Watch video above: Marking the fifth anniversary of Tori Stafford’s disappearance. Mark Carcasole reports.
TORONTO – Five years ago Tuesday, eight-year-old Victoria Stafford disappeared while walking home from her Woodstock elementary school.
Rodney Stafford was at his daughter’s grave this week.
“It’s hard,” he said.
But as difficult as it is, Stafford says he is trying to move on and keep himself from endlessly reliving the day his daughter disappeared.
“I’m welling up on the inside because I want to be out with everybody later, but I have a family I have to support. So I can’t allow something from five years ago to continue haunting me the way it has,” he said.
Tori Stafford was kidnapped by Michael Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic on April 8, 2009 as she walked home from Oliver Stephens Public School in Woodstock, Ont. It was her first day walking home by herself and McClintic later admitted that she persuaded the young girl to get in the car with her and Rafferty by offering to show her their dog.
Read More: A timeline of the Victoria Stafford investigation
Rafferty then drove from Woodstock to Guelph where they stopped at a Home Depot so McClintic could buy a hammer and garbage bags. The two adults then drove Stafford to a secluded piece of land outside of Mount Forest where Rafferty sexually assaulted Stafford, killed her and the two buried under a pile of rocks. Police didn’t find her body until July 19.
Amber Alert altered
There was no Amber Alert called in the hours after Stafford disappeared. Rod Freeman, the Chief of the Woodstock Police Service, said they tried but the disappearance didn’t meet the stringent criteria necessary for the alert.
“The evening that the investigation began, on April 8, sometime around 10 or 11 p.m. in the evening, my inspector at the time had contacted the OPP asking if our investigation qualified for the amber alert program, and it was determined at that point, after two telephone calls, that it didn’t,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
At the time, Amber Alerts could only be triggered when three criteria had been met:
- A person under the age of 18 had been abducted.
- The child is considered to be in danger of serious harm.
- Have descriptive information of a suspect, the vehicle or the child.
In Stafford’s case, she was considered a missing person for almost a week into the investigation.
Watch video: Global’s 16×9 presents a Road to Murder.
The Stafford disappearance sparked a provincial review of the program which eventually expanded the parameters for calling an Amber Alert.
“In hindsight, one of the adjustments that came about is that the parameters of the amber alert program were expanded by the Ontario Provincial Police,” Freeman said.
Instead of a confirmed child abduction, there only has to be “a suspected or believed child abduction,” according to Sgt. Steve Montpetit, OPP Amber Alert Coordinator. Rather than a confirmed threat of serious bodily harm or death of the child, police only need to believe or suspect the child could be in danger.
Montpetit also noted there was some confusion as to what was needed of the last three criteria (suspect, victim or vehicle description). He noted that the parameters have been changed to specify that only one of those three is needed now.
If the same situation were to occur now, an Amber Alert can be triggered.
But Rodney Stafford isn’t sure that would have helped.
“If they had of put out an amber alert right after she had been declared missing, shortly after 5 or whatever when her mom was starting to get really worried, if an amber alert had been issued then maybe they would have seen her in Guelph at the home depot. But I don’t know. It’s hard to say,” he said.
Conviction and appeal
Both McClintic and Rafferty were sentenced to life in prison for their roles in Stafford’s kidnapping, sexual assault and murder. Rafferty is appealing the conviction. His lawyer refused to be interviewed for this story but said in an email that the appeal is going forward.
And Rafferty will be receiving public funding for his appeal.
“I’m back in the workforce and I am paying into the taxes and my taxes, I’m helping fund this man’s appeal but yet I’ve lost my daughter, so I have to help him get out of the circumstance he put himself in,” Stafford said. “It’s a little hard to deal with. It’s making me angrier.”
Rafferty is expected to argue in his eventual appeal that the jury failed to consider whether he might have been only an accessory after the fact to Stafford’s murder rather than a prime instigator. McClintic is not appealing her conviction.
“There’s no way of denying it whether he swung the hammer or not, he was still there, there was multiple times he could have released her, there’s many different things that could have changed the outcome of that day, but he opted not to help,” Stafford said.
– With files from Mark Carcasole
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