The roll-call of stolen children: Emanuel Jaques, Sharin Morningstar Keenan, Christine Jessop, Nicole Morin, Alison Parrott, Andrea Atkinson, Kayla Klaudusz, Cecilia Zhang, Holly Jones.
Victoria Stafford.
And those were just the kids aged 12 and younger, taken in and around Toronto, that I can recite from memory.
Snatched off the street, from a backyard, a front yard, on the way home from school, from a friend's house, even from their own bedrooms, sometimes randomly, sometimes specifically stalked, always at a moment of opportunity and life is full of those.
Experts in the field of violence remind that, like adult women, children are more commonly threatened and done harm by those closest to them parents and relatives, close family acquaintances, the youngsters fearful of exposing their tormentors because they love those who hurt them, are vulnerable to the threats that silence.
But the fact remains, even in this era of well-street-proofed children, they are still kids. They are likely to go trustingly with someone they know even slightly. And they're little, easy to overwhelm by force or cajoling, their innocence used against them.
It is a sad reality that there are many parents who can both deeply empathize with Tara McDonald and Rodney Stafford, and maybe offer some hard-learned wisdom on how to proceed from here, keep wanting to live in a world without their child, knowing what they know and what they don't, can only imagine in the darkest of reflections. Having other children who still need their mom and dad however altered those parents might be by tragedy is the most spine-stiffening force for enduring the unendurable.
There is another child here, glimpsed occasionally these past six weeks playing alone in the driveway, pulling wheelies on his bike, steadfastly ignoring the constant lurking of reporters.
Eleven-year-old Daryn Stafford is the one who often walked his sister home from school, as he would probably have done on that fateful day, April 8, except that he'd accompanied another youngster, an autistic child, back to the boy's townhouse, as requested by the boy's father.
Within all the information that has become public since a Woodstock couple was charged and arrested Tuesday in the murder of Tori Stafford the 8-year-old not yet located despite an immense concentration of search efforts in two areas near Guelph one obscure detail emerges as most strange and haunting: The revelation that Daryn had sensed something suspect about one of the accused, Terri-Lynne McClintic.
Tori's dad, Rodney Stafford, told the Star's Raveena Aulakh on Wednesday that Daryn had earlier mentioned the name Terri-Lynne and "that address'' the house on Wilson St. where McClintic resided with her mother.
"Daryn was telling me something about hair-dye and a (white) coat. He knew about hair-dye and the girl possibly cutting her hair, dyeing her hair. I don't know how he got that information but it came from my son and it was rather disturbing."
McClintic chopped off her long hair just after police released a surveillance videotape of Tori walking away with a mystery woman in a puffy white coat. A neighbour told the Star McClintic had planned to dye her hair but apparently never got the chance, before she was taken into custody by police a month ago for breach of a probation order. McClintic's mother had also told neighbours that the 18-year-old had got rid of that distinctive coat, ditching it in London, Ont.
McClintic is now assisting police in their search for Tori's remains. But there will surely be no deal-cutting, not this time, the greater likelihood that the female accused will imminently have charges against her elevated to first-degree murder from abduction and accessory to murder, allegedly having helped boyfriend Michael Thomas Rafferty elude police "on or about'' the day Tori vanished.
"It's still early stages but right now she is cooperating fully with police, telling investigators what she knows," McClintic's newly secured lawyer said yesterday.
For a country that still remembers the notorious "deal with the devil" struck by Karla Homolka the sweetheart accommodation that shielded the schoolgirl killer from aggressive prosecution in the deaths of Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy and her own sister Tammy, in return for testifying against Paul Bernardo any similar arrangement concocted by officials within the Ministry of the Attorney General would be intolerable.
There are echoes in Tori's abduction mostly from what's been uncovered by reporters thus far of Homolka's procuring of sex victims for her fianc/husband, including another teenager who was Homolka's friend, coveted by Bernardo.
It is allegedly McClintic who took Tori, the child apparently killed within hours of her disappearance. It is, police have suggested, McClintic who knew Tara McDonald, if only peripherally.
There's no confirmation yet that Tori was sexually assaulted but that is most assuredly the subtext, what everyone is thinking. That's why children are usually taken, and murdered afterwards as if that puts an end to it, for the assailant.
What's incomprehensible, if true, the combination so rare in the annals of crime, is how anybody could serve up a child for a man's perverse longing; be complicit before or after the fact in the most vile intentions. Yet it happens, if more often within dreadful family dynamics, women betraying their own blood to please a man, hang on to a man.
Yet Homolka had her defenders, who saw in that wretch a woman abused into predatory criminality. Even a couple of Bernardo's jurors would later give Homolka a you-go-girl pat on the back. It is misplaced compassion.
From what we know, McClintic has had a crummy life, reared in a home drenched in drugs, severed from adoptive father at an early age, raised by a former-stripper mom. Perhaps she was always doomed to a troubled adulthood, the consequence of decisions made by others.
That might be an explanation. It is never an excuse.
Nothing could temper what is feared to have befallen Tori.
