Michael Rafferty found guilty of first degree murder

Eight-year-old Victoria Stafford’s remains spent 103 days wrapped in garbage bags and buried under a pile of rocks in a secluded field far from home.

It took a jury just 10 hours to find Michael Rafferty equally guilty of her murder as his former lover.

Rafferty, 31, shut his eyes and stood motionless as he was convicted late Friday night of first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and kidnapping in the Woodstock, Ont. girl’s horrifying death.

Tori’s family burst into tears, clasped hands and breathed audible sighs of relief as it became clear that the same fate awaits Rafferty, now a convicted child killer, as Terri-Lynne McClintic, his partner in crime.

She pleaded guilty two years ago to first-degree murder, admitting she lured Tori away with the promise of seeing a dog and delivered the child to Rafferty for repeated sexual assaults, and has already started serving her life sentence. With Rafferty’s convictions, which Superior Court Judge Thomas Heeney said were “just and amply supported by the evidence,” he now joins McClintic in being sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

The jurors went to the judge with several questions about the sexual assault charge during their deliberations. It was alleged that Rafferty’s sexual gratification was the motive behind the whole murder, but the jury didn’t know there was evidence he sought out hours of child pornography videos and made dozens of searches for images of violent child rape.

But in the end they were satisfied all the same that even though the months of decomposition destroyed the hope of finding any scientific evidence of rape, the child who was stripped naked from the waist down before most of her ribs were fractured and her skull was shattered with blows from a hammer was first sexually assaulted.

No one will ever know whether the jury believed if Rafferty or McClintic wielded the hammer, whether they thought the abduction was random or targeted, or whether the sequence of events was planned all along — but the end result was the same for little Tori.

Whether Tori knew McClintic or she was lured away with talk of a dog, the eight-year-old with butterfly earrings and a skip in her step was still unwittingly led to her death on a sunny April day after school.

She vanished April 8, 2009, and her family spent six agonizing weeks wondering what could have happened to their bubbly little girl, until Rafferty and McClintic were charged and police announced they believed Tori was dead. It would be another two months before her remains were found and she could finally be brought home.

Tori’s father, Rodney Stafford, said after the verdicts that it was hard to contain himself in the emotionally charged courtroom, but it was a relief that this was how the past three years of his life came to an end.

“Happy, excitement, but at the same time there was a sense of loss because Tori’s not coming home,” he said. “But we got it, we got the justice.”

After Rafferty was led out of the courtroom members of Tori’s family hugged the investigators who dedicated countless hours to the case over the past three years.

“Tori was truly our inspiration as we moved through the past three years,” said lead detective Insp. Bill Renton, a former Ontario Provincial Police officer who is now with the Woodstock police service.

Rafferty’s lawyer Dirk Derstine acknowledged it was an uphill struggle for the defence.

“It was quite a strong case for the Crown,” said Derstine, who wouldn’t comment on the possibility of an appeal.

McClintic told the trial a horrifying story of a drug-addled couple abducting a young girl at random for the man’s sexual pleasure, then killing her with inconceivable brutality.

Rafferty used McClintic, no stranger to violence but also desperate to believe she had finally found a good man, as a pawn to do his perverse bidding, the Crown suggested.

An entirely different scenario was put forward by the defence, suggesting McClintic was completely in control that day, acting out her sickening torture fantasies. The defence suggested Rafferty had no idea what was going on, but the guilty verdict indicates the jury believed Rafferty is responsible for some, if not most, of what happened to Tori.

Whatever roles they each played, Rafferty’s conviction for first-degree murder means the jury found that in some way the two of them worked together to ensure Tori would never return home.

Based on the judge’s instructions, the jury either believed Rafferty killed Tori himself or McClintic killed her and Rafferty intentionally did something to help or encourage her. Both those scenarios could have also led to a second-degree murder conviction, if they jury didn’t think Rafferty sexually assaulted Tori or had a hand in her kidnapping. If either of those offences happen in the course of a killing, it is automatically a first-degree murder.

First-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence with no chance of applying for parole for 25 years.

The 10-week trial swung wildly from emotional testimony about Tori to intricate technical evidence to sensational glimpses into Rafferty’s busy social life. The trial began March 5 and the first witness was Jennifer Griffin-Murrell, Tori’s Grade 3 teacher, though she noted the teacher in her tended to call the child Victoria.

The young teacher wept as she described her happy-go-lucky student’s spunky personality and “mother hen” approach to the younger kids in the split Grade 2/3 class.

Tori spent her last day at her Woodstock school on April 8 using a computer to research plants, sitting through a brief time out for goofing around and getting her tights wet by jumping in puddles, Griffin-Murrell said. As the dismissal bell rang at 3:25 p.m. Tori ran back to class to grab the butterfly earrings her mother had lent her that morning and walked out of Oliver Stephens Public School one minute after her classmates.

“OK, hon, we’ll see you tomorrow,” Griffin-Murrell recalled telling Tori as she walked out of school for the last time.

Several police officers also took the stand early on in the trial, though their testimony was at times no less emotional. The investigation into Tori’s disappearance and death is believed to be the largest such investigation ever in Canada and hundreds of police officers worked around the clock.

Even knowing how unbelievably stacked the odds were against them — in cases such as Tori’s only two per cent of victims are found alive — police still held out hope. But the result they feared came when McClintic confessed, and one police officer was overcome with emotion in court when recounting how the investigation shifted from an abduction to a homicide.

Veteran officer Det. Staff Sgt. Jim Smyth, who obtained sex killer Russell Williams’ confession, had to pause to collect himself on the stand when he described discovering Tori’s remains.

McClintic testified relatively early in the trial, and though much of it was interrupted by various legal motions, the gut-churning impact of her story was no less. Her cross-examination also revealed a chilling side to the “bloodthirsty” young woman when Rafferty’s lawyer read out letter after letter McClintic had written to a jailhouse friend in which she details endless fantasies of torturing victims.

The jury was then given an emotional break with methodical evidence of cell tower signals and hair dye label packaging — intended to confirm details of McClintic’s story, including proving Rafferty bought McClintic hair dye so she could change her appearance.

Rafferty himself remained largely an enigma to the jury, as the only glimpse of his personality came toward the end of the trial with a long stream of former girlfriends and flings taking the stand. Twenty-two women from Rafferty’s past were called to testify about various things he said and
the state of his car, including 15 women he dated in the spring of 2009.

If the sheer volume of past girlfriends didn’t already shock the jury, testimony from the longest serving girlfriend certainly would have. Charity Spitzig, a mother of four, forked over $16,835 to Rafferty from December 2008 until May 2009, when he was arrested.

Though the Crown explained without the jury present that they had instructed Spitzig not to say where the money came from, she nevertheless testified that she was giving Rafferty the money she made working as an escort.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg of information the police had that puts Rafferty in a bad light. However, that was the only bit of it the jury actually heard.

Heeney ruled the search of Rafferty’s laptop unconstitutional, so jurors did not know there was evidence he had searched for “real underage rape,” “nude preteen,” and other queries suggestive of a sexual interest in children. They also did not know police found evidence Rafferty had downloaded “substantial” amounts of child pornography and snuff films including one with a title indicating it involved a child.

There was also a lot of evidence kept from the jury due to the belief it constituted “bad character” evidence because of the principle that just because someone is a bad person does not mean they committed the offence in question.

A woman Rafferty met online alleged in a police report that he drugged, choked and raped her, but he was not charged. A litany of past dates reported he had a penchant for sexual choking. Some even complained of his “disconcerting” behaviour toward their children, the Crown said.