A flawed mom’s heartbreak no less real
Tori’s mother tenderly recalls final moments with her daughter as she takes the stand at trial,
LONDON, ONT.— Bad things happen to the children of good parents, too.
From the outside looking in — and deeply inside, intimately inside, voyeuristically inside we have gone — Tara Mcdonald was not Mother of the Year to Tori Stafford.
This makes her terrible loss no less anguishing. It should make us no less pitying, either.
Mcdonald’s self-confessed shortcomings were on stark display in the courtroom here Wednesday.
She was a drug addict when 8year-old Tori went missing April 8, 2009.
She did not walk her Grade 3 child home from school, a distance of almost a kilometre, on that fateful day.
She waited some two hours before reporting her daughter missing to police — and even at that point, it was Mcdonald’s mom who went to the station.
Most tragically, it may have been Mcdonald who inadvertently brought Tori into the deranged orbit of the young woman who is serving a life sentence for the youngster’s murder — and her ex-boyfriend, Michael Rafferty, now on trial for first-degree murder, sexual assault and kidnapping.
That crucial intersection of victim and victimizers — one admitted, the other alleged and pleading not guilty — remains an unknown equation. These are early trial days and only a handful of witnesses have taken the stand so far. It is not clear, yet, if Tori was acquainted already with Terri-lynne Mcclintic on the afternoon she strolled away from school, apparently willingly, with the felon who has confessed to the crime, “Mystery Woman” abductor and child captured by surveillancecamera footage.
Mcdonald told court she had no knowledge of Tori ever having met Mcclintic previously. The girl had been street-proofed, cautioned notto go off with strangers. But Mcclintic was not a complete stranger to Mcdonald. They had met about two months before Tori’s abduction, when Mcdonald went to the “dilapidated” row house in Woodstock where Mcclintic resided with her mother. The purpose of that visit was for Mcdonald and her live-in boyfriend, James Goris, to illegally buy drugs, specifically Oxycontin, from Mcclintic’s mom. There were, in fact, purchases on two separate days from “Carol,” and Goris, Mcdonald admitted, wouldreturn “a few more times” for the same purpose. Mcdonald owned a shih tzu called Cosmo. That pet was Tori’s “bestest little friend,” Mcdonald testified. The child dressed him up in doll clothes and would give him “palm massages.” Carol had a couple of shih tzus as well, one a female named Precious. The women had discussed breeding their dogs, though nothing came of it. On her first visit to Carol’s home, Mcdonald had been introduced to Mcclintic. “She was leaving as we were coming in.” The second time, Mcclintic had just returned from making a phone call — “I don’t think they had a telephone (in the house)” — and came into the bedroom where Carol had taken Mcdonald, plopping down on the futon. “She was very, very under the influence,” Mcdonald said of Mcclintic. “I’m not even sureshe knows we were there that day.” It is possible, Mcdonald said under questioning from Crown attorney Brian Crockett, that Tori may have overheard discussions at home about the breeding plan and mention of the Mcclintic name. It’s not clear if Tori or her 11-yearold brother Daryn grasped their mother’s drug addiction, either. At the time of Tori’s vanishing, Mcdonald was a serious Oxycontin devotee, her drug of choice since 2005. “It makes you feel comfortable, happy, relaxed,” she explained. But it had become an “expensive habit.” Mcdonald had lost tons of weight, her health was failing and, for those reasons, she had already taken herself to a methadone clinic. “I wanted to clean up.” Crockett: “Were you able to eliminate use?” Mcdonald: “I slowed down ex- tensively but not completely. It’s extremely difficult.” Under the stress of Tori’s disappearance, Mcdonald cranked up her Hillbilly Heroin intake again. She quickly came up to a whopping 80 milligrams a day and was routinely zonked during her daily “one o’clocks” — as she’d termed the media scrums that, if nothing else, kept the Tori story in the public eye. In that awful time — 103 days before Tori’s decomposing remains were discovered in a garbage bag buried in a pile of rocks 200 kilometres away — Mcdonald was herself a suspect and widely crucified by the media. Many of the rumours then bruited about the woman were confirmed in her courtroom testimony: the OxyContin, the drug debt her boyfriend had accrued, with a further detail revealed on the stand: “He did rip somebody off for Oxycontin, 20 or 30 pills,” $400 owed to dealers. There had been no ransom demands, however, nothing to link the drug debt with Tori’s abduction. On the day Tori went missing, Mcdonald had gone to the Salvation Army for food supplies, visited her grandfather in a nearby retirement home and then returned to the house the family had moved into only a week earlier. At their previous address, Tori’s school was practically next door; Mcdonald could see her children walking through the school’sfront door. That was no longer possible. But Daryn walked his sister to and from school. On this day, he’d accompanied another child home, a routine arrangement. When he swung back by the school to pick up Tori, she wasn’t there. “Whose idea was it that they would walk home (alone)?” asked Rafferty’s lawyer, Dirk Derstine, in his cross-examination. Mcdonald: “Mine.” Mcdonald’s mother had driven the children to school that morning but didn’t pick them up when class let out. Derstine emphasized that point.
“Are you sure you didn’t tell your mother that she didn’t need to drive them home?” Possibly, Mcdonald said. Derstine implied that Mcdonald had been lax, insufficiently alarmed when Tori failed to return from school at the regular time of 3:45 p.m. Mcdonald, her mother and Daryn had spent the next two hours or so scouring the neighbourhood for Tori. Mcdonald also called around to the parents of Tori’s friends. Then Mcdonald returned to the house, hoping Tori would phone or show up, while her mother, at about 5:45 p.m., went to the police station.
Derstine: “Do you remember telling your mother not to go to the police?”
Mcdonald: “I thought it was a little premature. I wanted to look for her first.”
Earlier, Mcdonald was emphatic in denying she’d been reluctant to involve police — the inference being that she was alarmed her drug use would be exposed.
On the stand, Mcdonald, 33, did not weep. She was poised. She was forthright. She tenderly recalled her final moments with Tori — allowing the child to borrow her butterfly earrings that morning, dabbing a bit of gloss on the youngster’s lips, some blusher on her cheeks.
This mother — who married at 17 — continues to confound us. She is profoundly flawed, but clean of drugs for the past six months.
Mcdonald testified for less than an hour; was trailed by a horde of reporters and TV cameras when she went outside afterwards for a cigarette.
Yet many of us will presume to know her. And, no doubt, judge her. Rosie Dimanno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.