In horrifying detail that left a courtroom numb, Ms. McClintic told a jury that while her former boyfriend, Michael Rafferty, conceived of and directed the crime, she inflicted the fatal blows.
Serving life imprisonment for her role in Tori's murder, Ms. McClintic also offered Mr. Rafferty’s trial an explanation of what prompted her to help place the child in a garbage bag and then beat her to death.
The crime scene was a patch of woodland roughly 130 kilometres from where Tori was abducted from outside her Woodstock school earlier that afternoon, in April, 2009.
Ms. McClintic, 21, told the court that when she saw her boyfriend sexually assaulting Tori in the back of his Honda Civic, she experienced “flashbacks.”
“I turned back to the vehicle and when I saw what was going on, all I saw was myself at that age … and all the anger and hate and rage that I’d built up toward myself came out of me,” she testified.
“I went back to the vehicle and I savagely murdered that little girl.”
Mr. Rafferty, 31, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and abduction.
The shock was palpable inside the cavernous courtroom as Mr. Rafferty’s former girlfriend delivered her flat but often lucid testimony, struggling to remain composed.
As she sat in the witness box, Ms. McClintic often closed her eyes as she chronicled the events.
Some spectators were in tears. Tori’s father, Rodney, seated near the front of the court with relatives, looked badly shaken. And when the afternoon session ended, Tori’s mother, Tara McDonald, wept in the corridor.
Ms. McClintic, serving life imprisonment at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in nearby Kitchener, also testified how, after a dysfunctional youth marked by drug abuse and a long series of criminal convictions, chiefly for assault, she had been attracted to the man on trial.
“He always said all the right things; he knew how to make you feel good,” Ms. McClintic told Crown attorney Kevin Gowdey.
“Compared to most men who have been a part of my life, it felt pretty good.”
Ms. McClintic first described for the court how Tori was kidnapped, and how even though she had been forewarned about what was going to happen, she did nothing to prevent it.
She and Mr. Rafferty were jointly charged in May, 2009, six weeks after Tori vanished on her way home from school, and two months before her decomposed body was discovered wrapped in green garbage bags and concealed beneath rocks, a few minutes’ drive southeast of Mount Forest.
She died as a result of “massive injuries” to her skull, the jury has already heard, inflicted by a hammer; she had also sustained broken ribs and a lacerated liver.
Ms. McClintic, who was seated a couple of metres from the nearest juror, began her keenly awaited evidence on Tuesday morning. The huge local interest was marked by the crowds of spectators who began lining up before 6 a.m. for a courtroom seat.
Wearing spectacles, her dark hair cut in a neat bob, Ms. McClintic was dressed in a black-and-white top, beige cardigan, black pants and black high-heeled shoes.
As she testified, Mr. Rafferty, his hair newly shorn in a buzz cut, stared hard at her, occasionally jotting down notes on a yellow legal pad.
The trial heard how in the run-up to the abduction, an hour or so earlier Mr. Rafferty had asked her, “Are you going to do it?”
“Do what?” Ms. McClintic recounted saying.
She said her boyfriend then taunted her, saying, “I knew it. I knew you were all talk and no action.”
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