Time for Rafferty to wipe that smirk off his face
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Bye-bye, Michael Rafferty.
You can wipe that smirk off your face now — the cocky smile you wore throughout your trial, so sure you were that you were going to be acquitted of these heinous crimes.
As if you had outsmarted us all.
A fan of CSI, you had wiped your Honda clean at that Cambridge carwash, disposed of Tori’s clothes and your own, threw out the back seat in your car and tried to wipe your BlackBerry clean.
You had buried Victoria Stafford in garbage bags beneath hundreds of pounds of rocks, left that bludgeoned child hidden and alone at the end of a remote country lane more than two hours from the people who loved and missed her, figuring she could never reveal the cruel horror you hammered down upon her.
Oh, but that innocent girl could not rest until she brought you to justice.
And she has now, she has.
How smug you were.
How you liked to puff out that barrel chest.
Such a stud, such a ladies’ man, you figured you had your lovesick partner in crime wrapped around your finger, that Terri-Lynne McClintic would keep her silence, or at worst, take the fall.
But she turned you in.
She had seen the mocking in your cold eyes, heard the distance in your voice when you said the two of you should lay low now that the police were closing in.
Still, you figured you had chosen well — who’d believe this crazy, violent, Oxy-popping gangsta poser with a criminal record as long as her brown hair?
A jury of your peers did.
A brave, brilliant jury that could see through your lies and see that McClintic was telling the horrific truth.
“This is either two people whose lives were taken over by drugs and all the stress that was going on, and they made a bad decision,” the master interrogator, Det.-Sgt. Jim Smyth, told Rafferty during his ultimately fruitless questioning. “Or this is (a story about) two cold-blooded psychopaths who are planning and plotting to snatch an innocent little girl off the street.”
He was right on the latter.
“Is this another Paul Bernardo?” another detective had asked him.
Rafferty certainly appeared to be a wannabe, even downloading the movie Karla, about the diabolical duo, just a few weeks after Tori’s murder.
He had also found a willing accomplice to entice a girl into his car, as twisted and sick as he was.
But unlike Bernardo, Rafferty liked his victims young, the younger the better.
When McClintic delivered Tori to his car — the prey he had ordered — he was angry that she was too old.
Oh, Tori. Your final hours were so mercilessly brutal.
You were supposed to meet your girlfriends back at your house, where you and your mom had just finished decorating your room with your favourite Bratz characters.
You were going to watch High School Musical III.
Instead, you fell into the trap of a monster.
Who knows whether Rafferty would have done this again if he hadn’t been caught.
McClintic certainly feared that he would, and told police that was one of the reasons she felt compelled to confess three years ago.
Even she had a conscience, or so it would seem.
Not so, our “Mychol” Rafferty.
In his many online postings, he once claimed that he was a “good person.”
How deluded this man could be.
In many ways he’s very reminiscent of Michel Briere, the predator who raped and killed Holly Jones after consuming a steady, insatiable diet of child pornography.
He, too, had snatched a young schoolgirl while she was walking home alone in broad daylight.
Briere would blame child porn for his taking Holly.
How many nights did Rafferty feed on disgusting images and movies of children being molested and raped?
How long had he fantasized about turning them into reality?
But now, like Briere, like Bernardo, this predator will be safely locked away for life.
“I’ll be there to say ‘bye-bye,’ believe me,” the detective had predicted as he left the defiant Rafferty behind in the tiny interrogation room.
Thank goodness Smyth was right.
You can rest in peace now, little girl.
Rest in peace.