Mcclintic’s poisoned past gives defence lawyer endless ammunition
Note to readers: Some of the testimony in this court case is disturbingly graphic.
LONDON, ONT. – In the sewer of evidence emerging at the Michael Rafferty murder trial here, the revulsion bar, never high, grows ever lower.
On Thursday, Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Heeney and the jurors learned that the young woman who only very recently has confessed to killing Victoria (Tori) Stafford herself once attempted to point the finger of suspicion at the little girl’s mother and stepfather.
It came in a key May 19, 2009, interview Terri-lynne Mcclintic had with Ontario Provincial Police Det.-sgt. Jim Smyth.
The officer asked her to “play armchair detective” and offer her theory of “what you think has happened here.”
After some hemming and hawing, Mcclintic said she had heard that Tara Mcdonald, the little girl’s mother, had a large drug debt and said something equally vicious about McDonald’s partner, James Goris.
Later on in the same interview, Mcclintic went on to admit for the first time that she was the mysterious woman in the white jacket seen on security video walking Tori away from her school and that she had lured the 8-year-old away and that Rafferty allegedly had sexually assaulted her.
That day, she stopped short of admitting she had seen a murder, and when she did, just five days later, she told Smyth it was Rafferty who was the actual killer of the little girl, who allegedly had first kicked and stomped her before hitting her in the head with a hammer.
The revelation of her trying to blame Tori’s mother and Goris came during pointed cross-examination by Dirk Derstine, Rafferty’s lawyer.
Mcclintic denied she had been trying to implicate the pair, said she was merely repeating information Rafferty had told her and suggested this was part of her psychological inability at the time to admit that she could ever have been involved in such a thing.
“I’m not the only guilty party here, and that’s why I’m sitting here today.”
TERRI-LYNNE MCCLINTIC
While Mcclintic almost two years ago pleaded guilty to, and was convicted of, first-degree murder, it was only in January this year that she belatedly confessed that she was the one who had kicked and hammered the little girl to death.
Consistent among her central statements is that she lured Tori away to a waiting Rafferty sitting nearby in his car; that Rafferty allegedly raped her, and that they both wrapped her body in garbage bags and tossed it onto a rock pile in the southwestern Ontario countryside. That, in other words, theirs was a joint enterprise.
Her stunning late-in-the-game admission came first on Jan. 13 to a prison counsellor, who told police, and on the next day, to detectives.
As Derstine put it, if it took McClintic almost three years to “finally come to accept that you were the one who killed Tori, when will you accept that you were the engine who drove the events of that day?”
“That will never happen,” McClintic snapped, “because it isn’t the truth.”
With frequent but vague references to a violent and abusive childhood – as a sampler, mother and daughter frequently “cooked up” Oxycontin together, and her mother once allegedly burned her with a cigarette and Mcclintic punched her in the eye so seriously she lost 70 per cent of her vision – Mcclintic claims to have developed a survivor’s ability to block things out.
As she put it one of the several times she spoke of it, usually tearfully, “I had pushed things out of my mind, I just couldn’t believe what had happened had happened. I just couldn’t believe I had been involved in something like that.
“I don’t deny I’ve been violent,” she said, “but I’m not violent toward children. I never hurt a child in my life, and to try to fathom and comprehend that a child has lost her life at my hands is something I could not comprehend.”
Her criminal record, serious and violent for such a young woman; her omnivorous appetite for drugs and the memory lapses caused by overdoses; her lengthy letters and diaries in which she raged and threatened to rain death on those who had wronged her – or their families – and detailed her lurid fantasies all gave Derstine plenty of ammunition.
She had to admit, she said once, that her writings were filled with “savage” imagery, but they were, for the most part she said, a way for her to work out her anger issues.
“You confessed under oath to beating a child to death with a hammer,” Derstine said. “It’s a little bit more than anger issues, wouldn’t you agree?”
After a long pause during which Mcclintic appeared to struggle for words, she finally said, “I agree that, I would say there were many things at play that day. I’m not going to make excuses, I’ll never make excuses for what happened, but things were more complicated than just me and my anger issues.”
Her several statements to police also provided rich fodder for Derstine.
He played for the jurors excerpts from her first videotaped interview, on April 12, 2009, just four days after the little girl had disappeared from view as if by black magic.
Mcclintic appeared relaxed, chatty and even sunny, in the interview, even when she was shown the infamous video of the white-jacketed woman. “Seeing a picture of yourself walking with Tori was not enough to break the block?” Derstine asked. As he remarked later of Mcclintic’s performance in another of the early interviews, when she was denying everything, “it all came out so naturally, it just flowed, as if it was the truth?” “Yes,” Mcclintic admitted. Toward the end of the day, as Derstine grew sarcastic, asking questions prefaced with a variant of, “So it’s not your fault then?” Mcclintic gave as good as she got.
“I’m not saying that,” she said once. “I did what I did.
“But I’m not the only guilty party here, and that’s why I’m sitting here today.”