Child sex killer Michael Rafferty attacked a fellow inmate after convicts targeted him over his horrific crimes
Notorious child rapist and killer Michael Rafferty has been convicted of assault with a weapon after attacking an inmate in the prison where he is serving time for the brutal murder of eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford, National Post has learned.
Charges of assault with a weapon and threatening death or bodily harm followed a jailhouse confrontation after years of Rafferty being targeted for abuse from fellow inmates because of his status as a child sex offender.
The incident provides a rare look inside Canada’s prison culture.
At the time of the attack, an inmate had taunted Rafferty, threw garbage into his cell, and said he was going to boil water to throw at him, said Rafferty’s lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais.
“People, as usual, were threatening him. He went to the guards to ask them for help, they told him to deal with it himself. That’s what he did,” Bordelais said in an interview when asked about the case.
Rafferty then went to the kitchen where the inmate was apparently preparing to boil water. Rafferty grabbed a pan and swung it at the inmate, she said.
Rodney Stafford, father of Tori — who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Rafferty and Rafferty’s then girlfriend, Terri-Lynne McClintic, in 2009 — was not upset to hear Rafferty is having a miserable time in prison.
“I hope he’s living in fear every day of his life,” Stafford said in an interview.
“I hope his days are filled with stress, anxieties, and sleepless nights wondering if someone will ever take revenge for Victoria…. That was an innocent child, and he made his choices and I’m not losing sleep if he’s living with the consequences.
“I’m praying he’s having to watch over his shoulder every minute.”
Stafford also said it is inappropriate for Rafferty to be housed in a medium- or minimum-security prison.
“If he were in maximum where he should be, this would be a non-issue,” he said.
Rafferty’s charges were quietly and quickly heard in a Quebec court on Feb. 9 in a five-minute hearing, which Rafferty joined via a video link, according to court records.
Rafferty, 45, was charged almost a year after the jailhouse skirmish, that happened on Nov. 15, 2024. Charges were laid by Quebec provincial police.
The other inmate did not want to cooperate in a prosecution, but the incident was caught on prison security cameras.
Rafferty pleaded guilty to the assault charge at Laval courthouse, after which the threatening charge was dropped.
Rafferty wanted the judge, Marie-Eve Landreville, to know the circumstances, Bordelais said.
“He was fed up with always being the target of threats and behaviours of this type, where inmates find out who he is and threaten him, throw garbage on his bed, in his cell, and that sort of incident.
“He usually never reacts,” she said. “He was scared, and he was also very frustrated” that there wasn’t intervention.
The new conviction against Rafferty does not extend his prison sentence because he is already serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and kidnapping.
It does, however, push back the date he is eligible to seek day parole, to June 2031, and his eligibility date for seeking full parole, to June 2034.
Rafferty’s residential address in court documents is listed as the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) Federal Training Centre in Laval, Que., which is a joint minimum- and medium-security prison designed to hold 764 inmates.
That explains why his trial was held in Laval’s courthouse but also reveals that Rafferty had been moved to a new prison.
In 2018, Rafferty was transferred from Port-Cartier Institution, a maximum-security prison in Quebec’s northeast, to La Macaza Institution, a medium-security prison about 190 kilometres northwest of Montreal.
After that move, questions were raised in Parliament and Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Ralph Goodale, said the transfer was being reviewed. Goodale said the transfer was justified as La Macaza “specializes in the treatment of sex offenders.”
On Monday, CSC refused to say whether Rafferty was housed in the minimum-security side or the medium-security side of the institution, citing privacy regulations.
CSC did, however, confirm the fight, calling it “an altercation between inmates.”
“The injured inmates were evaluated by staff members and cleared soon after. The assailants were identified, and the appropriate actions have been taken. No staff members were injured during this incident,” said Jean-François Mathieu, a communications manager for CSC in Quebec.
CSC also declined to confirm or deny Bordelais’ allegation that staff failed to intervene on Rafferty’s behalf.
Correctional officers are trained in a risk-based model for responding to and resolving incidents, said Mathieu.
“It is our expectation that our employees work to uphold the safety of our institutions, and those who work and live within them,” he said.
In a court ruling on the original murder cases against Rafferty and McClintic, a judge summed up their brutal attack on Tori Stafford by saying it “embodied the worst fear of every parent.”
On April 8, 2009, eight-year-old Tori was in Grade 3 in Woodstock, Ont., about 140 kilometres west of Toronto. It was her first day of being allowed to walk home from school alone. She never made it.
Her disappearance triggered a large search and investigation, and immense public anguish. As many as 900 police officers participated at some point in the probe, 8,000 homes were visited and more than 5,000 potential tips were received from the public.
After police arrested Rafferty’s girlfriend, McClintic, a month later, she cooperated with investigators, telling them that Rafferty picked her up that day and told her he wanted her to “snatch a little girl.” She agreed and Rafferty dropped McClintic off near a public school.
McClintic said Tori was the first female student she saw walking towards her outside the school. McClintic struck up a conversation with Tori about dogs as she walked beside her; she told the girl she had a Shih Tzu and asked if Tori would like to see it. Tori said yes and they walked to a parking lot where Rafferty was waiting in his Honda Civic.
She told Tori to look in the back seat for the dog, and as she peered in, she was pushed inside.
The three drove off.
In a frightful display of premeditation, Rafferty and McClintic stopped at a Home Depot to buy a hammer and garbage bags before driving to a remote farmer’s field where Tori was brutalized and killed, and her body concealed in a garbage bag, covered by rocks and abandoned.
After McClintic’s revelations, police arrested Rafferty. He was 28 at the time. McClintic was 18.
Two months after their arrests, Tori’s body was found.
McClintic pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Tori in April 2010 and was given a mandatory life sentence. She was the star witness at Rafferty’s jury trial in 2012.
Rafferty pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, sexual assault causing bodily harm and kidnapping. At his trial, McClintic testified that — contrary to what she had previously said — she was the one who swung the hammer that killed Tori after Rafferty sexually assaulted her.
Even so, a jury convicted Rafferty on all charges. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2012.
Rafferty, whose full name is Michael Thomas Christopher Stephen Rafferty, appealed his conviction in 2016. He claimed he was a bystander who only tried to help his girlfriend cover up her horrific crime. The appeal court judges dismissed his appeal without Crown prosecutors even needing to respond.
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.