I finally found the solution to my issue. I was able to track my problem down to a specific revision...and after a lot of staring at the code was finally able to have an epiphany about the solution.
I'm posting solution here just in case someone else has this problem in the future.
In the "PersonView" I was displaying a partial view that was returning some data as follows:
@Html.Action("SomeListPartial", "Other")
When I was reading that, in my mind I had mistakenly thought it was the @Html.ActionLink method which just provides a hyperlink to a page......the @Html.Action method instead "Invokes the specified child action method using the specified controller name and returns the results as an HTML string." ...which means it executes the action and gets back the resulting html for display on the screen.
When I looked at the action being called, it turns out that I had (correctly) placed an [Authorized] attribute on it...which is why it failing when not logged in.
Now I'm not entirely sure why the error wasn't more visible...but I think that there must be something buried in my website that does a redirect which is why I was automatically being taken to ?ReturnUrl=%2fPerson%2fShow%2fvXDwucay