Prosecutors close case against Rafferty
Defence theory is that he was a poor innocent dupe who had no idea Mcclintic would kill Stafford
LONDON, ONT. – Michael Rafferty doesn’t have to lift a finger to prove his innocence, but should he take the witness stand at his trial next week, he will have what Ricky Ricardo once famously told his wife on the ancient I Love Lucy TV series – “some ’splainin’ to do.’ ”
The 31-year-old Rafferty is pleading not guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder in the April 8, 2009, slaying of the little Woodstock, Ont., girl named Victoria (Tori) Stafford.
As with anyone accused of a crime, Rafferty isn’t obliged to testify in his own defence or call a whit of evidence.
The burden of proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt rests entirely upon the prosecution.
But as those prosecutors closed their case against him Thursday – some eight weeks, 61 witnesses and 186 exhibits after the trial began – it was with a compilation of video footage linking Rafferty to TerriLynne Mcclintic, the young woman who two years ago pleaded guilty to and was convicted of first-degree murder in the 8-year-old’s death.
Now 21 and serving a life sentence – unlike her notorious predecessor, Karla Homolka, Mcclintic received no cushy deal in exchange for her plea and her efforts to help police find the little girl’s remains – she testified here over six days.
And though she stuck tenaciously to the new version of who actually killed Tori, which she first confided in January this year to a prison counsellor – she now claims to be the killer, where for the almost three years prior she said it was Rafferty – Mcclintic was equally firm that the crime itself was Rafferty’s idea, that it was sexually motivated and that he raped the little girl.
Admittedly violent and troubled, the breadth of her criminal tendencies were most dramatically revealed in cross-examination by Rafferty’s lawyer, Dirk Derstine.
Under his questioning, Mcclintic admitted that she recently told her godmother, visiting her in prison, that she regretted only that the victim was a child but would otherwise kill again, and that she had, as a youngster herself, once cooked a puppy in a microwave oven until it screamed.
Derstine’s point was that it is Mcclintic who, with her criminal record for violence, lurid and bloodthirsty diaries and language, is likely telling the truth that she was
Rafferty isn’t obliged to testify in his own defence or call a whit of evidence.
the one who wielded a hammer and killed Tori.
Yet for all that her story changed in this one critical aspect, Mcclintic’s evidence was frequently independently corroborated.
It was her detailed map of the crime scene, a rural area off a country road south of Mount Forest, that led police to discover Tori’s remains 103 days after her disappearance.
And cell tower maps showed Rafferty’s Blackberry pinging off towers north of the Guelph, Ont., area on the day in question, while security video from Tori’s school and stores and businesses appears to essentially confirm Mcclintic’s rough time line of events that day.
And prosecutors proved that it was Rafferty, not Mcclintic, who had long-standing ties to the Wellington County area and the remote location where Tori was found.
Witnesses testified he had once lived in the county as a boy, once worked within about five kilometres of the crime scene and frequently travelled the back-country roads.
Scientists also found the little girl’s blood on the frame of the rear passenger side door of Rafferty’s car – the very area where Mcclintic said he raped her – and Tori’s DNA mixed with Rafferty’s on the bottom of a gym bag in the car.
Interestingly, some of the most compelling revelations of the trial aren’t considered evidence at all.
These came during Derstine’s cross of Mcclintic, when he put a series of suggestions to her in which he alleged she was the driving force of the crime, that Rafferty had “thought nothing of it” when she brought Tori to the car, that she told him it was part of an unspecified “drug debt,” that he refused her sexual “gift” of the little girl and walked away from the vehicle when she asked him to, and that though he was “horrified” to return and find Tori dead, he nonetheless helped Mcclintic “clean up.”
Thus did Derstine reveal the defence theory of the crime: That Rafferty was but a poor innocent dupe who had no idea the young woman with him would kill the little girl.
Prosecutors countered this by calling to the stand no fewer than 15 women who were, like Mcclintic, dating Rafferty in the spring of 2009.
The sum effect of their testimony was that if, as Derstine suggested, his client had been horrified by the slaying of that little girl, he got over it in a big hurry – indeed, by the day after the murder, when he consummated a new relationship at the Woodstock house he shared with his mother and was enthusiastically trying to arrange other rendezvous.
And, earlier this week, prosecutors played video footage taken from the Genest Detention Centre, where Mcclintic was incarcerated on an unrelated probation breach from April 12 until May 19, when she confessed and implicated Rafferty.
He visited her twice there, and the video showed the two hugging, flirting and gaily laughing in the visitor area – just weeks after they’d buried the little girl under a pile of rocks, and even as her family was growing more desperate and police were widening their search for her.
Most important is that Mcclintic vehemently denied Derstine’s pointed suggestions.
Since lawyers’ questions aren’t considered evidence unless the witness agrees or “adopts” them, the questions remain just that until and unless Rafferty testifies, at which point, jurors would be left to believe some, all or none of what he said, just as they may with every other witness.
Derstine is expected to announce whether he will call a defence next Tuesday, when the trial resumes.