The 18,000-km trek for Tori
Search ‘1.5 times around the moon,’ court told
LONDON, ONT.— The story of the largest police search in the history of Ontario, possibly even Canada, unfolded in a courtroom on Wednesday. It was the search for Tori Stafford. It included divers, canine units, aerial searches and officers from at least a half-dozen police forces. It involved scouring landfills, rock piles, waterways and highways. It was larger than the Bandidos case, larger than the double-homicide Regiers case in Huron County.
As Sgt. James Stirling, coordinator of OPP’S Emergency and Rescue Team, told the court on Wednesday, officers covered more than 18,000 kilometres from April 17 to midJuly. “They went one and a half times around the moon,” he said.
(The circumference of the moon is actually 10,800 kilometres.)
But Stirling said the chances of finding her alive were negligible from the start of his involvement, nine days after she went missing.
The 8-year-old was taken April 8, 2009, while walking home from school in Woodstock. Terri-lynne Mcclintic and Michael Rafferty, then lovers, were arrested a month later and charged with murder.
Tori’s body was found under a pile of rocks July 19, more than three months later. The site was seven kilometres from the search grid.
Mcclintic pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in April 2010.
Rafferty’s trial began just last month, on March 5. Over the course of this trial, many references have been made to the scope of the search. The magnitude became clearer on Wednesday when Stirling gave an overview to the jury.
The search was first classified as an abduction and started in the Woodstock area where she was last seen, said Stirling. It soon expanded to include landfills and waterways. One of the places of interest was the Salford Landfill site near Woodstock where at least 14 ERT officers searched through garbage from April 20 to May 7.
After 18 days, they had searched through 366 truckloads, or 830 tonnes of garbage.
The search turned into a homicide investigation after May 19, as police scoured for the site where Tori’s body had been buried, searching for discarded pieces of her clothing, a claw-hammer, the back seat of a 2003 Honda Civic, and clothing worn by Mcclintic and Rafferty.
(When Mcclintic confessed, she told investigators that she and Rafferty had disposed of those objects.)
ERT officers returned to the landfill on May 28 and 29 to search for the car seat. Stirling said several were located but not the one that they were looking for. They also visited the Waterloo landfill site but assessed there was too much gar- bage to search through. Divers searched 11 waterways around Woodstock and Guelph; at least 70 rock piles north of Guelph were checked; officers traversed more than 950 kilometres in a helicopter, Stirling said. Members of ERT also walked along 51 kilometres of the westbound Hwy. 401 lanes to look for pieces of foam tossed out from a moving car the day Tori was killed. They did not find any evidence. Officers had searched north of Guelph as far as Arthur Township, but never made it to Mount Forest where Tori’s body was finally found under a rock pile in a secluded laneway on July 19, 2009. After her body was found, ERT officers scoured that site for the claw-hammer used to kill Tori, gar- bage bags, shopping bags, shopping receipts and a blue-folding knife. Just as the homicide investigation had begun on May19, 2009, Rafferty was being arrested in Woodstock. OPP’S Det.-sgt. Walter Lima told the jury that he got a phone call soon after Mcclintic’s confession asking him to go to Tennyson St. where Rafferty lived with his mother. Lima arrived there at 6:49 p.m. and did not see Rafferty’s blue Honda Civic parked in the driveway. It was soon spotted southbound on Cedar St. near Parkinson Rd. Officers followed Rafferty to the parking lot of Quality Inn Hotel and Goodlife Fitness gym at Juliana Dr. where Rafferty parked in the northeast lot, got out of the car, took some plastic bags from the trunk, and got into a nearby Honda Accord. Lima parked his vehicle behind the Accord, walked to the passenger side and told Rafferty that he was under arrest for the abduction of Tori Stafford. It was 7:37 p.m. Rafferty was taken to the Woodstock police station and charged with abduction and murder.