Tara McDonald’s eight-year-old daughter, Victoria “Tori” Stafford, didn’t come home from school one afternoon this past spring. The sole trace of her was a ghostly, lurching image on a piece of surveillance tape: a little girl being led from her schoolyard by an unknown woman in a white jacket.
In the weeks that followed, Tori’s hometown of Woodstock, Ont., searched and waited, searched and waited. Like many pictures of missing children, Tori’s image became a kind of talisman for all the parents whose own children were safe and tightly held. She was everywhere for a while, a pretty girl with blond hair in a fashionable chop, a half-moon smile and sparkles on her clothes. Volunteers put pictures of her face inside purple balloons and sent them to scatter in the sky.
When McDonald appeared before the media, she often wore dark glasses, as if to place a small barrier between her own eyes and the eyes of the world upon her. It looked like self-preservation. From day one, you knew that everyone was going to be watching her eyes, scanning and judging, measuring the authenticity of her grief.
And so it went: A few weeks in, McDonald and her ex, Tori’s dad, clashed in front of journalists. Rodney Stafford berated McDonald for failing to display enough emotion: “This is your daughter!” Eventually, McDonald felt compelled to dispel internet rumours linking her to her daughter’s abduction.
Here we are again. At first, the mother of the missing child is a beatific image of unimaginable loss, a landing place for everyone else’s unmoored fear and sympathy. But quickly she can become a suspect, or worse.
