The parents of Victoria "Tori" Stafford are living every parent's worst nightmare now that charges have been laid against two people alleged to have stolen and murdered their little girl.
With details still sketchy, it appears Tori was snatched away in broad daylight outside her school and killed within hours. The suspects apparently abducted Tori for "nefarious" purposes, choosing her for no other reason than that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Every parent lives in fear of losing their children and few can bear the thought of their children being the victim of sexual predators. But even before Tori's parents' learned their daughter's fate, they'd been living a hell that began the day she went missing, April 8.
From that first day, the attentions of both police and the news media were squarely on the parents. Rumours -- often vicious -- swirled about them, with many of their past indiscretions being dredged up and broadcast by suspicious neighbours.
Tori's mother, Tara McDonald, found herself being asked questions that no parent dealing with the grief of a lost child wants to answer. There were rumours about drug addictions and talk about crippling debts to biker gangs.
McDonald insisted the rumours were all lies.
"I haven't done drugs since high school. Who doesn't smoke weed in high school? But not after that," she said on May 15. "I don't care what people say, but this is taking the attention away from Tori. Nothing except finding Tori matters right now."
Four weeks later, McDonald admitted to reporters she has battled an addiction to OxyContin and has taken part in methadone treatment.
McDonald, her boyfriend, Tori's father, Rodney Stafford, and other close family members tried to clear up suspicions by taking lie detector tests over the Easter weekend. But when police refused to comment on the tests and Tori's family wouldn't discuss the full results, suspicions only grew.
Reporters struggled to tell the story as they were both stonewalled by police reticent to release critical information and bombarded by "tips" from suspicoius residents of a town of 35,000, where everyone is said to know everyone.
Strangely, the one woman no one seemed to know was the woman on the surveillance video, seen walking away with a happy-looking Tori. Nor did anyone seem to know the woman depicted in a police sketch released more than two weeks into the disappearance. The fact that the suspect looked a bit like Tara MacDonald didn't help deflect attention away from her.
"It looks nothing like me," the mother of two insisted to reporters outside her home April 22. "Quit pointing a finger at me. Quit pointing fingers at everybody else, until there's somebody that we can point a finger at."
Though she insisted: "At the end of the day, I know that I had nothing to do with this," McDonald's every move -- from holding daily "press conferences" outside her home, to wearing sparkly eyeshadow during those briefings -- further fuelled rumours.
McDonald even had to respond to accusations that she didn't appear a grieving mother and hadn't been showing enough emotion during her daily "briefings."
"There's times where I sit in my house and I bawl my eyes out -- I curl up in a ball and I sob," she responded. "People have asked many times, 'Why aren't you crying, why aren't you showing emotion?' I don't do it out here. I do it in there with my friends and family, with people who can console me."
Many scratched their heads with McDonald later told the bizarre tale of a mysterious benefactor who had whisked her away to a hotel by limousine and offered to front the money from ransom demands that never came.
When reporters later asked her about skeptics who questioned her story about the benefactor, McDonald responded that Woodstock was "full of stories and rumours and crap."
"People watch the 1 p.m. press conference and make up their own stories," she said.
"A lot of weird things have taken place. A lot of weird messages, a lot of weird letters," McDonald went on to say. "[The limo ride] was no more any weird than anything else we have encountered so far."
As if the speculations of nosy neighbours and reporters trying to get their story weren't enough, Tori's parents had to contend with a police investigation they decided was ineffective.
They raged as the Oxford Community Police Department continued to label the abduction of their daughter a "missing persons" case, even a week after their girl had been gone. They struggled to understand why police didn't seem to be looking beyond them for other suspects.
But police were likely following the advice of experts on missing children cases, who know all too well that stranger abductions are statistically rare.
In 2007, of the 60,582 children reported missing in Canada, only 56 were kidnapped by someone other than the children's parents. The vast majority of the rest were runaways.
Former Toronto Police Supt. Gary Ellis says experience tells police to focus first on people close to the child.
"I always teach that the first place you look -- and percentage-wise in my own experience and what I have seen -- is that usually it is someone very, very close geographically and within the family," Ellis told CTV Newsnet Wednesday, as word of the arrests came down.
"It's very, very seldom that it's someone else in the rest of the world."
He says in cases of a stranger abduction, police need to work fast in the first two days after a disappearance if they hope to recover the child alive.
"The first 48 hours are critical. That's when the person has committed the act and then there's scrambling to make sense of the nonsense they've created. They're running around trying to cover up the evidence, trying to dispose of remains and build up their alibi and all sorts of things. And that's when they're most vulnerable, that's when they make mistakes."
"Unfortunately, the abductions of children that I've been involved in have been mostly sexual in nature, and the child has been dead within an hour."
In the case of Tori Stafford, it appears that some of those lessons may have been borne out.
Now, facing the arraignment and trial of their little girl's murderer and abductors, Tori's parents' nightmare is not over. It has only begun its next chapter.
