The search for Victoria Stafford's body focused on a farmer's field Thursday, where the woman charged with abducting the Grade 3 student and being an accessory to her murder was taken by police who had investigated the site only one day earlier.
Terri-Lynne McClintic was seen sitting slumped down in the back of an unmarked police vehicle, hands behind her back, as it left the area near Fergus, Ont. -- about an hour east of where Victoria, known as Tori, went missing six weeks ago.
"She's doing everything she can to assist the police fully in their investigation and to try to help them find Tori and to bring her home," said McClintic's lawyer, Jeanine LeRoy.
McClintic had been scheduled to go out with police Thursday to aid in the search, said LeRoy, who added she did not have permission to address the allegations against her client.
Several officers at the scene spent some time examining an area under a large tree, a spot where police had been the day before with a K-9 unit in the search for the eight-year-old's body. A forensics vehicle arrived on the scene Thursday afternoon.
The effort to bring Tori home safely turned into a grim recovery operation Wednesday after two people in her hometown of Woodstock, Ont., were charged in her disappearance.
McClintic, 18, is charged with abduction, and being an accessory and Michael Rafferty, 28, is charged with first-degree murder and abduction.
Rafferty and McClintic next appear in court May 28.
Only about a kilometre away from the farmer's field, police sealed off a large garbage bin, calling it an item of interest.
Several officers were dispatched to watch over the scene -- a move that came as a shock to Dean Smith, whose property houses the bin.
He said he returned from work to find a commotion and told police they were welcome to search the bin, which he said is emptied every few weeks and had been used the previous night.
"I have a nine-year-old daughter. It's sickening," he said.
Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino told Toronto radio station CFRB that evidence led police to search the area.
In the days following Tori's disappearance the community rallied behind the family, plastering the town with hundreds of flyers, holding candlelight vigils and balloon releases and participating in massive volunteer searches for the little girl.
But court documents suggest police Tori died the same day she was taken.
The flyers that once could be seen on nearly every telephone pole and in nearly every store window had all but disappeared Thursday.
When his daughter was first missing, Rodney Stafford said seeing his daughter's smiling face on posters everywhere he looked set him off crying. But now the finality of the posters' absence is also difficult for him.
"It's hard," he said Thursday. "But without being able to see a body... I still have hope.
"I am prepared to hear the worst, I am. But I don't want to."
Tori's mother, Tara McDonald, lashed out in an interview with a London, Ont., newspaper on Thursday night.
"My daughter's not coming home. I want the killers dead," McDonald told the London Free Press.
"Why did it have to be my daughter?" she said.
And McDonald told the newspaper police targeted her and her boyfriend James Goris during the investigation.
"The three times I was interviewed by police, they said, we know it's you," McDonald said told the Free Press.
Goris visited their house Thursday afternoon and lashed out at waiting reporters, knocking over camera tripods and swearing at them.
While Stafford was understandably shaken by news of the arrests, hearing McClintic's name didn't come as a surprise, he said.
About two weeks into the investigation a friend of his, Jessica McDonald, told him she was suspicious about her neighbour, Terri-Lynne McClintic.
"She gave me a lot of pretty specific details," Stafford said.
Police have provided few details on the accused or the evidence against them. Neighbours and acquaintances have talked about the couple.
McDonald said she became suspicious of her neighbour in the days following Tori's disappearance.
"She was acting funny, just some of the things she was doing and saying," McDonald said Thursday.
"I was 95 per cent sure it was her by Easter Sunday."
A surveillance video showed Tori walking outside her school with a woman with long, dark hair and around the time it was released to the public McClintic cut her hair to shoulder length, saying she had gotten gum in her hair, McDonald said.
She said McClintic and her co-accused were in a romantic relationship, though she did not know how long they had been a couple. Rafferty bought McClintic hair dye that she never got a chance to use, McDonald said.
When McClintic appeared in court Wednesday her hair was in cornrows.
Easter Sunday was also the day that McClintic was arrested on an unrelated breach of probation, McDonald said.
She hadn't seen the surveillance video at that point so she went to the police station and asked to see it and believed the woman on the tape in the white, puffy jacket to be her neighbour.
"Her body language is very distinguishing," McDonald said. "I could tell Terri-Lynne a block and a half away by the way she walks."
McClintic moved in next door to McDonald two months ago with her mother, Carol. McDonald said they were "going through a rough time."
"Once they paid their rent they had nothing...it's rough when you're starting over sometimes," McDonald said.
As McDonald's suspicions were aroused she asked Carol McClintic if her daughter had a white coat, and she replied that she used to have a white parka but had thrown it away, McDonald said.
McDonald's friend Craig Racine, who is a frequent visitor to McDonald's house, made up a story on one of the days after Tori's disappearance, but before McClintic's arrest, that he needed to borrow her laundry facilities.
Shortly after he took a bundle of clothes over police arrived, doing door-to-door canvasses. McClintic hid in the bathroom, Racine said.
He tried to coax her out, saying: "You didn't take the little girl, did you?" to which McClintic replied: "No."
At Oliver Stephens Public School the flag flew at half-mast as counsellors helped students cope with the loss of their schoolmate.
Next to the school is a row of townhouses in a co-op where Tori lived with her mother Tara McDonald and 11-year-old brother Daryn for about a year. They moved a few blocks away just five days before she was abducted.
On the front lawn three doors down from Tori's old home, neighbour Heather Baker set up a tea party memorial with a teapot, crackers, stuffed animals, flowers and lots of decorations in purple -- Tori's favourite colour.
Tori and Baker's seven-year-old daughter Emma were best friends and would drag the table out from the backyard and have tea parties in front of her kitchen window all summer long, she said.
Police said Wednesday that McClintic "may be familiar" with Tara McDonald.
Rodney Stafford said he believes the two, who lived only blocks apart, were acquainted through wanting to breed dogs.
A source told The Canadian Press that McDonald used to buy OxyContin -- a narcotic that she has admitted to using in the past -- from McClintic.
McDonald told the Free Press she did not buy drugs from McClintic and, while she had met her once, had never spoken to her.
Baker recalled a different connection.
"Terri-Lynne, I had heard her name last year, speaking with Tara," Baker said.
"I had a friend who was going to buy the couch that Tara had, and that fell through and I remember (Tara) saying, `Oh no, I'm going to give it to my friend Terri-Lynne.' "
