the church was deliberately offering no help to the media in discussing the Romney Mormon connection. Despite his seniority, he said, he had no power to force the French PR to speak to me but added that he was sure he would be willing to discuss the day-to-day life of a missionary in France, in itself helpful.
I relayed this thought to his colleague in France and reinforced my message, when it went unanswered, to include the suggestion that he might do well to start performing the duties of press officer with which he was entrusted. Still a blank.
In fact, all I ever received officially from the French Mormons was an e-mail from the press officer's wife - do they do job share? - to the following effect:
For several months, numerous journalists have come to us with the same request. But you should know that Mitt Romney was a missionary like any other for us. The rare members who knew him more than 40 years ago are very elderly or no longer with us. For younger ones, they retain only vague memories. For those that did know him, he was a missionary who accomplished his mission as did the others, certainly warm and outgoing, but many missionaries are likewise.
I took at face value the closing suggestion that I should approach missionaries who had returned to the US and in some cases supported his campaign. But if Malcolm Adcock is right, they've all decided or been told to clam up.
Of course none of these people was under the slightest obligation to be more helpful. And through scrutiny of what has previously appeared in the French press and elsewhere, I was able to write the article I had intended, with the inclusion one French Mormon's reported admission that Romney's people had e-mailed him to ask him to give no further interviews about the car crash.
And with the deepest of respect to the press officer or his wife, a "missionary like any other" does not have such a desperately close brush with death and go on to serve as acting co-president on his church's mission in France.
Malcolm remembered the Joyce McKinney case, too. He was a student at the time, already a Mormon, and admitted with a chuckle that the daily revelations brought him some ribbing from college friends.
He laughed again when I told him of my disbelief that I'd found it a million times easier to persuade the official Mormon spokesman of 1977 to provide information about that episode, for all its embarrassment, than his 2012 equivalents on the service to the church of a man who could yet become president of the USA.
* The piece for The National can be found at this link: http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/americas/the-crash-and-connection-that-moulded-romney. The book shown above can be bought at the usual knockdown prices by clicking on any of the Amazon links down the right-hand sidebar column.
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