The brother of convicted child-killer Terri-Lynne McClintic says the only reason his sister is in a healing lodge is because she manipulated the corrections system.
“She is no more Indigenous than I am green from the planet Mars,” he said in an exclusive interview with Global News.
READ MORE: Rallies planned in Ottawa and Woodstock protesting McClintic transfer
McClintic’s brother said his sister is trying to make her life easier while serving her sentence for the brutal murder of eight-year-old Tori Stafford in 2009, and that he believes she should be removed from Saskatchewan’s Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge and sent to a narrow cell in a maximum security prison.
“With what I know about Terri-Lynne, Terri-Lynne is taking a bed away from somebody that could benefit from it.”
McClintic’s brother spoke to Global News on the condition of anonymity.
He carries a heavy secret: very few people in his life know about his connection to one of Canada’s most notorious killers.
He is angry about the decision to send McClintic to the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Maple Creek, Sask., citing his sister’s heinous crime and the fact she assaulted another inmate since beginning her sentence.
“To be given access and rights to go to somewhere that for all intents and purposes has minimum security, and no fences, where there are freaking children?”
“Whoever made that decision and allowed that to happen should be absolutely fired.”
The Correctional Service Canada (CSC) allows offenders to self-identify as Indigenous without needing to prove their claim.
That’s exactly what he says McClintic has done, and he called her an expert manipulator.
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READ MORE: Terri-Lynne McClintic could try for early release in 6 years — but that doesn’t mean she’ll get it
Outrage over the transfer was initially sparked by Tori Stafford’s father Rodney and spread all the way to the House of Commons.
As a result, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale ordered a review of the decision by CSC’s commissioner, but the Liberals voted down a Conservative motion to reverse the transfer outright.
Global News asked CSC as well as Goodale’s office for an update on when the review’s results will come, specifically whether the time frame would be days, weeks or months from now.
A spokesperson for CSC would not say, but called the file “a priority.”
READ MORE: Scheer urges policy change to stop ‘horrific’ offenders like McClintic from going to healing lodges
While her brother said healing lodges can be beneficial, McClintic, he said, does not belong in one.
“As a convicted murderer your day to day life should be spent in your five-by-ten cell looking at your four walls, your ‘hots and a cot,’ and that’s it,” he said.
“You don’t deserve anything else. You deserve bread and water and to suffer. To suffer like Tori’s parents have suffered. Like her family has suffered. Like Tori has suffered.”
Growing up with Terri-Lynne McClintic
His relationship with the woman he calls his sister is not traditional: the two share no blood.
Terri-Lynne McClintic was born to a stripper who then passed her off to a fellow stripper and friend named Carol McClintic.
A second family member also told Global News no one knows who Terri-Lynne’s father was.
The man Global News interviewed is one of Carol’s two biological children.
“Terri-Lynne, for all intents and purposes, is my sister,” he said. “She was adopted by my biological mother, she grew up in my biological mother’s house. I’ve spent time, many, many, many years with her.”
READ MORE: Healing lodges — it’s not whether they work, but how well, research shows
They also spent years apart: he spent many years living with Carol’s sister, his aunt, whom he refers to as his mother — the woman who raised him.
When he and Terri-Lynne were both under Carol’s roof, they lived in what he described as “an incredibly harmful environment.”
Over the years, Carol and Terri-Lynne moved to several places across Ontario, at times with her brother, as well, and he says the various homes were full of alcohol, drugs and a “parade of men.”
There was also abuse — verbal, mental and, he suspects, physical and sexual abuse towards Terri-Lynne from visitors in the home.
“As a child it’s never something you should have to ask your parent to do, but Carol was never a parent.”
He cites his own last name as an example of the dysfunction in that household. It’s not Carol’s last name, and it’s not his biological father’s – he doesn’t know who that is. It’s the last name of the man Carol happened to be sleeping with when he was born.
WATCH: Scheer to force vote condemning child killer’s relocation
He says he and his aunt both called authorities several times to intervene into Terri-Lynne’s living situation, but nothing changed.
Instead, he says, he focused on being a positive big brother figure and a “safety blanket” to the girl 11 years his junior.
“I wanted to be there for her because I knew she had no one else.”
In his happiest memory of his sister, three-year-old McClintic spread raw eggs and Rice Krispies across the living room early one Saturday morning.
“She was walking out of the kitchen with a big thing of milk and I looked at her and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I was just absolutely gob smacked. And she looks at me in the cutest little voice and she says, ‘making breakfast.’”
A normal, happy memory — a long way off from an 18-year-old who abducted Tori Stafford after school and murdered her with a claw hammer to the head after she was sexually assaulted by Michael Rafferty, who was McClintic’s boyfriend at the time and is also serving a life sentence for the murder.
McClintic started smoking when she was eight or nine, according to her brother.
Alcohol, drugs, fist fights and trouble with the law followed.
And during the trial, court heart McClintic once microwaved her dog.
His last conversation with Terri-Lynne McClintic
The last time her brother saw Terri-Lynne, he drove up to visit the then-16-year-old at their home in MacTier, Ont.
This was about 10 years ago — two years before McClintic murdered Tori Stafford.
Her brother found her by a bonfire, “with a beer in her hand and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth.”
“Immediately I went big brother and I told her in no uncertain circumstances that she was going to get into the car immediately and that I was taking her home.”
WATCH: Terri-Lynne McClintic’s brother recalls the last time he saw her
By then, he was an adult. He’d joined the Canadian Forces.
He says he offered Terri-Lynne to come and live with him, but he was clear she needed to attend school, and that there would be rules.
She declined.
He spent the night at Carol’s home in a reclining chair. He barred a 16-year-old boy who’d shown up from sleeping in his sister’s room. Instead, the teen slept at the foot of the recliner.
“I woke up probably about 5:30 in the morning…that young boy was still curled up on the floor,” he remembers.
“But Carol was half naked on the couch…all of her glory exposed to the world. And the taste of disgust in my mouth was just…I opened my sister’s door and I gave her a kiss on the head and I told her I had to leave and I left.”
That was the last time he spoke to Terri-Lynne. The next time he saw her was on the news, being led into court in handcuffs.
When he thinks about everything that happened over the ensuing decade, he feels both shame and disgust.
“I’m disgusted with the fact that I’m not blood related, but I’m related to that. I’m disgusted with myself that I didn’t do more. I’m upset that I couldn’t do more.”
WATCH: Terri-Lynne McClintic’s brother on the possibility of her rehabilitation
McClintic’s brother tells Global News rehabilitation for his sister is impossible “without having her psyche torn down and rebuilt.”
And he doesn’t think the Indigenous healing path is a helpful one for her.
“A lot of it has to do with things like culture and to understand what it is to be Indigenous, and I don’t believe Terri-Lynne has that at heart.”
He says he has no plans to reach out to his sister, by mail, phone or visit, because he says he doesn’t value anything she’d have to say.
Yet a part of him itches to call her out on what he sees as her manipulative behavior.
“I know I’m never going to get a straight answer. I know if I were to ask her, ‘why are you lying about being Indigenous?’ she wouldn’t come out and tell me,” he said.
“On the other hand, if I said to her, ‘I know you’re gaming the system, I know you’re full of it and you will be caught,’ her body language and her response will be all I need to know,” he added, “but at the same point in time, I don’t want to be in the same room as her. I’m disgusted.”
“As far as I’m concerned, my sister is dead.”
He sighs.
“She should be. She should be for what she’s done.”
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