Hair dye raises question of why ‘bystander’ helped killer
Warning: Contains graphic and disturbing content
LONDON, ONT.
Three days after Victoria (Tori) Stafford was abducted and killed, Michael Rafferty, or “Mychol” as he sometimes signed his name, bought blond hair dye that ended up in Terri-lynne Mcclintic’s bedroom closet.
The two were involved in the spring of 2009.
Now 21, Mcclintic almost two years ago pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the little girl’s death, while Rafferty is now on trial here for murder, kidnapping and sexual assault causing bodily harm.
The hair dye link between the two — painstakingly proved by police and prosecutors down to affidavits obtained from the manufacturer and retailer — is significant for a couple of reasons.
First, it corroborates what Mcclintic told Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Heeney and the jurors when she testified.
She said that although she had cut her hair after the killing, it wasn’t enough of an appearance change for Rafferty, and that he left the hair dye for her near a telephone pole by her house and told her to get it.
(By this time, police were looking for a mystery woman with long dark hair and wearing a white coat who appeared on security video near Tori’s school, walking with the little girl.)
Mcclintic was arrested, initially on an unrelated probation warrant, the day after Rafferty bought the hair dye, presumably before she got a chance to use it.
But the link also raises the broader issue of why, if Rafferty was — as his lawyer Dirk Derstine suggested in his cross-examination of Mcclintic — merely a “horrified” bystander to the murder, he would have been taking steps to help the real killer change her appearance.
Rafferty may have changed his own appearance, too: The hair dye link was made through a receipt discovered during a search of his mother’s Woodstock house, and it shows he also bought a frosting kit at the same time. And an officer involved in booking Rafferty after his May 19 arrest described his dark-brown hair as having frosted tips.
The search of the Rafferty and Mcclintic homes also turned up other items linking the burly 31-year-old to Mcclintic and to her version of what happened on April 8, 2009, the day Tori was lured away from her Woodstock public school by Mcclintic.
Among these items was a memory card with three pictures of Mcclintic lolling on the bed at a local motel where the two had sex on March 26 that year; a black pea jacket she said was used to hide the little girl as she was forced to the floor of Rafferty’s Honda Civic; a “Missing 8-yearold” poster (one was also found in the shotgun shack where Mcclintic lived with her mother), and a blue folding knife (the blade missing) that looked just like the one Mcclintic had drawn for police with her usual clarity.
Police also found a note in a drawer that read, “Things 4 Carol” and listed small pieces of furniture.
Mcclintic testified that after she was arrested — first on the unrelated warrant and before she confessed to involvement in Tori’s death — Rafferty stayed in touch with her, visited her at the detention centre where she was being held, and helped her mother, Carol Mcclintic, about whom she was worried.
Though Mcclintic has changed a central fact about the little girl’s killing — for almost three years, she maintained Rafferty was the one who stomped her and hit her on the head with a hammer, then this year and at trial recanted that statement and said she was the actual killer — she has consistently maintained the whole kidnapping was her then-boyfriend’s idea and that he raped the little girl in the back seat of the car in a country lane near Mount Forest.
Many of these details have been corroborated by other evidence, including security video of Rafferty’s car cruising Tori’s school that day, of Rafferty getting cash from an ATM near a Home Depot, and of McClintic buying the murder tools, a hammer and garbage bags, in the store.
The police searches of the homes where the two lived, detailed for jurors in lengthy slide presentations, were telling and oddly poignant.
Mcclintic’s mother was an Oxycontin addict with unspecified health problems. The search of the cramped little house where the women lived looked like a cross between those seen on the Hoarders and Intervention reality shows — virtually every wall in the place was dotted with white areas where plaster had been repaired, and receipts for the mother’s drugs were everywhere.
From the receipts, it appears that about the time of the murder the mother was on nine different drugs, including Oxycontin (which Mcclintic testified her mother sometimes sold) and various sedatives and anti-depressants. She also took drugs used for treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mcclintic testified that she and her mother would “cook” crushed Oxycontin pills together, that she began smoking weed with Carol at the age of eight, and that though theirs was a violent and stormy relationship, she loved her mother.
They lived in poverty, on food stamps, and Carol McClintic’s drug benefit card was noted on some of the prescriptions as expired.
The house where Rafferty lived with his mother — and four cats, three of whom made a guest appearance in the police photos — was by contrast as neat as a pin and, if not affluent, then stolidly middle-class.
The only evidence of drugs was in an unlabelled empty pill bottle found in Rafferty’s bedroom.
There were artificial and dried flowers in abundance throughout the house, candles, family photos, a statue that read, “Mothers plant the seeds of love that help us grow strong” and a carefully sponge-painted grey ceiling in the kitchen.
For whatever the differences between the homes are worth, they lend heft to a vignette Mcclintic told the jurors.
She was in custody, and Rafferty, with his conventional good looks and appearance, came to visit. When he left, one of the staff asked who he was and when she replied, “My boyfriend,” the staff member said, “Way to go, Terri.”
To the 18-year-old drug addict with no prospects that she then was, and this is how she described herself, Mychol Rafferty must have looked like a fine catch.