Bear Bounces to Fame

The singing dog in the above commercial is "Bear".

Bear is an all-white Jack Russell Terrier pup so "amped up" on life, that if he had ever been allowed to hunt, he probably would have come to harm. Some terriers are like that; they know no bounds.

The good news for Bear is that my friend Scott Kauffman in California managed to place Bear with animal trainer Steve Berens.

Bear has since gone on to appear in several movies and many commercials.

It seems Bear's latest commercial (featured at top) has created a small stir in England, where the low-esteemed mumbling dog that is featured in the bank segment appears to be frightened and shaking. Never mind that the dog is trained to do this on command; appearance is everything. And, of course, in commericials it really is everything.

To tell you the truth, I found this ad incredibly confused, and I could not tell what the take-away message was supposed to be.

Apparently, we are supposed to think the two dogs are the same animal -- the shaking dog has no confidence because he lacks a really cool car, but he joyfully sings out loud (and sounds amazingly like Steve Winwood) when he's riding around in that nifty Volkswagen Polo.

Is that it?

If so, it's an incredibly stupid ad. The singing dog part is brilliant, of course, but the other segment just crashes and burns and wrecks it all. Free advice: Cut the ad down, keep the singing dog, lose the mumbling dog that looks scared (what were you thinking?), and add a beautiful girl as a romantic element. What you will have left is a perfect bit of advertising: dog, car, girl, good music. Simple.

For the record, the singing dog and the scared dog are not the same animal. The more timid dog is a rescue that was also placed by Scott with animal trainer Steve Berens; he is sometimes used as a double for Bear when the situation is called for. But he's not Bear. Bear's issue is not lack of confidence; it the opposite of that.

Scott and Margie Kauffman, by the way, have placed thousands of rescue Jack Russell Terriers in good homes over the years.

For an excellent article by Gina Spadafori mentioning Margie's good work, see The Saints Of Rescue.

To see an example of what Scott can do with a Nikon camera, see this still-picture composite I put up a few year back: Long May It Run.

• Related Links:
  ** A 15-Year Mistake
  ** The Saints of Rescue
  ** The Continuing Need for Rescue
  ** Hump and Dump Dog Breeders
  ** A Challenge to All Breeders
  

Bear, airborne in the kitchen.
.

The Beam in the Eye of Kennel Club Breeders

I notice that some of the AKC Border Terriers folks are all atwitter over the fact that Oprah Winfrey is going to be doing a segment on puppy mills.

It seems that Mainline Animal Rescue sponsored a billboard four blocks from Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios in Chicago, which got Oprah and her producers interested in exposing the puppy mill industry in America.

Now some of the Border Terrier folks are suggesting "Oprah's new cause has the potential to negatively impact responsible breeders."

Which has me rolling on the floor laughing.

Responsible breeders in the American Kennel Club? It's an oxymoron.

The closed registry system of the American Kennel Club is one of the primary reasons the quality of Kennel Club dogs is going into the toilet.

I have written about this at some length in a post entitled Inbred Thinking, but I am hardly the first. Time magazine devoted a whole cover article to it.

So are the Border Terrier folks pushing for an open registry? They are not.

Are they pushing to pull their dog out of the AKC? They are not.

And yet, it was an open registry that created the Border Terrier, was it not?

And, for the record, it's an open registry that keeps the Patterdale Terrier a working terrier and keeps the Jack Russell Terrier working too. Just look at the "Parson Russell Terrier" if you want to see how fast the Kennel Club can wreck a breed. Astounding!

Most folks who hunt any breed of dog generally run away from Kennel Club stock. As I have noted in the past:

"The number of working dogs ruined by the AKC grows every year. Irish setters, once famed at finding birds, are now so brain-befogged they can no longer find the front door. Cocker spaniels, once terrific pocket-sized birds dogs, have been reduced to poodle-coated mops incapable of working their way through a field or fence row. Fox terriers are now so large they cannot go down a fox hole. Saint Bernards, once proud pulling dogs, are now so riddled with hip dysplasia that it's hard to find one that can walk without surgery in old age."

And don't kid yourself; it wasn't "puppy mills" or "unscrupulous backyard breeders" that did this. It was the same kind of people who are on every AKC breed list-serv; folks who do not work their dogs, and who judge a dog mostly by how many times the word "champion" shows up in its pedigree.

And so I have to laugh out loud. The Border Terrier folks are concerned that Oprah Winfrey's little show "might negatively impact responsible breeders"?!

Right. Let's be honest here for a minute, eh?

The Border Terrier community is part of the problem when it comes to the wreckage of dogs in America.

This is a Border Terrier community where almost no one actually hunts their dogs.

This is a Border Terrier community where "protect and preserve" the breed really means protect and preserve the price structure, not the true working abilities of the dogs.

And these folks now want to take inventory of Mainline Animal Rescue which seems to simply be looking to find good homes for dogs in serious distress?

Ha!

When will they take inventory of their very own AKC which subsidizes every dog show with revenue from puppy mill misery pups?

And so pardon me if I do not hyperventilate over what Mainline Animal Rescue is all about.

There is no way they could be doing any more harm to dogs than the American Kennel Club and its rosette chasers are already doing.

Of course, as is so often the case, the fish stinks from the head down. As I wrote in piece for Just Terriers magazine some years back, the "experts" you find judging AKC terrier trials are, for the most part, a laughable group of fantasists.

In the AKC, for example, most judges are experts in a half dozen breeds. In the terrier ring, it's almost a guarantee none has ever owned a Deben collar or cut a shoulder into a trench in order to get down another two feet. As a rule these authorities are experts by dint of having spent far too many nights in bad hotels attending show trials. In 20 years of owning dogs, they have logged a thousand miles bouncing around show rings in plaid skirts and blue blazers. They may have driven to the moon and back to pick up rosettes, but few have driven 10 miles out into the country to even see a fox den, much less put a dog down one or dig to it.

A few will claim expertise because they have bought an airplane ticket and attended a mounted hunt or two in the U.K.. They have seen "the real thing" they will tell you, and know what is required of a working dog thanks to their two-week vacation in Scotland! Just don't ask them how to extract quarry from the stop-end of a pipe or how to treat a bite wound.

And so you will pardon me if I am laughing because the Border Terrier community is all atwitter over the fact that Oprah would dare to talk about puppy mills.

My God, she she might talk about the long-standing nexus between puppy mills and the American Kennel Club.

She might talk about how many AKC misery pups it takes to subsidize an AKC rosette.

Damn, I hope so! Bring it on Oprah!!

I do not fear Oprah's expose of the dog breeding business in this country, any more than I fear the morons and lunatics at PETA. Oprah, at least, might do a little good.

No, I do not fear Oprah.

What I fear are rosette chasers at the American Kennel Club and the scores of thousands of nodding know-nothings and "hump and dump" breeders who say their goal is to "protect and preserve" a breed with a closed registry system.

God save us from them!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


44Some related posts on this blog:

• AKC Loves Puppy Mills ... and the Naïve
• AKC Depends on Puppy Mills to Subsidize Shows
• A Terrible Beauty: The Ugly Side of Show Dogs (Time magazine)
• The Kennel Club Wrecks More Than Terriers
• Inbred Thinking
• The AKC and Working Dogs
• Hump and Dump Dog Breeders
• Joe Bowman's Patterdale
• A Bit More on the Border-Patterdale Connection
• Old and New Border Terriers?
• Autopsy of a Standard (Border Terrier)
• The Thin Portfolio of the Working Border Terrier
• Out of the Ring and Into the Den
• The Saints of Rescue
• Overbreeding: Beware of Simple Answers

.

The Saints of Rescue

Boston Globe, December 2, 2004

The Busier the Better for Rambunctious Jack Russells

By Gina Spadafori

_________________________________

About once a month, I'll get a frantic e-mail from someone who's frustrated to the point of desperation. "Help!" the e-mail will scream. "I have a Jack Russell, and he digs, barks and chews when we're gone. He's too hyper! We can't take it anymore!"

Sometimes, it's all I can do not to write in return, "High energy? Digging? Barking? Chewing? Congratulations! You have an authentic Jack Russell terrier! What did you expect?"

What they expected, of course, was an adorable, low-key and well-mannered small dog, like Eddie on the TV show "Frasier," or Wishbone on the PBS children's series of the same name. What they don't know is that Moose, the dog who played Eddie, had a full-time trainer, or that the role of Wishbone was played by not one but a handful of well-trained dogs.

And what about their cute little hellion? Perfectly normal for any Jack Russell who isn't given the structure and the physical and mental exercise these hard-driving dogs need.

"I get those phone calls every day," says Margie Kauffman, past president of the Northern California Jack Russell club and current head of the group's rescue efforts. "They're mostly from folks who haven't done their homework and don't know of the breed's natural tendencies."

Kauffman's group (www.jackrussellrescue.com) re-homes about 150 dogs a year from an area that starts north of Fresno, Calif., and ends at the Oregon border. That number doesn't include those terriers who are placed or sold privately, or who are adopted out of shelters directly.

"These dogs are loving, loyal, and very smart. But when they're bored, people say they're destructive," she says. "In my own pack, they're not bored. They get lots of exercise, and they're engaged all the time."

Lyndy Pickens, who has two of the dogs (which the American Kennel Club calls Parson Russells, not Jack Russells), got her first Jack Russell at the age of 3 and vows to have one as long as she lives.

"They're thugs in clown's clothing," she says, looking lovingly at her two Jacks, Shiner and Louie, their heads underground as they dig a trench on her property in the foothills above Sacramento. "This is not a dog bred to ask permission."

Indeed, knowing what the Jack Russell was bred for is essential to understanding how to keep both a terrier and your sanity, says Kauffman, who has seen literally thousands of Jack Russells over the years. ("My daughter calls me the patron saint of Jack Russells," she says, laughing. "If you look at any dog breed, they were bred for a specific purpose," she says. "Jack Russells weren't bred to be pets. They were bred to work: 150 years ago, the dog would have been everyone's household vacuum. Bugs, mice, rats people didn't want pests in the house, the barn, or the chicken coop. The dogs had to work for their keep, killing the pests. They're not like a cat, who will eat and then not hunt again. The Jack Russell will keep killing.

"Jack Russells today are hard-working, tenacious little dogs as a result."

And not, please note, one of the better breeds to keep if you have rodents as pets.

So why are these dogs so popular? When living with people who understand them, who keep their minds and bodies exercised, who train them and work them constantly, who set limits and gently but firmly enforce them, the Jack Russell is an outstanding companion.

"I love how joyous they are," says Pickens.

"It's interesting to live with them," says Kaufman. "They're bright."

For people who understand the breed and are willing to work to keep a working terrier happy, there's no better dog in the world. For anyone else, though, if you're looking for a lazy dog, or an easygoing dog for beginners, you're better off without this high-energy breed.

In other words: If you don't know Jack, you'd better not get one until you do. And even then: Are you up the challenge? Be sure beforehand, so your Jack Russell won't be another one looking for a new home.

Freak on a Leash

Is it me, or is there something wrong with cloning pit bulls at a time when thousands of them a day are being put to death for no other fault than the fact they are pit bulls?

That was my initial thought when I found a fat blonde American woman had sold her house in order to get the money to have the Koreans clone her dead dog. The dog's name was "Booger" and now there are five little black snot rolls suckling on the side of a yellow hound mongrel who is their surrogate mom.

"Ah, get over it," I thought. This is a waste of money, but it's no worse than some fool having another litter of puppies because "Tricky-Woo is so special."

Then I started thinking of how ferked up someone has to be to sell their house in order to get the money to clone their dog. Talk about needy.

But a lot of people are a bit over-needy when it come to their dogs. As I have noted in the past, a lot of these folks seem to have human relationships that are wrapped around the axle. Sometimes these folks have personality disorders, and sometimes it's because they are not able to have kids, and sometimes it's because they are socially awkward and/or have light doses of mental illness.

No doubt this lady was one of those, and a quick look at the picture below seemed to tell me quite a lot.





I let it go. No reason to kick the sick, right? I would not post on the Korean pit bull cloning thing.

And then I clicked on my Google Reader and saw that Gina, over at Pet Connection, had stumbled across an article about who this woman really is.

Her real name, it seems is not 'Bernann McKinney' but Joyce McKinney, and some 20 years ago she was involved in the 'Mormon Sex Slave Case' in which she was the assaulter, rapist, and kidnapper.

Oh. My. God. As The Daily Mail noted:

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.

At the time, she famously said of her victim: 'I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.'

Now if you can stop reading there, you are a better person than I am.

I wanted more. And, The Daily Mail, of course, was only too happy to oblige:

So, dear readers, let us turn back the clock 30 years to Joyce and the sensational circumstances of what became known as the 'Mormon Sex Slave Case'.
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 £50 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.

Before long, the Press caught up with her and she dropped her disguise to revel in her sexual notoriety - she posed topless for a number of glamour magazines before the U.S. authorities finally caught up with her and she was arrested.

Once again, she was freed on bail and, by now - 1979 - there seemed to be no appetite in the UK for forcing her extradition.

McKinney, meanwhile, had allegedly vanished into an increasingly desperate world of prostitution, drug abuse and psychiatric problems.

She resurfaced once more in 1984, when she was arrested near Salt Lake City Airport, where Kirk Anderson - the Mormon she had kidnapped - was working.

In her car, police found a length of rope and a pair of handcuffs. The implication was clear that she was about to make a second kidnap attempt, but she failed to show up in court and the case was dropped.

By the late Nineties, McKinney was back in North Carolina, dogged by ill health and often in a wheelchair, living on benefits in a remote smallholding with only three ponies and a fiercely devoted pitbull called Hamburger for company.

On one occasion, she had broken into a dog pound to rescue a pitbull terrier - possibly Hamburger - which was to be put down for mauling a jogger.

'I love those pitbulls,' she explained. 'They're such sympathetic animals.'
Locals, who knew of her racy past, treated her with suspicion, if not fear. She had a taste for litigation and was described as 'one wild woman'.

In a rare comment on the Mormon affair, 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.'

May was last heard of selling plumbing supplies in California, while Anderson was an estate agent in Utah and understandably reluctant to rake over his past misfortunes.

Wonderful!

Done properly, this will no doubt be produced as an opera. The Daily Mail link has more picture, and I have posted the most charitable below.

I end this post now for a simple reason: Words fail me.



Ms. McKinney in better days.
.

Broken People with Shiny New Dogs

Is it me, or is there something wrong with cloning pit bulls at a time when thousands of them a day are being put to death for no other fault than the fact they are pit bulls?

That was my initial thought when I found a fat blonde American woman had sold her house in order to get the money to have the Koreans clone her dead dog.

The dog's name was "Booger," and now there are five little black snot rolls suckling on the side of a yellow hound mongrel, who is their surrogate mom.

"Ah, get over it," I thought. This is a waste of money, but it's no worse than some fool having another litter of puppies because "Tricky-Woo is so special."

Then I started thinking of how ferked up someone has to be to sell their house in order to get the money to clone their dog. Talk about needy.

But a lot of people are a bit over-needy when it come to their dogs. As I have noted in the past, a lot of these folks seem to have human relationships that are wrapped around the axle. Sometimes these folks have personality disorders, and sometimes it's because they are not able to have kids, and sometimes it's because they are socially awkward and/or have light doses of mental illness.

No doubt this lady was one of those, and a quick look at the picture below seemed to tell me quite a lot.





I let it go. No reason to kick the sick, right? I decided I would not post on the Korean pit bull cloning thing.

And then I clicked on my Google Reader and saw who this woman really is.

Her real name, it seems, is not 'Bernann McKinney' but Joyce McKinney, and some 20 years ago she was involved in the 'Mormon Sex Slave Case' in which she was the assaulter, rapist, and kidnapper.

Oh. My. God. As The Daily Mail noted:

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.

At the time, she famously said of her victim: 'I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.'

Now if you can stop reading there, you are a better person than I am.

I wanted more. And, The Daily Mail, of course, was only too happy to oblige:

So, dear readers, let us turn back the clock 30 years to Joyce and the sensational circumstances of what became known as the 'Mormon Sex Slave Case'.
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 £50 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.

Before long, the Press caught up with her and she dropped her disguise to revel in her sexual notoriety - she posed topless for a number of glamour magazines before the U.S. authorities finally caught up with her and she was arrested.
Once again, she was freed on bail and, by now - 1979 - there seemed to be no appetite in the UK for forcing her extradition.

McKinney, meanwhile, had allegedly vanished into an increasingly desperate world of prostitution, drug abuse and psychiatric problems.

She resurfaced once more in 1984, when she was arrested near Salt Lake City Airport, where Kirk Anderson - the Mormon she had kidnapped - was working.

In her car, police found a length of rope and a pair of handcuffs. The implication was clear that she was about to make a second kidnap attempt, but she failed to show up in court and the case was dropped.

By the late Nineties, McKinney was back in North Carolina, dogged by ill health and often in a wheelchair, living on benefits in a remote smallholding with only three ponies and a fiercely devoted pitbull called Hamburger for company.

On one occasion, she had broken into a dog pound to rescue a pitbull terrier - possibly Hamburger - which was to be put down for mauling a jogger.

'I love those pitbulls,' she explained. 'They're such sympathetic animals.'
Locals, who knew of her racy past, treated her with suspicion, if not fear. She had a taste for litigation and was described as 'one wild woman'.

In a rare comment on the Mormon affair, 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.'

May was last heard of selling plumbing supplies in California, while Anderson was an estate agent in Utah and understandably reluctant to rake over his past misfortunes.

Wonderful!

Done properly, this will no doubt be produced as an opera. The Daily Mail link has more picture, and I have posted the most charitable below.

I end this post now for a simple reason: Words fail me.

___________

This is a repost from 2008.  For a link to the rest of this story, from this year, click here.

Ms. McKinney in better days.

.