After six weeks of restless nights and days consumed by the search for his “baby girl,” tears streamed down Rodney Stafford’s face as police announced yesterday that the effort to bring eight-year-old Victoria home safely had become a grim search for her body in a rural area outside of Guelph.
Stafford stared at the TV in his sister Randi Millen’s home, almost in disbelief that tireless efforts to keep Victoria’s disappearance in the news had come to such a tragic end — abduction and murder charges laid against two people.
Court documents suggest that even before the searches and candlelight vigils, and before her smiling face was beamed into homes nationwide, the Grade 3 student, known as Tori to friends and family, was already dead.
Emotions were raw at the courthouse where Michael Thomas C.S. Rafferty, 28, was arraigned on a first-degree murder charge and abducting a child under 16.
Also arraigned before the court was Terri-Lynne McClintic, 18, who is charged with abduction, and being an accessory for allegedly helping Rafferty elude authorities. Rafferty and McClintic next appear in court May 28.
The charge sheet alleges the girl was killed on or around April 8, the day she went missing outside her school.
