Tori’s final pleas for help chillingly ignored
LNote to readers: Some of the testimony in this court case is disturbingly graphic.
It was nothing less than the merciless destruction of a trusting child that convicted killer TerriLynne Mcclintic described for an Ontario Superior Court judge and jury here.
The child was 8-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford, dead at the hands of Mcclintic and, allegedly, her former boyfriend Michael Rafferty.
Where Mcclintic almost two years ago unusually pleaded guilty to and was convicted of first-degree murder in the little girl’s April 8, 2009, death, Rafferty, 31, is pleading not guilty.
Mcclintic, 21, took the stand Tuesday in what is expected to be a lengthy stint as the prosecution’s star witness.
Her testimony marks the first time the public has heard any details of how Tori was abducted and killed.
By her own account – delivered in a nasal twang, replete with the use of “like” that is her generation’s trademark and interrupted by long pauses, false starts and instances where her mouth would move but produce no words – Mcclintic was the one of the pair that the little girl repeatedly turned to for help and comfort in the last hours of her life.
Mcclintic let her down every single time. The nadir of her betrayal, if such things can be measured, may have come when, according to McClintic, Rafferty was in the process of sexually assaulting Tori in the back seat of his car.
The pair had driven off to a secluded spot in the southwestern Ontario countryside after Mcclintic lured Tori, on her way home from school in Woodstock, Ont., just east of London, to Rafferty’s car with promises of seeing her little and non-existent dog.
So allegedly in mid-attack, Rafferty had summoned McClintic back to the vehicle – she said she’d walked a distance away, where she stood alternately staring off at a silo and reliving her own alleged childhood trauma – because Tori had to pee.
“I walked her to the front of the vehicle,” Mcclintic said. “She grabbed onto my hand,
ONDON, ONT. – and then she went to the washroom. She held onto me when she went to walk so she wouldn’t fall.”
Prosecutor Kevin Gowdey asked her if she noticed anything after Tori had relieved herself.
“There was blood on the snow,” Mcclintic replied.
“I told her I was sorry,” she said. “She said, ‘Don’t let him do it again.’
“I told her she was a very strong girl. She said, ‘Like you?’ and I said, ‘No, you’re very much stronger.’ ”
Then, she said, “I walked her back to the vehicle and gave her back to Mike.”
Rafferty, she said, picked Tori up and prepared to resume the assault.
“She still had hold of my hand, she didn’t want to let go,” Mcclintic said. “She asked me to stay with her.”
She actually got into the front-passenger seat, “and I tried to hold onto her hand, but I couldn’t stay. I knew what was going to happen and I couldn’t be there for that.”
You see? As was her custom all that long day, given a choice between Tori and Terri-lynne, it was nolo contendere, no contest: She picked Terri-lynne every time.
It was while she stood gazing off to the fields – “I could hear her screams,” she said – that she claimed to have flashbacks.
At times, she said, “it was like I wasn’t even there.”
At other times, she said, “I realized I needed to do something.”
Do something? Perhaps stop the assault? Save Tori? But no.
It was when she turned back to the car, “and saw what was going on,” that she snapped, she said.
“All I saw was myself at that age and all the anger and hate and rage and blame I built up toward myself came boiling up out of me.
“I went back to the vehicle,” she repeated, and there was another long pause until McClintic said, “and I savagely murdered that little girl.”
Though her language grew markedly less specific and moved from the active to the passive tense – “a bag was placed over her head”; “she was struck with the hammer”; etc. – Mcclintic claimed to have been the one who smashed the little girl in the head until she stopped moving.
On at least three other separate occasions after Tori was abducted, Mcclintic was alone in the car with the couple’s prisoner.
The first was when Rafferty stopped at a Tim Hortons, not long after the abduction. They were keeping Tori hidden under his black pea jacket, lying on the rear floor, and in his brief absence, she “had kind of sat up a bit.”
When Rafferty returned to the car, he said, “What part of stay down, stay f---ing covered, don’t you understand?” Mcclintic said.
For the first time that day, she apologized to the little girl.
Then in Guelph, Ont., Rafferty stopped to buy some Percocet painkillers. When he left the car, “I apologized for him yelling at her,” McClintic said. “She asked me what was wrong with him. I said he was just stressed out. She asked when she could go home, and I said soon. I said I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.”
The third time she was left alone with Tori was when Rafferty stopped at a gas station to use the ATM, preparatory to the next stop, when Mcclintic was to buy a hammer and garbage bags.
While he was gone, she told Tori, “I had to go to a store, and she told me not to leave. She said she didn’t want to be alone with him.”
Mcclintic left her anyway, went into a Home Depot and bought what he’d told her to get.
Though she told Gowdey they didn’t directly discuss what the hammer or bags would be used for, she said Rafferty had dropped some whopping clues.
Once, while they were still on the highway, he told her, “We can’t just keep her and we can’t take her back.” And at another point, he told her, “You know I’m going to f--her, right?”
She tried to ignore the remarks, she said, explaining that “I experienced my own traumas and I didn’t want to acknowledge that.”
This was the curious pattern of her relationship – if the term can be applied to what these two had – with Rafferty.
They met at a pizza joint in Woodstock. He described her to a friend he was talking to on the phone as “this pretty little number here.” That melted her heart such that within an hour or so, they were in the country, having sex in his car.
They were both using OxyContin – she injected vast amounts; he just popped the pills – and she often made the arrangements.
Their one date consisted of going to a movie and, finding the theatre empty, having sex there.
She ignored the bad signs – his alleged talk about kidnapping someone, how when they’d drive by schools he’d purportedly say, “It would be so easy to do this” – because, she said, if she just looked at the good things about him, compared to most of her previous boyfriends, he was a winner.
That day, Rafferty unexpectedly picked her up and they ended up parked near Oliver Stephens Public School.
“Are you going to do it?” he asked.
“Do what?” she said. He replied, she said, “See, I knew it, I knew you were all talk, no action.”
She knew then what he meant. She got defensive. “I never said I wouldn’t do it,” she said.
She hopped out of the car. “Just talk about dogs or candy,” he advised.
“He told me he wanted a young female because the younger they were, the easier they were to manipulate.”
She sidled up to Tori, “the only one that was alone,” and as they talked about dogs and crossed the street from the little girl’s school, Tori Stafford grabbed her hand, and when they got to the car, Mcclintic “opened the back door to show her the dog that wasn’t.”
After all, any sacrifice so, as she once put it, she could “finally have a good man in my life.”
cblatchford@postmedia.com