Girl, 8, vanishes on walk home from school before eerie CCTV leads to horrifying discovery

Victoria Stafford was just eight years old when she disappeared on her walk home from school. Months later, the horrifying truth about what happened became clear

An eight-year-old girl who proudly set off on her walk home alone from school was never seen alive again – before a horrifying discovery three months later.

Victoria ‘Tori’ Stafford was proud to be walking home alone from school. She would normally have to wait for her older brother before setting off so he could walk with her. But because her mother Tara McDonald had moved to a new home that was only about a 10-minute walk from Oliver Stephens Public School, third-grader Tori was proud to be exercising a little independence and walking home alone.

But Tori never made it home. It was over three months later that the little girl’s badly-decomposed remains were found in woodland by a horrified police officer. A post-mortem examination found that she had suffered a brutal beating that had shattered her liver and caused 16 broken ribs. Pathologists confirmed that Tori’s death had been the result of repeated blows to the head with a claw hammer.

Initial suspicions fell on Tori’s mother, Tara. True Crime podcaster Annie Elise explains that there were discrepancies around the initial missing persons report. Tori had walked out of the school at around 3:30pm. Tori’s grandmother Linda reported the child missing almost three hours later. “This did not sit well with the police,” Annie said. “School was over at 3:25 p.m. Why wait until a little after 6:00 p.m. to report an 8-year-old as missing? Tara definitely faced a lot of backlash.”

The family lived in the quiet town of Woodstock, southern Ontario. Locals were shocked at the girl’s disappearance – which later was established to be an abduction after CCTV footage emerged that showed Tori walking away from her home in the company of an unknown woman.

Tori seemed to be walking alongside this woman quite freely, which only stoked suspicions about Tara. Annie continued: “Tara received a lot of hate from the minute that Tori’s case was made public, simply due to her not reporting her missing right away. And this surveillance clip going public did not help. Right away, people out in the public began to speculate. Could the person on this surveillance video have been Tara herself?”

After initially suggesting in interviews that the mystery figure might have been a man disguised as a woman, Tara went to the police, claiming that she might actually know who the woman was on the surveillance video.

But for Tara to name the woman meant revealing a dark secret about herself. She admitted that she had for years been addicted to OxyContin, a powerful opioid painkiller sometimes known as “Hillbilly Heroin.” Once or twice, as she had visited her dealer to buy the drug, she had bumped into another user, Terri-Lynne McClintic.

Given that Tara’s reputation in Woodstock was already being dragged through the mud, revealing her addiction only made matters worse. “It’s hard to say whether this story hurt or helped Tara when it came to suspicion,” Annie says. “On one hand, she was admitting to being a drug addict, but on the other hand, Terri-Lynne had an even darker history when it came to getting into trouble.”

Eighteen-year-old Terri-Lynne had been a regular drug user since childhood. At 15, she was arrested for the first time after punching her mother in the face, fracturing her cheekbone. “The following year,” Annie says, “she got another assault charge, this time for attacking someone at a youth home. In 2007, she mugged two men at knife point and actually ended up stabbing one of them in the back. When the police arrested her, she hit one of the officers in the back of the head.”

A year later, while being detained in a youth detention centre, Terri-Lynne, still only in her teens, wrote: “I just want to be on the road and take the first person I see, grab them, bring them with me, mutilate the f*** out of them, smash their skull apart, and then piece it together like a puzzle. That way, they stay conscious of the pain that I’m inflicting on them.”

Terri-Lynne was already the subject of an outstanding warrant, so police immediately picked her up and questioned her her about Tori’s disappearance. But Terri-Lynne denied all knowledge of the incident and insisted that she was not the woman in the CCTV video.

Meanwhile, rumours began to circulate that Tara and her ex-husband James owed a huge some of money to their drug dealer, and that Tori being abducted was “collateral” for that debt.

Tara had been making announcements to the press almost daily, in hope of keeping the case of Tori’s abduction on the front pages, and immediately denied the drug debt story. “But then she went public with something pretty huge,” Annie says.

“Tara said that a limo had showed up at her house and had taken her and James to Toronto and that once they got there, they met with people who claimed that they were in contact with whoever had Tori and that they were even willing to pay a ransom that they said had been demanded for her safe return. And this whole story, it sounded so fake and so made-up that the public felt even more sure of Tara’s guilt.”

It later emerged that the limo ride had been a ruse by undercover police, hoping that Tara would reveal something incriminating about herself.

Meanwhile, Teri-Lynne was still a person of interest in the enquiry. However police believed that if she had been involved in the crime, she wasn’t likely to gave acts alone. They began to investigate Michael Rafferty, who had begun dating Terry-Lynne a month of two before Tori’s disappearance. Rafferty, around 10 years older than Teri-Lynne, was also an OxyContin user.

Terri-Lynne and Rafferty were known to have bought a claw hammer and garbage bags from a DIY store just hours after Tori’s disappearance. Teri-Lynne was again questioned about Tori, and this time her story began to change. Eventually she confessed that she and Rafferty were the ones who took Tori.

Annie explained: “They weren’t keeping her somewhere because of a debt or waiting for some sort of ransom payout. They weren’t hiding her, hoping to make her their daughter or something weird like that. It was something far different.”

Claiming that her recollection of that day was “a blur” she admitted that she had approached Tori at random, and lured her to Rafferty’s car where, she told Tori, they had a cute puppy to show her. In fact, the 18-year-old admitted, she had been delivering Tori to her 28-year-old boyfriend “for sexual reasons”.

Both she and Rafferty were arrested. But before the case could go to trial Terri-Lynne changed her story once again. She admitted “my recollection of the series of events that happened on April 8 . . . The only thing that was not true in the document was that it was not Mr. Rafferty who committed the murder but it was myself.”

She described how Rafferty had been angry with her when she brought Tori to him, complaining that it “should have been a younger person”.

After they had brutally killed Tori, Terri-Lynne made a promise to her boyfriend. She told a court: “I said don’t worry, I’m an 18-year-old junkie anyway . . . I will take the fall for everything.

“He had a life, a job, things going for him and I really had nothing.”

“I said he had more to lose than I did.” But even though police now had their killers, it was still another month before Tori’s body was found.

Both of the culprits were jailed for life for Tori’s murder. Neither of them had any prospect of parole for 25 years. Rafferty has made a number of appeals against his sentence, but without success.