Older witness puts Mcclintic at school
LONDON, Ont. — The defence team of the man charged with first-degree murder in the death of Ontario schoolgirl Victoria “Tori” Stafford opened and closed their case Tuesday with only one witness — a woman who picked up her grandchildren at the elementary school where Stafford disappeared three years ago.
The 60-year-old testified she saw the little girl happily leaving school that day with a woman in a white, puffy ski jacket.
The older woman’s identity is protected by a publication ban.
Michael Rafferty, 31, has pleaded not guilty to raping and killing the eightyear-old. He didn’t testify in his own defence. The defence’s witness told the court she was waiting in a car for her grandchildren and their mother to come out after school that day. She saw a dark-haired woman with a white puffy jacket walk into the front doors of the school.
Moments later, her family members arrived and they began driving off.
As the car was driving along the main street near the school, the witness recalled seeing the white-jacketed woman again. But this time she was with a young girl.
“The little girl who was with her was happy, skipping, talking a mile a minute,” said the witness. “I assumed that the person she was talking to was her mother.”
She said the woman in the white jacket wasn’t speaking to the child.
“It seemed like she was on a mission,” the woman told the court.
A surveillance video of Stafford walking with a woman in a white jacket was released to the media shortly after Tori’s disappearance.
“Is it possible, ma’am, that you’ve seen the video like we have, over and over again. Is that what is affecting your memory? asked Crown attorney Michael Carnegie.
But the witness told him that she had been drawn to the woman because she was wearing a winter jacket on a warm April day.
During the Crown’s case, prosecutors called 61 witnesses. Among them was Rafferty’s former girlfriend, Terri-lynne Mcclintic.
Mcclintic, 21, is currently serving a life sentence for Stafford’s death after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in April 2010.
She testified that she was the woman in the white jacket who lured the child away from the school that day at Rafferty’s urging. Court has never heard before Tuesday that Mcclintic may have actually gone into the school before the kidnapping.
Rafferty denies the girl had been raped, a fact that can’t be supported with DNA evidence.