Power of a child galvanized police in search for Tori
Officers scoured swamps, roads and garbage in long, grim hunt
LONDON, Ont. – As the third anniversary of Victoria (Tori) Stafford’s slaying approaches, one of the few enduring comforts from that time is how the little girl’s disappearance galvanized police across Ontario.
At the trial of Michael Rafferty, which regularly careens from horrific evidence to the routine and back again, jurors got another reminder Wednesday of the simple power of a child.
The 31-year-old Rafferty is pleading not guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder in Tori’s death. His ex-girlfriend Terri-lynne Mcclintic almost two years ago pleaded guilty to the latter charge and is serving a life sentence.
Tori was already missing nine days when the Emergency Response Team of the Ontario Provincial Police was first called in; this was shortly after the OPP joined the Woodstock force in the effort to locate the little girl.
The odds were very much against Tori being found alive.
As OPP Sgt. Jamie Stirling, a veteran ERT member and team leader, told Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Heeney and the jurors — and here Stirling was referring to an international study of stranger abductions — in only two per cent of 735 cases in the study were such stolen children found alive.
This didn’t slow the ERT search — or the larger joint task force of regular OPP and Woodstock officers — one iota.
In fact, Stirling said, the search for Tori was easily “the largest in OPP history and probably in our nation.”
The next biggest was the socalled Bandidos investigation (into the homicides of eight members of the biker gang), which saw 1,751 assignments and involved 1,757 names (mostly of officers, but also witnesses and suspects, etc.).
In the search for Tori, OPP officers got 5,557 assignments and 13,899 names were involved.
The ERT is the OPP’S search and rescue arm, and over the next 80 days — Tori’s disappearance became a murder investigation on May 19, when Mcclintic made her first tearful confession — the officers of this elite, highly trained unit performed some of the least glamorous imaginable tasks.
A search always begins with what the ERT calls PLS, or Point Last Seen — in the eightyear-old’s case from near Oliver Stephens Public School in Woodstock, where she was in Grade 3.
In the early days, before the Mcclintic confession changed everything, the ERT members looked to Woodstock itself, wading in waist-deep swampy water on the edge of town until they finally had to call in OPP divers.
(As the search widened, over six days in late May, these 11 divers searched 11 different waterways in southwestern Ontario. The numbers from that study on stranger abductions show that 14 per cent of the time, victims are found in water.)
The next big task on the ERT list was the Salford landfill, Woodstock’s local one.
They began on April 20 and searched there until May 7, with 14 members there every day, painstakingly poring through garbage with rakes and shovels, then being decontaminated by two additional members.
Every day, the ERT went through 20 to 25 truckloads’ worth of refuse.
No good deed going unpunished, they had to return in late May, specifically to look for the back seat of Rafferty’s Honda Civic, which by then detectives had discovered was missing. The ERT found several discarded back seats, as it turned out, but not the right one.
After Mcclintic’s confession, and the details she provided detectives about where she believed she and Rafferty had gone with Tori that day, the search moved to a great swath of the southern part of Ontario north of Guelph.
The PLS became a Home Depot in the north end of that city, where Mcclintic bought a hammer and garbage bags (and where store cameras caught her doing so, and caught Rafferty getting cash out of a nearby ATM minutes before).
ERT members travelled by foot, by chopper and car and ATV, searching in no fewer than six Ontario counties, looking for evidence McClintic said she and Rafferty had tossed.
As Stirling said, the abduction study showed that in more than half the cases, the body was found within a mile of discarded evidence.
They were looking for Tori, of course, but also for clothes and shoes worn by Mcclintic and Rafferty, for the murder weapon (that hammer) and the garbage bags, for the Home Depot bag.
Always, too, they were looking for the scene as Mcclintic had described it — a country lane, noticeable because it was across from a neat house set on an angle to a main road, that crossed a stream and led to a rock pile near a stand of pine trees.
On all-terrain vehicles, 12 officers from the ERT searched 70 different rock piles — and these were only the ones that at least superficially fit the criteria — and travelled up and down country roads and into farmers’ fields.
Many times, OPP cadaver dogs were along for the rock pile searches.
Between May 27 and June 3, ERT members walked 51 kilometres along the shoulder of the busy multi-lane Highway 401, westbound lanes only, looking for bits of the bloodstained foam rear seat Mcclintic said she had, at Rafferty’s instruction, cut out and which had been thrown from the window as they headed back to Woodstock.
The chances were minuscule the ERT would find anything so light as foam so late in the game, but they looked anyway.
The helicopter search went over four days in May, two of them with Mcclintic in the chopper.
On July 19, OPP DetectiveStaff Sgt. Jim Smyth, the interrogator to whom Mcclintic confessed, was on his way back to Woodstock from OPP headquarters in Orillia.
Police had just learned that Rafferty’s cellphone had pinged off a tower near Mount Forest, just a little north of where the ERT search had stopped. The ERT was to meet the next day, but Smyth wasn’t going to be able to make the meeting, so on a whim, he detoured off to Mount Forest to scope out what would be the new search area.
It was he who found Tori Stafford’s remains, just 6.8 kilometres north of where the ERT had stopped.
As Stirling was testifying, on the monitors throughout the courtroom were shown the mapped GPS results of the ERT searches — blue lines for underwater and chopper searches; orange or red lines for the areas officers walked or covered by car and ATV; green squares for the rock piles.
Helped by members of nearby forces, the ERT members travelled more than 18,000 kilometres. As Stirling put it once, they went one and a half times around the moon, as magical and lovely as the little girl herself.