To the Parole Board of Canada, May 2037:
Dear Tribunal members,
It is your task to decide whether Michael Rafferty should be granted parole after spending the last 25 years in prison for kidnapping, raping and murdering eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford. As you judge his request, please consider the perspective of people who lived in southern Ontario so long ago when these atrocities occurred. And after you have done so, please deny Rafferty’s plea for freedom.
We cannot say how successful Canada’s penal system will be in rehabilitating him. We hope that after the passage of a quarter of a century he will have admitted his crimes, apologized to the family of his victim as well as the general community, which he frightened and scandalized. Perhaps prison psychologists and counsellors will instill in him a basic sense of morality while treating his unquestionably depraved state of mind. We doubt this will be possible. To gaze into his blank, remorseless eyes after his arrest was to recognize a force both sinister and incorrigible.
Yet whatever progress the system and its professionals can achieve in this regard, we would submit that Rafferty can never be rehabilitated to the point at which he can safely and justly be released into open society.
The magnitude of his wrongdoing is simply too great to allow this to happen. Canada was right to abolish the death penalty decades ago. However, some transgressions of not only law but fundamental human morality demand the next most extreme punishment — the confinement of the guilty party in a penal institution until that individual dies.
Rafferty violated the most basic standards of decency upon which any civilized society is founded. Physically strong adults are responsible for protecting younger, weaker and more vulnerable members of the community. Yet on April 8, 2009, Rafferty, as a 28-year-old man, preyed on a defenceless child, depriving her of freedom, personal integrity and, ultimately, life itself. The lurid details of his actions require no repetition here. It should be sufficient to state that Tori Stafford endured great mental anguish and severe physical pain. Her suffering continued for hours, rather than minutes, while release came not through any act of human mercy but only death.
Though his crime was primarily directed toward this little girl, she was not his only victim. Her family experienced weeks of gnawing fear and dread, first while they did not know whether she was alive or dead and then later, for more than two further months, when they were deprived of the knowledge of where Rafferty had crudely concealed her body.
It is fortunate that we experience such nightmares with great rarity, perhaps once or so in a generation. But such obscene and monstrous wounds leave lasting scars. Ontario was never quite the same after the killing spree of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in the early 1990s.
It changed after Rafferty and his accomplice Terri-Lynne McClintic drove off with Tori Stafford on the first day the child had been allowed to walk home alone from her Woodstock school. Canada’s Amber Alert system was reviewed and improved after criticism that police had been too slow in announcing Tori’s disappearance. After video cameras near Tori’s school, a banking machine and hardware store helped convict Rafferty, the public became more accepting of how such technology can diminish personal privacy.
When you, the members of the parole board, hear Rafferty’s bid for liberty in 2037, he will be 56 with a significant life expectancy ahead of him.
Please remember that had Tori not encountered him that fateful day, she would in all probability be a young 33-year-old with most of life’s joys ahead of her.
Remember nothing the police or our courts could do could ever restore her. Remember that perfect justice in this case was never a possibility. And remember, if Rafferty speaks to you, that folklore tells us the devil lies with eloquence while cutting a fine figure. Do not trust him.
An editorial from the Waterloo, Ont., Region Record.