WARNING: Graphic details of this court case may disturb some readers
In a dramatic courtroom exchange Friday, Michael Rafferty's lawyer suggested Terri-Lynne McClintic was the mastermind behind Tori Stafford's murder and that she had offered the little girl to his client as a "gift" to settle a drug debt.
Defence lawyer Dirk Derstine portrayed Rafferty as an unwitting accomplice to Tori's abduction who had no idea why his then-girlfriend McClintic shoved the eight-year-old girl into his car on April 8, 2009.
The Grade 3 Woodstock, Ont., student was kidnapped as she walked home from school.
"The abduction in this case was your idea... you went and lured this girl and brought her in the car all friendly and Michael thought nothing of it," Derstine said during McClintic's cross-examination on her last day on the witness stand.
"Later on you told him that the girl was in the car for a drug debt and still later...you offered her to Michael, sexually."
"I very much disagree with you," McClintic replied.
McClintic, 21, pleaded guilty to Tori's murder in 2010 and was sentenced to life in prison. Rafferty, 31, has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering the girl.
Derstine suggested Friday that when Rafferty refused McClintic's offer of a little girl, she directed him to the rural area where Tori's partially clothed body was found more than three months after her disappearance.
"Once you got to that lane you told him to walk away because you had to talk to the little girl because she was scared of him," Derstine suggested.
He said Rafferty was "horrified" to find the girl already dead once he returned to the vehicle, but he helped McClintic clean up the crime scene anyway.
McClintic vehemently denied Derstine's suggestions.
She has previously testified that Rafferty urged her to kidnap a young girl for him.
McClintic has given contradicting accounts of how Tori died. She told a police interrogator in 2009 that it was Rafferty who killed Tori by striking her head with a hammer.
On the stand last week, however, McClintic said she was the one who wielded the hammer and "savagely murdered that little girl."
Derstine has been grilling McClintic about her previous convictions and troubled past. He painted her as violent and so disturbed for much of her life that she once mircowaved a dog as a youngster.
"I was a child," McClintic said of the incident. "I didn't know what I was doing."
McClintic has testified that she used to be a very angry person, but that she had dealt with those issues by the time Tori was killed.
Court also heard Friday an audio recording of Rafferty's interview with police before he was charged with Tori's murder. During the interview, Rafferty denied McClintic was his girlfriend and said he only found out about Tori's disappearance after seeing police helicopters conducting a search for the little girl.
Rafferty also told police Woodstock was a "scary" town full of drug addicts.
With files from The Canadian Press
