Horror in an ordinary day
Crown opens case with shocking details of Tori Stafford’s death
LONDON, ONT.— A day of many firsts would also be her last — with unspeakable things in between.
Eight-year-old Victoria Stafford — Tori — was bubbling with excitement about her newly decorated bedroom, intending to show it off when friends came over after school, little girls invited to watch High School Musical III on DVD.
Always a mini fashionista, she’d dressed up that morning with special care in a Hannah Montana top, completing her outfit with butterfly earrings borrowed from her mom.
It was to be — that April 8, 2009 — the first time that Tori would be allowed to walk home from Oliver Stephens Public School in Woodstock by herself, while brother Daryn returned other youngsters to their parents, as was his routine arrangement.
Lining up outside her classroom, waiting for the let-out bell to ring, Tori suddenly realized she’d left those special earrings inside her desk and was allowed to quickly scoot back to retrieve them.
Then, enjoying this new sensation of independence, the child headed for home. She never made it. She barely got half a block away. One hundred and three days later, Tori’s badly decomposed remains were found down a distant country lane, at the base of an evergreen tree, her violated body stuffed into a green garbage bag, large rocks piled on top. She was still wearing her Hannah Montana T-shirt and those butterfly earrings but was naked from the waist down.
Tori — bright-eyed beauty, chatterbox, beloved daughter and sister — had suffered, and emphasize that, suffered, blunt impact trauma to the torso sufficient to have caused laceration of her liver and several fractured ribs. She’d been, as a forensic pathologist would later conclude, killed by repeated hammer blows to the head. The pounding to torso, to chest, had likely come first.
“These injuries were almost certainly caused before the fatal hammer blows were delivered,” Crown Attorney Kevin Gowdey told a hushed courtroom here. “On their own, these injuries were fatal.” But someone — or more than one person — inflicted great pain on this small, slight, cheerful child.
Michael Thomas Rafferty is charged with first-degree murder, abduction and sexual assault in the trial that began Monday with the prosecution’s opening address: an outline of what the jury of nine women and three men is expected to hear in the coming weeks.
The defendant has pleaded not guilty. His girlfriend at the time, Terri-lynne Mcclintic, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on April 30, 2010. She was sentenced to automatic life in prison and is anticipated to be the Crown’s key witness against Rafferty, 31.
The grotesque details that were read into the record as an agreed statement of facts at Mcclintic’s trial were frozen in the judicial bell jar of a publication ban, pending this proceeding. Only a hint of what Tori allegedly endured was revealed to the jury in an opening that was peculiarly stripped of drama. The jurors were clearly attentive but there were no rapt faces. Sitting in the dock, wearing a slate pinstriped suit, white shirt and striped tie, his hair modestly spiked into an Ed Grimley quiff and heavier, squatter than he’d looked in earlier court appearances, Rafferty showed no emotion.
On the afternoon that Tori disappeared, she was noticed by parents picking up their own kids, the child chatting with a woman wearing a white parka, dark pants and running shoes, hair pulled back in a ponytail. That final image of Tori, calmly walking away with her mysterious companion, in broad daylight, was also captured by surveillance cameras outside a high school next door. When Tori failed to make it home, reported missing by her mom, Tara Mcdonald, just after 6 p.m., that video footage would be seized by police and publicized. Who was the Mystery Woman? As photographs of Mcclintic and Rafferty were projected on courtroom monitors, Gowdey intoned: “This little girl was taken — together by this woman and by this man. Together they took Tori in Michael Rafferty’s car, a long way from her school, from her family.”
A little girl’s life had tragically intersected that afternoon with a pair of alleged sex killers.
Those who spotted Tori in those crucial minutes saw nothing amiss; just a kid strolling along with an adult woman, surely a family member or friend. Mcclintic was no friend. Crossing the street, Tori got into a Honda Civic in the parking lot of a retirement home. Rafferty, Gowdey said, had been sitting there, waiting. The car drove off and some of its passengers’ movements, court was told, could later be tracked via closed circuit cameras and cellphone calls bouncing off transmitters. “Technology,” said Gowdey, “can follow us through ordinary days . . . and extraordinary days.”
At 3.20 p.m., the Civic was caught on a camera at a nearby Esso station. By 4.30 it was in Guelph where Rafferty went into a woman’s house, allegedly to buy Percocet pills — while Mcclintic remained in the vehicle. Tori was “hidden from sight.”
Half an hour later, the car pulled up at the Home Depot on the north side of Guelph. Rafferty went into the gas station and withdrew cash from an ATM — that’s on video. After then driving the car closer to the store, Rafferty stayed in the Civic, said Gowdey, while Mcclintic went inside. She bought garbage bags and picked out a claw ham- mer, paying for her purchases with $40 at a self-serve checkout. The surveillance camera trail ends there, with Mcclintic placing her purchases in the Civic’s trunk. The car would then wind its way, said Gowdey, into the northern part of Wellington County, well north of Guelph, down a gravel road off 6th Concession North roadway near Mount Forest. Despite one of the most massive police searches in the province’s history — 900 cops involved — Tori’s body would not be found until July 19th. Police had obtained a court order to retrieve phone records from Rafferty’s BlackBerry, court heard. OPP discovered that Rafferty had used his BlackBerry to check voice mail at 7:47 p.m., April 8, with that call pinging off a cell tower near Mount Forest. On April 12, Mcclintic was arrested at a house in Woodstock where she lived with her mother on an unrelated outstanding warrant. She’d been identified as the “Mystery Woman’’ by several sources. Rafferty wasn’t even on the police radar at that point but investigators began scrutinizing his connection to Mcclintic after discovering they’d phoned each other regularly during that month. The communication continued even after Mcclintic was taken into custody, with regular phone contact between Rafferty and Mcclintic, from April 12 to May 15, while she was at the Genest Detention Centre in London. Rafferty was listed as Mcclintic’s “boyfriend” at the facility and had been approved by staff for visits. There is videotape, said Gowdey, of Rafferty with Mcclintic at Genest. On May 19, Mcclintic gave a “cautioned statement” to police, which means that its contents could be used against her. “During a long statement that began with her denials, Mcclintic ultimately admitted she was the female in the white jacket walking with Tori,” on the day the girl vanished. “She gave details of Tori’s kidnapping, including the tactics that they used to lure Tori to Rafferty’s vehicle.’’ A subsequent search of Mcclintic’s home would turn up a box of hair dye purchased April 11 — days after the “Mystery Woman” video had been publicized around the world. Police also found a journal which, said Gowdey, “you may conclude is the script for what Terri-lynne Mcclintic should say should the police ever come to her and accuse her of being the woman in the white jacket.” Mcclintic, charged with murder, provided a drawing of the area where the killing allegedly occurred; she also accompanied police, by cruiser and by helicopter, in trying to locate that site. Meanwhile, police seized Rafferty’s Honda Civic, which had been roughly painted over black, its back seat removed. Forensic biologists, however, were able to detect blood evidence on a rear passenger door’s rubber moulding. In forensic lingo, “Victoria Stafford cannot be excluded” as the source of the DNA retrieved from that blood swab; the probability of a randomly selected individual unrelated to Tori would coincidentally share that DNA profile “is estimated to be 1 in 28 billion,” said Gowdey. Similar DNA from blood was found as well on the bottom of a gym bag. Rafferty was arrested on May 19. He’d spent the previous days allegedly looking to rent a car and contacting auto wreckers. And all the time police searched, the public searched, her mother held daily media scrums outside the house, Tori was mouldering in a slapdash, lonesome grave. What was done to this child? The prosecution says Tori was pummelled, sexually assaulted, slain and crudely buried, and that it was a crime allegedly committed in tandem, the specifically who did specifically what irrelevant. “Ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the trial you are going to consider what Michael Rafferty and Terri-lynne Mcclintic did individually and what they did together to bring about the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of Victoria Elizabeth Stafford. In the end, it is not necessary or essential that you determine exactly who did what. Which of the two delivered the hammer blows to the skull or who inflicted the trauma to Tori’s body, that lacerated her liver, broke her ribs. “Deciding that is not your task. Your task will be to decide whether they acted together when they picked up Tori and took her away from her school, whether they acted together when they took Tori to Guelph, whether they acted together when . . . (they) bought the garbage bags and the hammer, whether they acted together when they took Tori to an isolated location where all of her clothing was removed other than her T-shirt, whether they acted together to bring about sexual assault on Tori, whether they acted together when Tori was killed, when she was placed in a garbage bag, and when heavy rocks were placed on top of her.” Gowdey had said earlier: “This trial will travel down a long road.” That dreadful journey has only just begun.