A few seconds of grainy footage, an 8-year-old girl walks calmly away from school beside a woman she seems to trust.
Soon after, that same woman is handing out flyers, asking the town to [music] bring her home.
She thought no one was watching.
Diana, we’ve just learned that Oxford County police are going door to door handing out flyers that look similar to this.
It’s a picture of Victoria Stafford.
Friends and family call her Tori.
She was last seen yesterday and police are doing everything they can to locate the Wednesday, April 8th, 2009, Woodstock, Ontario.
An 8-year-old girl walks out of Oliver Stevens Public School for the short walk home, just a couple of blocks.
She never makes it.
Her name is Victoria Stafford.
Everyone calls her Tori.
By dinnertime, her family is driving the streets, calling her friends [music] and checking every place she might have gone.
By evening, the police are called.
Within days, it becomes one of the largest searches in Ontario history.
Boats, helicopters, search dogs, and they find nothing, not a trace.
But there is one piece of evidence.
A few seconds of video taken near that school on the very afternoon she vanished.
What it shows will change the entire direction of this case and it will raise a question that takes weeks to answer.
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Now, back to that Wednesday afternoon.
Woodstock, Ontario sits about an hour and a half from Toronto.
It’s a small city of roughly 40,000 people, the kind of place where neighbors know each other and kids still walk home from school.
One of those 40,000 people was Tori Stafford.
She was born in Woodstock in July of 2000 to parents Rodney and Tara, the younger sister to her big brother Darren.
When Tori was two, her parents divorced, [music] and she and Darren went to live with their mother and her family.
Tori was a tomboy.
She didn’t mind getting muddy.
[music] She loved bugs, animals, anything she could chase or catch.
Her grandmother called her a little pistol, and she was the kind of kid who would talk to anyone, whether she just met them or not.
That’s what makes the rest of this so hard to understand.
On Wednesday, April [music] 8th, 2009, the plan for Tori was simple.
After school, she’d head to her dad’s house, then see some friends and watch a movie.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
But her father, Rodney, had classes that day and was running behind.
Around 4:00, he called Tara to say he’d be a little late picking Tori up.
Tara said that was fine since Tori wasn’t home from school yet anyway.
Oliver Stevens Public School sits on Fifth Avenue in downtown Woodstock, only a couple of blocks from Tori’s house.
It was an easy walk, [music] and her brother Darren usually did it with her.
But that day, Darren had to walk some other kids home [music] first.
When 4:00 came and went with no sign of Tori, it started to feel wrong.
Darren went back to the school and looked for her.
He couldn’t find her.
He went home and asked if she’d turned up.
She hadn’t.
Her grandmother, who lived with the family, pulled on her boots and went out to look.
Calls went out to Tori’s friends, and nobody had seen her.
So her grandmother and her mother got in the car and drove the streets, scanning every corner, every sidewalk, hoping to spot a little girl who had simply wandered somewhere she shouldn’t have.
She wasn’t there.
By around 6 that evening, with no word from her and nowhere left to look, the family called the police.
Two blocks, that’s all that separated Tori from home.
And somewhere inside those two blocks, the day stopped being ordinary.
But police were about to find out just how little there was to go on.
That night, police searched the home of Tori’s father, Rodney, and his family was contacted.
They found nothing.
Tori had been supposed to come home from school that day, and instead she had simply vanished.
When a child goes missing, there’s no time to waste.
The very next morning, April 9th, posters went up and police made their first public appeals.
From there, the search grew and grew until it became one of the largest investigations Ontario had ever seen.
Boats, helicopters, search dogs, volunteers, every resource they had was out [music] in force.
And still they found nothing.
Hours turned into days and the questions got louder.
Why wasn’t there an Amber Alert?
For many people, that was the hardest part to accept.
When a child disappears, an Amber Alert is supposed to flood every radio and every phone.
But police said Tori’s case didn’t meet the criteria.
There were three conditions.
A child under 18 had to have been abducted.
The child had to be in danger of serious harm.
And there had to be enough descriptive information about the child or the abductor for a public alert to help.
At that point, police said none of those boxes had been checked.
The criteria were later changed and many people believed it should never [music] have taken a case like this to make that happen.
Then came the first real break.
Investigators went back to the area around Oliver Stevens public school and began going through security footage and in a few seconds of video they saw her Tori walking away from the school.
But she wasn’t alone.
Next to her was an adult woman.
Police believed she had brown hair, but the footage was too grainy to tell much else.
And what struck investigators was Tori herself.
She didn’t seem to be in distress.
She wasn’t pulling away.
She seemed calm, even comfortable, like she knew this person or believed she could trust her, which raised a question police couldn’t answer yet.
Who was she?
The footage didn’t come with a name, but in a small city where everyone seems to know someone, it was only a matter of time before people started pointing [music] fingers.
And when they did, they didn’t point at a stranger.
They looked much closer to home.
With no answers and a few grainy seconds of footage, the pressure in Woodstock had to go somewhere, and it went to the people closest to Tori.
Rumors spread through town faster than the search teams could cover ground.
Some people started asking questions about Tori’s home life.
Her mother, Tara, was struggling with an addiction to Oxycontton, [clears throat] a problem that had a hold on a lot of Woodstock.
Her father, Rodney, was not around much.
When a child is missing and there’s nothing to show for it, people look for something to explain it, even when they have no proof.
And under that pressure, a family already living its worst nightmare [music] began to strain.
Then police released a composite sketch of the woman from the video.
And for many people, it seemed to point in one direction.
When Tara’s drug problem became public knowledge, a lot of people were quick to decide that the woman in the footage was Tara herself, but police weren’t convinced.
They had their own line of inquiry, and they were keeping it close.
Because someone had looked at that footage and said no.
Close, but not her.
Her name was Terry Lynn McClintic.
She was 18 years old, and she wasn’t a stranger to the case at all.
She had handed out flyers asking for Tori’s safe [music] return.
Now, police brought her in.
She was questioned and arrested, but on charges that had nothing to do with Tori.
She stayed in custody, and she stayed on police’s radar.
[music] About 2 weeks after Tori vanished, the Ontario Provincial Police stepped in as the search began to stall.
They said openly [music] what many people had feared.
This was an abduction.
They said it didn’t matter whether you called it a missing person case or an abduction because the investigation followed the same process either way.
Now, police had a woman in custody who looked like the last person to be seen with Tori, but she wasn’t giving them anything.
[music] And as detectives dug into her life, they found a connection that made the case even more tangled.
Terry Lynn and Tara knew each other.
[music] They weren’t close friends, but they had met several times.
They moved in the same circles [music] with the same dealers and the same methodone clinics.
The more police learned, the more confusing it became.
And while Terry Lynn sat in a cell saying nothing, someone came to see her.
The man who came to see Terry Lynn was named Michael Rafferty.
He was 28 years old, 10 years older than she was, and he told police he was her boyfriend.
Rafferty was happy to talk.
Officers asked him a few questions while he was there, and he answered them easily.
Yes, he and Terry Lynn were dating, [music] though he made it sound like nothing serious.
Had there been anything more between them?
No, he saidn nothing like that.
Had he watched the video?
Yes.
Did he recognize anyone in it?
No, he said nobody.
Then came the questions about clothing.
Police asked whether he’d ever seen Terry Lynn in certain jackets, and he said he had a long dressy white one, a long dressy black one.
Those were the two he knew.
And what was he doing on the afternoon of April 8th?
He said he didn’t remember.
Most days, he said [music] he was just zipping around town.
He seemed relaxed and helpful like a man with nothing to hide.
Remember that because it matters later.
Rafferty went home.
Terry Lynn stayed in custody.
Then on May 24th, 2009, something changed.
Terry Lynn was sitting in an interrogation room and it was a very different kind of day.
What she didn’t seem to realize [music] was that every word in that room was being recorded.
Detectives sat with her for a long time and her voice dropped, [music] then grew fainter as she spoke.
She told them she wanted to tell the truth about April 8th.
She told them how the day began and what she said was that she and Michael had decided that morning what they [music] were going to do.
Then she started to explain what that was.
According to Terry Lynn, the plan was simple and it was cruel.
She told detectives that she and Michael had talked about it that morning.
He had made comments about wanting a young girl, someone who would be easy to manipulate.
Terry Lynn said she’d brushed it off at first, thinking it was just talk, but that day he meant it.
And she said Tori was the first young girl who came along.
She told them she led Tori away from the school and toward Michael’s car.
Then they drove.
Michael turned on the radio, listening for an Amber Alert.
There wasn’t one.
As far as anyone knew, nothing had happened yet.
They drove northeast, stopping for gas, pills, and coffee as if it were any other afternoon.
Then they pulled into a Home Depot.
Michael stayed in the car with Tori while Terry Lynn went inside and bought a hammer and a box of [music] garbage bags.
Terry Lynn told detectives she hadn’t wanted to go back to that car, but she did because Tori was there and she thought that if she stayed close, she could [music] make things a little easier for her.
She couldn’t.
Terry Lynn told investigators that Tori Stafford [music] didn’t survive that afternoon.
Her account placed Tori near a remote spot covered over with rocks.
And somewhere in that room, as she said it out loud, [music] the tears came.
Police had spent weeks searching for a missing girl.
And that moment, they knew they were looking for something else.
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Now, back to what police did next.
They asked Terry Lynn one more time if there was anything else she was holding back.
She said no.
She said she had told them everything.
And on that day, Michael Rafferty was arrested.
Terry Lynn had given police a name, a story, and a rough idea of where to look.
But a story isn’t proof, and an idea isn’t a place.
Somewhere out there, Tori was still waiting to be found.
And the only person [music] who knew exactly where was a man who had no intention of saying a word.
By the time Michael Rafferty was arrested, he and Terry Lynn had been dating for only about 4 months.
They lived in Woodstock, [music] Michael with his mother, and on paper, they looked like two very different people.
Terry Lynn’s life had been hard from the start.
She grew up in foster homes, and she had struggled with drugs, including Oxycontton, which had a grip on the whole town.
Michael was different.
He had no criminal record.
Before this case, he had been completely under the radar.
Friends described a man who was mostly unemployed with some landscaping work here and there, but people who knew him also said he could tell a story.
And the story changed depending on who was listening.
Whatever got him sympathy, he used.
Remember that because police were about to see it up close.
Detectives sat Michael down and they weren’t there for small talk.
They told him they knew what he had done.
They told him the time for denying it was over.
He denied it anyway.
Again and again, he insisted he hadn’t done anything.
When an officer asked him about his biggest [music] fear now that he’d been charged, he talked about losing his life as he knew it.
Not being able to take care of his mother.
Not being able to do the things he did every day.
Police tried everything.
Hours of questioning, good cop, bad cop.
And through all of it, Michael never confessed.
[music] and never came clean.
Terry Lynn was a different story.
Over the course of her interview, she had been asked four separate times whether she wanted a lawyer.
Four times, she said [music] no.
So, detectives did something bold.
They put Terry Lynn’s account to Michael step by step from the moment Tori left the school to the last time Terry Lynn said she saw her.
They asked him if she was lying and they told him this was his chance to say so.
He did.
He called her a liar.
But he wouldn’t say it to her face and he didn’t need to.
Police already had her statement.
Both Michael and Terry Lynn were charged with murder.
Terry Lynn had her own reasons for helping.
She wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of her heart.
But she did draw police a map to the place where she believed Tori was buried.
Officers went out in force about an hour from Woodstock following that map and they ran into a problem.
They couldn’t [music] find her.
Terry Lynn’s directions weren’t clear enough.
The only person who knew the exact spot was Michael, and he wasn’t saying a word.
Days passed, then weeks with a little girl’s family still waiting for answers until one officer, the same one who had sat across from Terry Lynn in that room, looked at her handdrawn map one more time and decided to trust a hunch.
It was June [music] 20th, and the search had been going on for weeks.
The officer who had interviewed Terry Lynn went back to her hand-drawn map.
He wasn’t following a landmark or a clear set of directions, just a hunch about what she had tried to describe.
And that hunch led him to a pile of rocks.
Tori had been found.
Police took great care at the scene.
Her remains were taken to the Center of Forensic Sciences where they could be formally identified.
But for Tori’s family, hope had run out.
They had spent over 2 months searching, praying, and waiting for a miracle.
Now finally they had an answer and it was the one they had feared.
Tori was home in the only way she still could be.
Across Woodstock and across Ontario, a lot of people who had never met her felt it.
[music] Purple, Tori’s favorite color, started appearing everywhere.
It became a symbol of how much this little girl meant to a whole country.
Now the case moved to the courts.
In April of 2010, Terry Lynn McClintic pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
She was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
For the first time, someone was being held fully accountable.
But Michael Rafferty hadn’t pleaded guilty.
He had spent the entire investigation insisting he’d done nothing wrong.
And his trial began in March of 2012, nearly 3 years after Tori disappeared.
[music] And the star witness was the woman who had already confessed.
Terry Lynn McClintic took the stand to tell her story once more [music] under oath in front of a jury.
Her account had been recorded, replayed, and picked apart for years.
But this time, something was different.
She had a few corrections to make.
Terry Lynn McClintic took the stand in Michael Raffert’s trial [music] under oath in front of a jury.
Her story had been recorded and replayed for years, and most of it was familiar, but she made changes.
She told the court that Michael had harmed Tori in a way she had never mentioned to police.
She also said that she was the one who caused Tori’s death, not Michael.
It was a stunning turn and nobody in that courtroom could say for sure why she’d made it.
Maybe she was trying to take the blame.
Maybe she was trying to do him a favor.
Or maybe it was simply the truth.
We don’t know.
But the defense knew exactly what to do with it.
[music] They pounced.
For years, Michael had insisted he was innocent.
Now they argued.
The star witness had changed her story on the stand.
If she could tell police one version and a jury another, how could anyone trust either?
On cross-examination, Terry Lynn admitted it.
She was the only one who had struck Tori.
For a moment, the whole case seemed to hang in the balance.
But the jury had heard everything.
[music] the first confession, the map, the weeks of denial from the man in the interview room.
After a trial that lasted two months, they reached their verdict.
Michael Rafferty was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Two people had taken an 8-year-old girl from a Woodstock sidewalk, [music] and both would spend decades behind bars.
You’d think that would be the end of it, but in the years that followed, the court system had more to say, and one of those two people was about to make headlines again.
Michael Rafferty didn’t accept the verdict.
He appealed right away.
And for the Stafford family, [music] that meant more waiting, more court dates, and more reminders of the worst day of their lives.
In [music] 2016, 4 years after he was sentenced, his appeal reached the courts.
It was dismissed immediately.
The sentence stood.
[music] The case, it seemed, was finally closed.
But for Terry Lynn McClenn, something else was happening, and almost nobody outside the prison system knew about it.
In 2018, she was moved to an indigenous healing lodge in Saskatchewan.
Healing lodges are minimum security facilities built around indigenous culture, programming, and spirituality.
Non-indigenous offenders can be placed in them, too, as long as they commit to that programming.
And once the news became [music] public, a lot of people had one question.
How does someone convicted of taking an 8-year-old girl end up in minimum security?
It made the transfer harder to understand.
Reports said she had first been classified as maximum security, then medium, even after an incident involving another inmate.
And now she was somewhere with far fewer restrictions than most people thought she’d ever see.
The reaction was swift.
People gathered in protest and purple, Tori’s favorite color, filled the crowd.
Many demanded that McClintic be returned to a traditional prison.
And eventually she was moved.
She went back to a regular prison far from the lodge.
But the outrage hadn’t been about a single transfer.
It was about trust [music] and whether the system had kept faith with the little girl at the center of it.
Still, there was one more thread in this story.
It involved the man who had never confessed and the one person who kept standing by him.
The last threat of this story belongs to Michael Raffert’s mother.
And it may be the saddest one of all.
Michael had never confessed.
And inside prison, according to reports, he found a way to make [music] his life easier.
He got his mother to pay for it.
She sent money to inmates and to their spouses, tens of [music] thousands of dollars, reportedly up to about 30,000.
It was said to be protection money, so that other inmates wouldn’t hurt her son.
Others believed the payments were buying him favors.
Either way, a mother who had once stood by his side kept sending money to people she had never met.
All for the son at the center of this case.
It cost [music] her everything.
She suffered a heart attack and lost her home.
Then she [music] died.
Michael Rafferty still has years left to serve.
Terry Lynn McClintic is still [music] in prison, too.
But the sentences were never really the point of this true crime documentary.
The point is a little girl who walked out of school on an ordinary Wednesday in Woodstock, Ontario, trusting the wrong person.
A girl who loved bugs and mud and talking to anyone who would listen.
A girl whose favorite color became a symbol for a whole country.
Tori Stafford was 8 years old.
She should have had a lifetime of ordinary days.
The system failed her in more than one way.
[music] The Amber Alert never came.
The search came up empty.
And years later, the questions weren’t about her at all, but about the people who took her.
And through all of it, somebody had to keep telling her story.
So, we will.
If you stayed with me to the end, leave the words Tori deserves better.
It tells me who was here for the whole story and it helps make sure this isn’t just another case file.
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