After Victoria (Tori) Stafford was abducted on April 8 from her Woodstock hometown, her accused killers were captured together in a car by a surveillance camera located in a nearby Southwestern Ontario city.
Terri-Lynne McClintic, the 18-year-old so fully co-operating with police she accompanied Ontario Provincial Police detectives on a helicopter search of a rural area near Guelph yesterday, and her 28-year-old boyfriend Michael Thomas Rafferty, are apparently visible in the surveillance photograph, The Globe and Mail has learned.
The two were taken into custody Tuesday night after Ms. McClintic, then in her second interview with detectives, made a full statement to police. The surveillance video evidence, as well as the location of the area being searched, are considered corroborative of some of the details in her statement.
It is alleged that Ms. McClintic was loitering outside Oliver Stephens Public School that day, where Tori was in Grade 3, as the dismissal bell rang.
The teenager allegedly was on a specific mission to grab a child for Mr. Rafferty, with Tori being simply the first available youngster she spotted.
Ms. McClintic is alleged to have led the little girl to her boyfriend, who was waiting nearby in the same car shortly afterwards caught on the videotape.
The vehicle is now in police hands and will be subjected to a painstaking search, with officers looking for any forensic evidence – from hair to fibres to DNA – of Tori's presence.
Ms. McClintic has told police that she walked a distance away from the car when Mr. Rafferty allegedly assaulted the little girl.
But if proved in court, the allegations that this young woman actively helped in obtaining a child victim for her boyfriend for the purpose of sexual assault would place her in one of the rarest of categories, the so-called “male-coerced or male-accompanied” female sexual offender.
A recent study of 19 convicted female sex offenders done by the Correctional Service of Canada revealed they made up just 3 per cent of the total number of female offenders.
The vast majority of these women – 16 of 19 – had male co-offenders, and 14 of them committed their offence or offences with the men – thus the “male-coerced or male-accompanied' moniker. Most of the involved men were their husbands or lovers, with four being described as male-coerced (where the male partner forces the women to take part) and five falling into the “male-accompanied” category, which researchers say usually means they took a more active role in the assaults on the victims.
But overwhelmingly, most female sex offenders, including those who work with a male partner, tend to assault their own children or those with whom they are well acquainted.
Only four of the 19 women had assaulted strangers or acquaintances – the very category into which, if the allegations against Ms. McClintic are proved, the teenager would fall.
Though Ontario Provincial Police Detective-Inspector Bill Renton earlier this week would say only that there was some connection between Tori's mother, Tara McDonald, and Ms. McClintic, The Globe has learned that it was likely born of the women's shared use of OxyContin, the prescription painkiller known as hillbilly heroin. Ms. McDonald recently has admitted she was addicted to the drug, and Ms. McClintic was also allegedly a heavy user.
But the women weren't friends, merely acquaintances, their connection fleeting, so the crime is considered a random or stranger attack, the allegation that Ms. McClintic was simply on the hunt for an available, vulnerable child to bring to Mr. Rafferty.
Tori Stafford was certainly that: At 4-foot-5, only 62 pounds, she was still tiny enough to fit comfortably into the lap of her maternal grandmother, Linda Winters, when the two cuddled under a purple blanket in Ms. Winters's favourite chair.
And while Ms. McDonald always described her daughter as a spunky little girl who would be a handful for anyone trying to do her harm, and though Ms. Winters said she'd been “programmed” not to go with strangers, Tori was still just a child – a bright, feisty one to be sure, but a child.
Much was made, particularly in the early weeks of her disappearance, of the fact that Tori had appeared comfortable with the mystery woman with the long, dark hair and puffy, white jacket who led her away that day. The two had been captured in a fuzzy surveillance video from a camera located at the high school adjacent to Tori's school.
In fact, even the local Oxford Community Police appeared reluctant to formally label the case an abduction, in part because Tori's relatives agreed that it appeared the little girl wasn't struggling with the mysterious woman, but rather going willingly, the inference that she must have known the woman quickly taking hold in the public imagination.
The disappearance was officially called an abduction only after the OPP took the helm.
Whether called a disappearance or an abduction, the investigation proceeded quickly once Tori was reported missing to the Oxford police by Ms. Winters more than two hours after school let out. The name didn't affect the way police proceeded.
But there was false comfort and magical thinking in the notion that because the child appeared at ease on the videotape meant that she probably had been taken by someone she knew.
She was a little bit of a girl, smart as a whip for her age, but she was only 8, her ninth birthday, the one she will not see, in July. She could have been street-proofed a thousand times, warned about strangers, and been the sauciest child in the world. She was still just 8.
As the child killer Michael Briere, the quiet computer developer who in 2003 snatched 10-year-old Holly Jones off a street near her Toronto home and had her already dismembered and her body mostly disposed of by the time anyone even realized she was missing, told police at the end of his confession, when asked if he had anything else to say: “Tell parents to tell the children to scream.”
That was Mr. Briere's helpful hint for moms and dads everywhere, though the shock of a strong arm around the throat precludes most adults from screaming, let alone a child. Children can be easily overpowered, as Holly was, but just as easily tricked and charmed and fooled and sweet-talked. They trus t .
Parents would be better off praying for luck, that their child is lucky, not the one who catches the wrong eye of the wrong human being on the wrong day and is, poof, gone – or hit by the other sort of lightning, nature's equivalent.
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