Science silent about those who did this
Horrific images shown to jurors in Stafford case
Despite all that, death will not be immediate
Warning: This story contains graphic details
Science would save them, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Pollanen, told the jurors, and he was both right and wrong.
Dr. Pollanen was testifying Tuesday as an expert witness at the Ontario Superior Court trial of Michael Rafferty, who is pleading not guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault and first-degree murder in the April 8, 2009, death of the little Woodstock, Ont., girl named Victoria (Tori) Stafford.
Mr. Rafferty’s former girlfriend, Terri-lynne Mcclintic, almost two years ago pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for her role in Tori’s slaying, and more recently in her testimony here changed her story to say that she, and not her hulking ex, was the actual killer.
By either account, whether she was doing the killing or Mr. Rafferty, the essential elements of the child’s death were the same: The eightyear-old died after allegedly being raped by Mr. Rafferty. She was, Ms. Mcclintic told Judge Thomas Heeney and the jurors, first kicked and stomped and then struck in the head with a hammer which she had bought, just an hour or two before, ostensibly at Mr. Rafferty’s direction.
Dr. Pollanen was called in when Tori’s remains were discovered in what he called “a clandestine grave” under a rock pile in the countryside south of Mount Forest on July 19 that year, more than three months after she had van- ished on her way home from school.
The next day, what was left of the little girl was transported to Toronto for autopsy, which Dr. Pollanen performed.
The jurors were about to see a few selected slides from that post-mortem.
“These photographs, even for pathologists, can be very confronting,” he told them. “You have to look past your emotion and see the science. There are things to be learned from them.”
What follows is some of what the science had to say.
First, the little girl’s body was so badly decomposed that there was no evidence of sexual interference because the area was essentially obliterated, and her body was partially skeletonized.
She was identified by dental records.
She died in the foetal position. Her liver was lacerated. No fewer than 16 of her ribs were fractured, sometimes in multiple places.
These two injuries were probably related, because the job of the rib cage is to protect the organs of the chest and the liver is just below that on the right.
The injuries were likely caused by strong blunt force trauma spread over a broad area or a single massive compressive force.
Since the little girl’s body was found under some huge rocks, one directly on the chest, Dr. Pollanen had to try to learn if the injuries were caused before death, or after it, by the rocks.
He got lucky: His microscopic examination revealed liver microemboli in Tori’s lung — tiny fragments of liver tissue wildly out of place in the lung. It got there because the little girl was alive when she received broad blunt impacts such as punches or kicks.
That trauma to the liver, in time, would have been fatal in and of itself.
Her scalp, brain and most of her face were gone.
But, working with forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Gruspier, who put Tori’s skull back together à la Humpty Dumpty, Dr. Pollanen learned the bones of her face were markedly fractured (cheekbones and nose) and that her reconstituted skull was a patchwork of linear and depressed fractures.
Dr. Pollanen said there were at least four separate areas of damage, meaning at least four separate blows.
By using a three-dimensional model, made of dental stone, he was able to show the jurors how the claw end of a hammer (it was like the one Ms. Mcclintic bought that day, but he could say only that a hammer, not this specific brand, was the weapon) fit into two of the wounds.
Tori suffered penetrating skull damage. She would have been bleeding from the head wounds, the broken nose. She would have suffered traumatic brain damage and intercranial bleeding. She would also have been bleeding internally from the torn liver, which probably contributed to her death.
“Despite all that,” Dr. Pollanen said, “death will not be immediate.” She may have been choking on her own blood, consistent with Ms. Mcclintic’s testimony that she heard gurgling from the little girl.
Throughout Dr. Pollanen’s testimony, there were reminders that this was a child: She had the extra flexible rib cage of the young; her knee joints were disarticulated, as is normal with children; her bones weren’t fully developed yet.
She was wearing only a little cap-sleeved Hannah Montana hoodie with what Dr. Pollanen described as “an elaborate collar embedded with small crystals,” the picture of a woman with a guitar on it, “various sparkles” and bearing the slogan “A girl can dream.”
In the remains, in the green garbage bags containing them, he also found the butterfly earrings Tori’s mother had loaned her that long-ago morning, two bottle caps, and the fragment of a hair barrette.
So science did its job, and gave the jurors a way past the horrible pictures to the useful facts.
It was silent about a person (and there is at least one), or people (there is allegedly another, Mr. Rafferty), who not only could inflict such damage upon a little girl, but who could also anticipate committing precisely such cruelty when, with the girl herself lying on the floor of their car, one or both of them first stopped at a Home Depot to pick up a hammer and garbage bags.