Crime Seen (21 page)

My bureau had been reorganized in recent months and now CIB reported to me. I wanted to get Bill’s first-hand update on the case and details about his recent two arrests. I was also anxious to meet with his team. After twenty years of being involved in these types of cases and knowing how they could affect you on a personal level, I wanted them to know that I not only appreciated their work but also cared about their well-being. I knew they’d had high hopes that their dedication and hard work would find Tori and bring her home. The last few days would have been tough for them.

I was already familiar with the details of Tori’s abduction as I’d gotten back into doing some profiling again after being away from it for a couple of years—taking some time away and doing other work had been just what I’d needed. There’d been a BSS team on the ground in Woodstock since Tori first went missing and they’d talked to me on the phone, as well as met with me back up in Orillia to get my opinion on a couple of aspects of the case. I’d even arranged for some of my profiling colleagues, including the FBI’s Ken Lanning from Quantico, to come up and take a look at the case, but that meeting was cancelled at the last minute with news of the arrests.

On the afternoon of April 8, Tori, a Grade 3 student, was abducted as she walked away from her school on her way home. The only concrete evidence in the investigation was what happened seconds after she exited the school building. It was a grainy piece of security video footage shot from a high school adjacent to Tori’s school. The footage showed her walking away with what appeared to be a woman wearing a light-coloured coat. Tori was wearing a hooded
Hannah Montana
shirt bearing the caption “A Girl Can Dream” and a denim skirt. She was also wearing a pair of butterfly earrings that her mother had lent to her that morning.

Since her disappearance, Tori’s mother, Tara McDonald, held almost daily press briefings from the front porch of her home to a number of media outlets. Tori’s abduction was also featured on an episode of
America’s Most Wanted
. Each day Tara pleaded for the safe return of her daughter and for anyone who had information to come forward. She often shared her only daughter’s handwritten notes, drawings and personal belongings as she told stories about Tori’s home and school life. Her ex-husband and Tori’s father, Rodney Stafford, was often present for the porch-stoop media scrums as well. Despite a less than amicable split back in 2002, after four years of marriage, they did their best to appear aligned in their mission to bring their daughter home. On several occasions their then eleven-year-old son, Daryn, was present with them. Their public appearances garnered considerable interest from the public, and at the same time kept the story of Tori’s abduction in the media forefront.

Eight days after Tori’s abduction, the OPP joined forces with the original investigating agency, Oxford County Police Service. The number of tips coming in on the case and the daily expanding scope of the searches for Tori were beyond the capabilities of the small city police service. Police Chief Ron Fraser was appreciative of the help. The number of investigators jumped from fifteen to more than a hundred within the first week.

Bill Renton was from the area and had assisted the small community police service in another murder investigation in the recent past. His biggest issue was the sheer volume of the case. He immediately set up the PowerCase computer software management system in use by all Ontario police services. The software provided for centralized data storage, evidence management and assignment tracking, and a host of other features that investigators required. Three detectives were assigned full-time just to read the seventy-five to a hundred tips received each day and prioritize them.

The OPP sent equipment and officers from around the province to Woodstock to assist in the search for Tori and the investigation into her abduction. In the months of April and May, more than 63,000 people accessed the MPUB website where Tori’s abduction/missing person case was posted. The community also became actively involved in assisting in the many searches and rallies held in support of Tori’s family. Many town residents would come up to the unfamiliar “suits” in their streets, coffee shops and restaurants and, without even asking who they were, thank the detectives for their efforts.

One of the “suits” was Jim Smyth, the third trained OPP criminal profiler, now working as a forensic polygraph examiner. He was in town conducting polygraph examinations and interviews on prioritized persons of interest. Four days after Tori disappeared police had received a tip from her mother, and an officer subsequently paid a visit to eighteen-year-old Terri-Lynne McClintic to talk to her—as well as take the opportunity to arrest her on an outstanding warrant. McClintic seemed to be forthright and have reasonable answers for all of his questions about Tori’s disappearance. Everything changed when police got a tip about McClintic’s boyfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Michael Rafferty, who didn’t answer officers’ questions about Tori’s disappearance so well and came off as evasive.

Investigators wanted Jim to take a second harder look at McClintic and offer her a polygraph. She took the test, but it came out inconclusive. She was a good liar, but only initially. When Jim went into interview mode, McClintic’s previously stable house of cards soon came tumbling down and she confessed to her involvement in Tori’s abduction and murder. She revealed that the girl had been murdered within hours of her being taken. She also implicated Rafferty, who was also charged with first-degree murder, along with kidnapping and sexual assault causing bodily harm.

That night Bill brought together about forty of his team, detectives and civilian support staff to share the break in their case. Everyone was devastated. He then went to tell Tori’s parents and their families himself.

The morning I met Bill for breakfast in Woodstock, I found him waiting for me alone at a table in an empty section of the hotel restaurant. He looked exhausted. Dave Cardwell, the director of CIB, joined us a short time later and the three of us drove over to the project offices set up in an empty warehouse. Bill had civilians and officers gather together to hear Dave and me acknowledge their work and offer our support. I found myself saying many of the same things that I’d heard Ken Lanning say to the police on the Michael Dunahee case almost two decades earlier. Despite what had happened, these men and women had done everything they could to bring Tori home. We would continue our search for Tori, as British Columbia was still searching for Michael. There was one big difference. We had two people in custody who knew where Tori was.

The investigation’s focus was preparing the criminal prosecution case against McClintic and Rafferty and finding Tori’s remains. Rafferty was uncooperative with police, but Jim and several other officers spent considerable time with McClintic in the days after her arrest. Using a police helicopter in the air and unmarked cruiser on the ground, Jim tried to work with her to re-create the route she and Rafferty had followed in his car after they took Tori. She gave a very detailed description of a side road just off a main concession road, a house and a lane through a field. Jim believed she was telling him the truth in her descriptions, but they couldn’t identify the complete route she and Rafferty took, nor could they find the final place where Tori was brutally attacked, murdered and her body disposed of.

OPP Emergency Response Team members (ERT) from across Ontario continued with search efforts throughout the summer. They were assisted by other OPP and area police services and many members of the public who came out just wanting to help the family in some small way. At one point some officers were assigned to look for possible evidence that had been disposed of and they worked in a landfill site for thirty-one days. Day after day they went through the garbage, without complaint—and unfortunately without success.

On Friday, July 17, Bill received information that Rafferty used his mobile phone within several hours after Tori’s abduction and some of his calls had pinged off a tower in the town of Mount Forest. That location was outside the perimeter of the searches that had been completed up until that time. Bill decided that, rather than call searchers in to work over the weekend, he would give them some well-deserved time off. Bill asked Jim to work the weekend and get prepared for the expanded search the following week.

Like so many others, Jim hadn’t had many nights at home, so late Saturday afternoon he decided to make the two-hour drive home to attend a family function that evening. He got up early on Sunday morning to head back to Woodstock. When driving down Highway 400 Jim decided to cut off and take a side road over to take a look at the area they would be searching that week. He zigzagged along country roads as he worked his way south. Suddenly he came upon an area that looked just as McClintic had described several months earlier. He drove down the lane and saw a pile of rocks up ahead, again just as she’d said. Jim parked a ways back from the rocks and got out of his car. His first breath was confirmation. He’d smelled that odour before.

I was notified and called Jim’s cellphone right away. His voice was shaky when he answered. The adrenalin was obviously still flowing. He was still at the scene.

“Are you sure, Jim?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said.

Jim had found Tori 103 days after her abduction. She was positively identified at autopsy through her dental records. She had been raped and savagely beaten. Her cause of death was multiple blunt impact injuries.

I worried about my officers, even the ones that I knew well like Jim, and how they would cope with situations like these. Families often provided the strongest support. Jim’s father was a retired senior officer with York Regional Police. He and Jim’s mother knew he was working on Tori’s abduction but that was all, since Jim never spoke about his work. His dad later told me, “Jim’s mother had said to him, ‘Jim, you find that little girl and bring her home.’ The day they had it on the news that a lone OPP officer found her body they didn’t say who it was. But his mother just said, ‘That’s Jim.’ I was thinking the same thing. Later we found out it
was
him, not through Jim, but from media reports. We knew what he was going through at work, but we didn’t need to know the details. He was raised in a police family and knows there is always an umbrella overtop of him.”

Sometimes a family’s umbrella held overhead isn’t enough to fend off the torrent of emotions felt by uniform and civilian staff working under these circumstances. The day after Tori’s body was discovered I again went to the warehouse offices in Woodstock. This time OPP commissioner Julian Fantino was with me. We knew there was nothing we could really say to ease the emotion of the situation. Like my last visit, I hoped at least our words and physical presence demonstrated our support.

That day, critical incident debriefing teams were with us too. I knew the value of people being able to openly discuss the emotional and physical impact and share with each other what they were experiencing. At that time the sessions were most often led by our own force psychologist, assisted by police officers who had been through traumatic incidents themselves.

On July 31 many of those working on the case attended Tori’s funeral.

McClintic pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Tori and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. After a publication ban was lifted, the public were advised of the Agreed Statement of Facts read after her plea. It confirmed that she was the woman in the light-coloured jacket in the videotape. She had started a conversation about dogs with Tori when she met her outside the school. She lured her to a nearby car, driven by Rafferty, telling her there was a puppy inside.

Following a ten-week judge-and-jury trial in the nearby city of London, Rafferty was convicted of kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.

Despite the outcome, the team working on this case had a lot to be proud of. They successfully concluded an investigation that involved over 900 officers from different police agencies, 50 civilians, 7,500 officer reports, 2,200 civilian statements, 5,500 tips followed up and hundreds of hours of videotape footage viewed. Search teams covered 18,144 kilometres of territory. Unfortunately none of their hard work, or the hopes and prayers of millions of people, could bring Tori home alive.

THE FINAL TRIBUTE

“Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.”

—Plutarch (AD 46–AD 120)

I KNEW KEN LEPPERT BY REPUTATION
before I ever met him. One of the first CIB investigations he’d been assigned was a cold case that many thought would never be solved. Allen and Margaret Campbell had gone missing from their cottage on Trout Lake near North Bay on May 29, 1956. They were presumed to have drowned but there was never any proof. Media attention given to the fiftieth anniversary of their disappearance managed to elicit new information about where they were last seen on the lake in their boat. Using recently developed side scanning sonar technology to examine the bottom of the lake, Ken and his team searched the new area—and found the couple in twenty-five metres of water. As suspected, their deaths were from drowning. So Ken started off his CIB career with a bang by solving the fifty-year-old case.

A couple of years later, when Ken was in Orillia for a meeting, he stopped by my office to talk to me. By this time we’d met a couple of times but I didn’t know him that well. It was late in the afternoon and I was catching up on some paperwork before heading home when he appeared at my doorway.

“Have you got a minute?”

“Sure. Come on in and have a seat. What’s up?”

“I just finished a brain storming session with UHIT [Unsolved Homicide Investigation Team]. I’d like to talk to you about Kirkland Lake.”