Healing lodge could be right place for killer
At Terri-Lynne McClintic’s old prison, the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., there was a wedding on Monday.
A woman named Sheena McIntosh was united in holy matrimony with inmate Melissa Merritt, convicted of first-degree murder in January of this year with her former common-law spouse Christopher Fattore in the death of Caleb Harrison, Merritt’s former husband.
(Harrison was one of three members of the same family who were found dead over a five-year period but charges in another death, that of Bridget Harrison, resulted in a mistrial for Merritt, though Fatore was convicted. Fattore was acquitted in Bill Harrison’s death.)
After the ceremony, the happy couple headed for the institution’s PFV (private family visit) trailer.
I mention this only because in the righteous outrage over the recent transfer of McClintic to an Aboriginal healing lodge in Saskatchewan, there seems this underlying assumption that the 28-year-old had been doing “hard” time before and was now going to be having it easy.
In truth, since the former Prison for Women in Kingston was closed, most female prisoners in Canada don’t live in grim, television-style maximum security, but rather in pod- or apartment-like accommodation.
At Grand Valley, for instance, McClintic was in the Pathways unit, a ninewoman cottage for Aboriginal offenders.
Even though it’s entirely unclear that McClintic has Aboriginal heritage, it’s enough apparently, as Correctional Service Canada says on its website, that she identify that way and be prepared to follow the programming.
That’s but a sideshow, of course, to the real story, brought to public attention by Rodney Stafford, the father of McClintic’s victim, Victoria (Tori) Stafford.
She was the sunny little girl, all of eight, who was on her way home from school in Woodstock, Ont., on April 8, 2009, when she was lured away by McClintic, who dangled before her the promise of seeing a puppy, and then disappeared as if into the very air.
For much of the rest of that long summer, Tori stayed missing, through frantic searches, motorcycle rides in her name and constant press attention while her parents, Stafford and Tori’s mom Tara McDonald, suffered and came under intense public and police scrutiny.
After 103 days, Tori’s body was found off a rural road near Mount Forest, Ont. Her remains were so decomposed it was impossible to tell whether she had been raped or not, though McClintic would tell police that her casual boyfriend, Michael Rafferty, had attacked her twice.
The little girl’s skull had been crushed by repeated hammer blows, and 16 of her ribs were broken.
It was McClintic who helped police find Tori — she drew a map that proved to be surprisingly accurate — and whose wrenching, sobbing confession, later viewed by the jurors at Rafferty’s trial, drove his arrest and conviction.
McClintic herself pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for her role in the whole awful mess on April 30, 2010.
She was also the star witness against Rafferty — despite a last-minute recantation, not terribly believable and absent all the detail of her confession, where she tried to take the blame for the actual murder — at his trial in 2012. The prosecutor’s theory at the time was that McClintic simply wanted to avoid testifying, and perhaps that was it.
Despite all that, her own conduct was beyond ghastly: Whether she was taking the blame herself or pointing the finger at Rafferty for the killing, she always acknowledged that she knew his sexual deviance was the motivator for Tori’s abduction.
At one point, she told the jurors, after she had returned the child to Rafferty for the second assault, “I could hear her calling my name. T, T, please don’t let him do it again!” She kept walking away, so she wouldn’t have to see it.
She was such a damaged creature herself, the product of a stripper mother with a drinking problem who had a series of brief relationships with sometimes violent men. McClintic was in and out of care, and it’s difficult to know which would have been worse for her, her mother’s terrible embrace, or the state’s.
Certainly, as she was not there to help Tori Stafford when the little girl cried out for her, neither was anyone ever there for her. This is not to mitigate in any way what she did, but rather to say, I suppose, that it would have felt awfully familiar to her: Children in McClintic’s entire experience were to be hurt and ruined.
She is serving a mandatory 25 years in prison before being eligible to apply for parole from her automatic life sentence.
I understand why Rodney Stafford, who is a decent and solid citizen and a sweet man, wants McClintic transferred back to a place that is more recognizably a prison and where she might do harder time. I understand the public outrage. I just can’t share it completely: Those two little girls, the dead one and the killer, have melded in my mind somehow. One can’t be saved or helped or even made half-whole. Maybe the other can be.