_{A HEALING LODGE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE}

Okimaw Ohci – which translates to Thunder Hills in Cree – has operated out of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, Canada for the past 23 years. Since then, eight more healing lodges have opened, all of which apply Indigenous (Native Indians) approaches to justice and reconciliation to help rehabilitate female offenders. Some  female prisoners who are serving in provincial prisons  and federal prisons can be se t to these healing lodges.

Each facility is centred within a large circular spiritual lodge where elders hold teachings and ceremonies. Female offenders are trained in Indigenous languages, family, nature, and vocational lessons. They are also encouraged to make changes in their lives on the path to recovery. The offenders live in that lodge.

Okimaw Ohci has 30 beds and, in 2012, was operated with 65 employees. The facility offers both single and family units, and inmates who are mothers are allowed to have their children stay with them.

Each federal female offender is provided with a personalized plan that touches on areas physically, emotionally and spiritually to grow. The facilities offer a “holistic and spiritual” approach, according to the Correctional Service of Canada. That means that the female offenders who were sentenced to prison for two or more years and generally serve their sentences in women’s federal penitentiaries and if the correctional authorities are convinced that serving their sentences in a healing lodge, they will be sent there to finish their sentences. Non-Indigenous prisoners can be sent to these healing lodges. There are also lodges for male prisoners.

In all cases, the prisoners are thoroughly assessed with respect to an offender’s risk to public safety before a decision is made to move him or her to a healing lodge. 

The rest of this article is about a female child killer and her victim.
                                              

Victoria "Tori" Elizabeth Marie Stafford was an eight-year-old Canadian girl abducted from Woodstock, Ontario on April 8, 2009, sexually assaulted and murdered. She was last seen on security camera footage walking with 18-year-old Terri-Lynne McClintic.                

Tori’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation and search were the subject of massive media coverage across Canada. The search for her ended on July 19, 2009, when her remains were found in a wooded area in rural Ontario and were immediately believed to be those of Tori Stafford. This was confirmed in a news conference held July 21, 2009.      

 On Tuesday, July 21, 2009, at 9:00 am police confirmed the remains found near Mount Forest, Ontario, approximately 500 meters from Concession Road 6, were that of Tori. Stafford was found naked from the waist down, wearing only a Hannah Montana T-shirt and a pair of butterfly earrings that she had borrowed from her mother. Her lower half was significantly decomposed.

A security video taken from the high school shows her walking with a person of interest. The person of interest was described as a white female aged between 19-25 - 5'1 to 5'2 tall and weighing approximately 120-125 lbs with straight long black hair worn in a pony tail. She was wearing tight black jeans and a white puffy jacket. The case was later featured on America's Most Wanted. The initial investigation was led by Oxford Community Police Service, but then turned into a joint operation with the Ontario Provincial Police.

McClintic lured Tori away from her school in Woodstock, Ontario at the end of the school day on April 8, 2009, with the promise of seeing a dog. She shoved Tori in Rafferty’s waiting car and the two of them drove about 130 kilometres north to a secluded field, where she was raped and brutally beaten to death. She died from at least four blows to the head from a hammer and 16 of her ribs were broken or fractured.

On May 20, 2009, police charged Michael Thomas Rafferty, 28, with first degree murder and Terri-Lynne McClintic, 18, with being an accessory to murder (in addition to lesser charges) in the abduction and suspected murder of Tori. Ontario Provincial Police indicated that Tori's mother, Tara McDonald, was familiar with McClintic who assisted the police in the search for the remains of Tori Stafford.  After her arrest, her lawyer stated that her client "wants Tori's family to know she is trying hard to find their daughter’ body."

During an autopsy it was determined that Tori had suffered through a beating that caused lacerations to her liver and broken ribs. Her eventual death was the result of repeated blows to the head with a claw hammer. McClintic testified that while it was Rafferty's idea to abduct Victoria and he was the one who sexually assaulted the young girl, it was McClintic who delivered the fatal hammer blows that killed her.

        

McClintic testified at Michael Thomas Rafferty trial. During her testimony, she said that she placed a garbage bag over Tori’s head and then she kicked and stomped the dying girl.  McClintic said that she then bludgeoned Tori’s head with a hammer. In her testimony, she also said, “I savagely murdered that little girl.”  

On May 28, 2009, McClintic's charges were altered to a first degree murder charge and an unlawful confinement charge, and it was announced that the two accused would be tried separately.

McClintic was scheduled to make an appearance in court on April 30, 2010, but a publication ban was imposed by the judge on the events of the day. The publication ban was lifted on December 9, 2010, revealing that Terri-Lynne McClintic pleaded guilty to first degree murder. She was sentenced to life in prison. A life sentence includes the right for a killer to apply for parole after serving 25 years of that sentence. It is up to the National Parole Board to decide if the lifer can be released at that stage of the sentence.

On March 5, 2012, the trial of Michael Rafferty for the kidnapping, sexual assault, and first-degree murder of Tori Stafford commenced. On May 11, 2012, at 9:18 pm,, the jury found Rafferty guilty on all charges. Four days later he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

On September, 12, 2012, Terri-Lynne McClintic was set to have a trial on allegations she beat up another inmate while they were in prison. She was facing a charge of assault causing bodily harm during what was expected to be a one-day trial.

Sentences can run concurrently in Canada, so even if she was found guilty, her life sentence would remain unchanged.

McClintic applied to the National Parole Board for the opportunity to serve her sentence in a healing lodge.  If her request was granted, the remainder of her sentence (whatever it may be) would be far better in the lodge than in a prison. The Board reviewed her background.

McClintic was born to a stripper in Woodstock in 1990. At birth, her mother handed her over to Carol McClintic, her best friend and a fellow stripper. Carol became her mother and in the next few years, the two lived all over Ontario, moving every couple of years. They lived in Guelph, Hamilton, North Bay, Parry Sound, Muskoka.

The moves meant McClintic attended many schools. Her attendance, she admitted, was always a problem. The moves meant McClintic attended many schools. Her attendance, she admitted, was always a problem. At school, she says she was bullied because she was a stripper’s daughter. When she was about 7 and living in Guelph, Children’s Aid began what became a long-running interest in her welfare.

It’s not clear where McClintic was when she started doing drugs, but she was about 8 years old — the same age as Tori when she was abducted and killed. McClintic started with weed, slowly graduating to harder drugs.

From then until she was 18, she was a serious drug-user. She spent her childhood at two foster homes and her teenage years at detention homes. From age 12 to 17, she had been in and out of these homes for numerous misdemeanours such as fighting and was convicted of assault at least six times.

Even in youth detention, she was perpetually in trouble. She wrote long, lurid letters and diary entries in which she threatened those who had wronged her, venting about “slaughtering” someone and “ripping out each bone.”

Life was not any better outside the juvenile homes. In 2006, McClintic, then 16, got into a fight with her mother, punching Carol and almost causing her to go blind in one eye.

But, in May 2009, Carol told the Toronto Star that her daughter had come home a few months before as a changed person. “We have been tighter than before,” said Carol. She also said her daughter had been molested when she was about 4 or 5. Carol said she stopped it as soon as she found out. Who molested her?

Sometime in 2008, the mother and daughter moved to a dilapidated two-bedroom house in Woodstock. McClintic didn’t have any friends, but gradually came to know drug dealers in the town.

In early 2009, in the months leading up to Tori’s abduction and murder, McClintic was taking antidepressants, popping OxyContin and ecstasy pills regularly, injecting morphine and smoking weed. The lone positive influence in her life was her godmother. But that relationship didn’t change the character of McClintic.

It was to her godmother that McClintic recently admitted that as a child, she had microwaved a tiny family dog. At the time of the horrid act, she had claimed the dog had been attacked by another animal. The dog was put down. This woman was invariably a sick puppy.

What everyone knows, however, is that while she was in prison, McClintic told her godmother that she was sad about Tori’s death, but only because Tori was a child. McClintic said, she could do it again.

This was the woman that the Parole Board was prepared to send her to  a minimum  security  Healing  Lodge. She was later transferred from the Grand Valley Institution for Women near Kitchener, Ontario to the Okimaw Ohc Lodge for Aboriginal Women on Nekaneet First Nation in southern Saskatchewan.

The question that comes to the fore is—who in their right minds would send a sociopath to a minimum institution for treatment in which there isn’t a psychiatrist on staff?

The transfer to the lodge sparked public outrage, protests and divisive political debate. Alberta Conservative MP Glen Motz said that the victim's family and all Canadians could have been spared the drawn-out, painful debate had the government acted immediately to overturn the transfer decision.

He also said. "What's disappointing is instead of taking decisive action when she was transferred, or when they became aware of the transfer, they deflected, they dodged, they hid behind their officials in process, until they were humiliated into doing the right thing,"

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has insisted he has no legal power to intervene in individual cases, and has argued that those decisions must be left to the professional bureaucrats who make decisions about correctional and security classifications based on what is best for the offender's rehabilitation and for public safety.

A memo from the assistant deputy attorney general for three federal departments — Public Safety, Defence and Immigration — provided to CBC News said that the minister can give directives on strategy objectives, priorities and goals, but his delegates have statutory authority over specific directives on particular cases.

Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer credited opposition and public pressure for the transfer of McClintic back to a federal  penitentiary for women.  He said, "Justice has finally been served because of you, the thousands of Canadians who let their voices be heard," he said during an event in Brampton, Ontario. "Because of the opposition pressure, the Liberals have finally backed down and taken action."

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale ordered Correctional Service Canada to improve policies related to transfers of "medium-security women offenders to facilities that do not have a directly controlled perimeter."

Under that new policy, transfers must be authorized by CSC's deputy commissioner for women, who will be required to ensure that the Indigenous communities are engaged in all  transfer recommendations.

Factors in evaluating transfers to facilities without a controlled perimeter include:

1. Length of an offender's sentence.

2. Time remaining before an offender is eligible for Unescorted Temporary Absence.

3. A requirement that long term offenders be at least into the "preparation for release" phase of their correctional plan.

4.   Institutional behaviour, for those serving long sentences.

McClintic was transferred to the Edmonton Institution for Women (a federal penitentiary) that is a multi-level facility with minimum, medium and maximum security wings. It is in the latter that this psycho will probably spend most of her life in prison

Unless she receives psychiatric treatment, she will either remain in prison for the rest of her life or be released as a dangerous offender who will be a continual  risk to society.



UPDATE:  The Correctional Service of Canada said in a news release that Joely Lambourn, 45, who was serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for dangerous driving causing death, was discovered missing at 12:25 p.m. Friday  during a headcount at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Maple Creek, Sask. RCMP were immediately notified and a warrant was issued for her arrest


UPDATE:  Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says he will examine the transfer of Victoria Stafford's murderer Michael Rafferty from a maximum-security prison to a medium-security facility -- a review that will take place just weeks after Rafferty's accomplice Terri-Lynne McClintic went back to a prison from an Indigenous healing lodge