Tory Has Justice...

Hard to say; by whose reckoning?  A trusting, playful, happy eight-year-old child for whom life was so obviously a fascinating enterprise she sought with huge gusto, curious about every facet of what experience could teach her, was, by cruel fate, halted in her exploration of life at that very age.  She will never be nine, ten, eleven years of age.  She will never experience the teen-age years, becoming an adult, seeing her future spread before her.

Her brief life so crammed full of curiosity and engagement with opportunities was simply that; brief.  On the very last day of her life she experienced more pain and anguish than most people are forced to feel throughout all the years of a well-lived and lengthy life experience.  She lost her trust in those she did not really know, and she knew what it felt like to be desperate for intervention, for something to happen to stuff the nightmare that was imposed upon her back into the creepy dark place it came from.

But there was no rescue, and she kept suffering, her pleas for mercy and cessation ignored by the man who had planned his own sick venture into a different kind of experience.  She was bludgeoned to death by the woman who said during her trial that she had been looking "for a good man", and obviously felt she had found that good man in Michael Rafferty. 

In the end, the testimony of his assistant, Terri-Lynne McClintic ensured a jury would find him guilty of murder. Child rapist Rafferty's ex-girlfriend did not, after all, find the "good man" she was looking for.  But in an attempt to ingratiate herself with him regardless, she set out to abduct a grade three child outside her elementary school in Woodstock, Ontario, on April 8, 2009.

"I told her I had a Shih Tzu.  She told me she had one, too.  I asked her if she wanted to see mine, and she said yeah, and that's how she ended up coming back to the vehicle... I opened the back door to show her the dog that wasn't there."

The dog was not there, the not-there dog that drew the little girl to accompany the woman whom she might have seen before, briefly, in the company of her own mother.  No dog was there to impress and entertain Victoria Stafford, the little girl intoxicated with life's potentials.  What awaited her there, was a malevolence so stark and brutal it takes the breath of decency away.

Two years ago Terri-Lynne McClintic unexpectedly declared herself to be guilty in the first-degree murder of Tori Stafford.  She was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.  She claimed that it was she who had taken a hammer and struck the repeated, deathly blows that had taken the child's life.  Of course this was after the little girl's trust and enthusiasm for life had already been extinguished by her partner, Michael Rafferty.

"When I turned to the vehicle, when I saw what was going on, all I saw was myself when I was that age and all the anger and hate and rage that I had ... that I built up towards myself came boiling out of me", she testified at the just-concluded trial that delivered the verdict of guilty to Michael Rafferty's unspeakable crime. 

The psychiatrically unsophisticated might ask themselves, why then not use the hammer to express that anger on Rafferty himself, the monster that had aroused that wrath?  Why the choice of expressing rage against a child who had already suffered monumentally?

The jury that found for a verdict of guilt in charges of first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and kidnapping heard, over the inexpressibly miserable space of ten weeks that the trial took, little bits of the little girl's character.  The nine women and three men heard this description from Tori Stafford's mother:  "She'd be outside in a dress, picking up worms and bugs, getting dirty and jumping in puddles."

The young woman who was looking for love in the most sterile of places, from a psychopath with an interest in child pornography, snuff films, "real underage rape" necrophilia, incest and deviant sex, lent herself to his enterprise to learn first-hand what "real underage rape" was like.  "I could hear her calling my name.  T, T, please don't let him do it again!" she testified at the trial.

An autopsy revealed that the little girl with the impish smile died from multiple blows to the skull, presumed caused by a hammer.  She had 16 broken ribs, and suffered a 15-centimetre cut to her liver.  To claim also that her heart was broken is rather theatrical and certainly not in accord with what a medical forensic autopsy would reveal