LONDON, Ont. — A police video showing a tearful Terri-Lynne McClintic saying she stood watching, frozen as her boyfriend sexually assaulted and killed eight-year-old Victoria Stafford was shown Wednesday to a jury that’s been told it can now treat it as evidence.
WARNING: Graphic details from this court case may disturb some readers.
The videotaped interview from May 24, 2009 — days after she and boyfriend Michael Rafferty were charged in the death of the Grade 3 student — provides a very different account of who killed Tori from McClintic’s testimony in court.
In the interview she says Rafferty raped Tori repeatedly then killed her.
But in court last week McClintic said all the details about Tori’s death that she had previously described — including the ones that formed the basis of her guilty plea to first-degree murder — were accurate, except that it was she, not Rafferty, who wielded the hammer.
She just snapped, she said, referencing her own childhood traumas, and killed Tori after the alleged sexual assaults. At the time of the May 24 interview she didn’t want to believe she was capable of murder, McClintic has testified as explanation for her changed story.
McClintic began testifying last week at Rafferty’s trial. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and kidnapping. The jury was shown excerpts of McClintic’s police interview earlier, but at the time Superior Court Judge Thomas Heeney told them they couldn’t use it as evidence in the trial, only to assess McClintic’s credibility.
Heeney told the jury Wednesday that he made a ruling that the video statement falls under an exception to the traditional rule about prior inconsistent statements, and they can now consider it as evidence in finding the facts of the case. Jurors will still have to assess McClintic’s credibility on the video, just as they have to assess her credibility on the stand, Heeney said.
A one-hour portion of a longer interview from May 24 was shown Wednesday, in which McClintic tells her story, punctuated by frequent bouts of crying. Court has heard McClintic abducted Tori outside her school, then the three drove in Rafferty’s car to a rural area more than 100 kilometres north.
“I could hear her calling out for me saying, ‘T, make him stop’,” McClintic says on the video, describing how she walked away during the alleged sex assault. “I wanted to grab her, take her away from him, but I took a couple steps and felt like I walked into a brick wall.”
There was a break at one point during the sexual assault when Tori needed to use the washroom, McClintic said, and she took Tori a few steps away from the car.
“With me, she was good,” McClintic says in the interview. “She was great. She wasn’t scared of me.”
When Rafferty killed Tori, kicking her, stomping on her and hitting her in the head several times with a hammer, it seemed like “he knew what he was doing,” McClintic tells Ontario Provincial Police Det. Sgt. Jim Smyth.
“I felt at the point of tears a lot, and I didn’t want him to see that. I didn’t want him to see any of that,” she said.
Rafferty made her help put Tori’s body into several layers of garbage bags, McClintic said, and Smyth asked how he got her to do those things.
“He said, ‘You’re in it just as far as I am,”’ McClintic told him. She decided to tell police the story so Tori could be brought home, McClintic said in the interview. Tori’s remains would be found in July, 103 days after she went missing, partially clothed and in garbage bags in a field and under a pile of rocks, court has heard.
As the video of the interview was played in court Wednesday, Rafferty sat in the prisoner’s box shaking his head.
Smyth asks at the end of the interview if McClintic has left anything at all out of the story.
“No,” she says. “No. Everything, I’ve thrown everything out, everything, like I’ve laid it all out. That’s it.”