After Tori Stafford's death, Michael Rafferty turned to promiscuity ...

After Tori Stafford’s death, Michael Rafferty turned to promiscuity: Christ... http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/18/christie-blatchford-after-t...
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Christie Blatchford Apr 18, 2012 – 8:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Apr 18, 2012 8:28 PM ET
From what Michael Rafferty's lawyer Dirk Derstine has told the judge, it doesn’t appear that he is disputing that he was present when Tori was stolen off the street in nearby Woodstock or
that he helped bury her body under a rock pile off a country road.
It is the modern wisdom that everyone grieves differently and therefore, no judgment should ever be made of a person who doesn’t
behave conventionally.
If the same can be said for a reaction of stark horror, then and only then would Michael Rafferty’s conduct in the days after Victoria
(Tori) Stafford’s slaying be considered remotely within the widest of normal ranges.
Mr. Rafferty, of course, is the 31-year-old man now on trial in Ontario Superior Court here for kidnapping, sexual assault causing
bodily harm and first-degree murder in the little girl’s April 8, 2009, death.
He is pleading not guilty, but from what his lawyer Dirk Derstine has told Judge Thomas Heeney and the jury, it doesn’t appear that
Mr. Rafferty is disputing that he was present when Tori was stolen off the street in nearby Woodstock or that he helped bury her
body under a rock pile off a country road south of Mount Forest, Ont. When last month Mr. Derstine was cross-examining
Terri-Lynne McClintic, a former girlfriend of Mr. Rafferty who already has pleaded guilty and been convicted of first-degree murder
in the child’s death and who now claims to have done the actual killing, he acknowledged his client’s presence when he said, “I’m
going to suggest to you that Mr. Rafferty came back [to the car] after the death, was horrified, but helped you clean up.”
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Handout

After Tori Stafford’s death, Michael Rafferty turned to promiscuity: Christ... http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/18/christie-blatchford-after-t...
Christie Blatchford: Tori Stafford jury hears of Michael Rafferty’s democratic appetite for the opposite sex
Tori Stafford’s DNA almost certainly on Rafferty’s car, but no scientific way to prove how it got there: expert
By Mr. Derstine’s scenario, Mr. Rafferty was a poor sap who “thought nothing of it” when Ms. McClintic arrived at his waiting vehicle
with the blonde eight-year-old in tow, nobly refused her alleged proffered gift of the child sexually, left the area at Ms. McClintic’s
direction and returned to find the little girl dead.
But if he was as appalled and shocked as Mr. Derstine suggested, Mr. Rafferty certainly had an
odd way of showing it.
Promiscuous already in the spring of 2009 – he was involved with no fewer than 11 women at
that time – seven of those relationships started after the little girl’s death, when it appears he
embarked on a whirlwind of activity on the Plenty of Fish dating website, contacting multiple
women simultaneously starting on April 9.
For days now, the court has seen a parade of these women – as young as 23, as old as 50; many
with long dark hair and glasses; some buxom and plump, some slim; some professional women,
some stay-at-home mothers – to the witness stand.
Tuesday came another one, 29-year-old Jessica Meloche.
She met Mr. Rafferty on Plenty of Fish on April 12 (four days after his purported moment of
horror), and soon he was spending most weekends at her place. It was he, she said, who proposed
they see one another exclusively, and she agreed, unaware that he was also seeing another
woman, Sarah Hodge, almost every day about that time, making connections and having coffee
dates with other women, and, in his fashion, wining and dining a lucky few.
‘I wear my heart
on my sleve and
sometimes that
can be my
downfall’ —
Michael Rafferty
on his Facebook
page
Most of the women seem to have been wowed by him, and to have found him to be all that he said he was, for instance, on his
Facebook profile.
There, he demonstrated himself to be a thoroughly modern fellow – illiterate, vacuous and narcissistic – even if he used enough
capital letters and LOLs (short for laugh out loud) and OMGs (short for omigod) to have passed for one of his younger paramours.
Michael Rafferty's Facebook page
Court handout
“I love camping and value friends more than life it’s self, lol,” he wrote there. “If
that means anything.”
Under “interests,” he blathered on at misspelled length. “And culture to the max
with me,” he wrote. “I want to learn as much as I can all the time about other
people and there culture.” He claimed to love Grey’s Anatomy, CSI and Survivor,
as well as several cooking shows, fitting for a fellow who claimed to have a
“master’s” in culinary arts (he also told various women he had a kinesiology
degree, taught ballroom dancing, and to have had his own contracting company).
In the “About me” section, which he watched with some evident fondness as it
was flashed on courtroom monitors on Wednesday, Mr. Rafferty wrote, “I am
slowly becoming somebody. I’m complex and have lotsa layers…. I have many
accomplishments in my life and for those I am greatfull for haveing the chance to
do.”
About 10 o’clock on the morning that Tori Stafford was taken and killed – her DNA later found in Mr. Rafferty’s car – he changed his
status on his Facebook wall to read, “Everything good is coming my way.”
The temptation is to imagine those words as creepy or foreshadowing or somehow telling, but it’s
a much safer bet that this was just another inane spewing from a fellow who counted among his
favourite books self-help bibles.
Much more revealing, much more difficult to explain, was Mr. Rafferty’s rabbit-like behaviour
after he purportedly got the shock of his life on April 8.
As he confessed in the “About me” Facebook section, “I wear my heart on my sleve and
sometimes that can be my downfall.”
No dear: That wasn’t your heart on your sleeve, or rather sleve: It was a picture of your
exceptionally busy penis.
Well, everyone does react differently to being horrified.
‘I am slowly
becoming
somebody. I’m
complex and have
lotsa layers…’
2 of 3 4/19/2012 9:01 AM

After Tori Stafford’s death, Michael Rafferty turned to promiscuity: Christ... http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/18/christie-blatchford-after-t...
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Posted in: Canada, Full Comment Tags: Michael Rafferty, Tori Stafford
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