Police searching for Victoria Stafford's remains released images Friday of a Honda sedan which may have been involved in the young girl's abduction six weeks ago.
The blue Honda, which is partially covered by black spray paint, was spotted by video cameras in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Guelph, Ont., around the time Victoria was kidnapped on April 8.
While police charged two people in the young girl's disappearance and death earlier this week, officers continue to scour swaths of land near Woodstock Ont., looking for the girl's remains.
Oxford Community Police Const. Laurie-Anne Maitland said Friday that police hope images of the Honda may trigger community response about the body's whereabouts.
Maitland said that the 2003 sedan was seized by police and is considered a suspect vehicle.
Earlier this week, suspect Terri-Lynne McClintic was seen in a police search helicopter flying around the Guelph area. McClintic was reportedly helping officers track down the body.
"It's been painstakingly long, this entire investigation," Maitland told CTV Newsnet in a telephone interview from Woodstock. "They're being very thorough, but they've yet to find her."
Earlier in the day, Tara McDonald, Victoria's mom, cast doubt on the theory that McClintic was helping police.
"I think if she knew where our daughter was at this point, then they wouldn't be searching," she told reporters in front of her Woodstock Friday.
"I honestly feel that she's just enjoying some helicopter rides and some fresh air because she's probably not going to be getting very much of that in the future."
McClintic, 18, is facing charges of kidnapping and being an accessory to murder after the fact. McClintic and her boyfriend, Michael Thomas C.S. Rafferty, were arrested Tuesday.
No allegations against Rafferty and McClintic have yet been proven in a court of law.
McClintic's co-operation a 'gesture'
McClintic's lawyer said her client is co-operating in the search as a gesture to the girl's family.
"Certainly she's doing it because she feels she needs to do this for the family and for Tori," lawyer Jeanine LeRoy told CTV Toronto on Friday.
On Friday, a judge extended a court order allowing McClintic to help police until Sunday.
"She did indicate that the weather changes and the foliage changes (since April 8) are making that tougher," LeRoy told The Canadian Press Friday.
Police continued to focus their search in an area between Guelph and Fergus, including a rock pile. OPP officers with a cadaver-sniffing dog are involved.
On Thursday, police picked up a dumpster near Fergus and sent it away so that its contents could be examined.
McDonald confirmed she won't be making any funeral arrangements until Tori's body is found.
"It's not that I don't believe what's going on," she said. "I know what's going on. But I'm not going to be able to go through that twice."
McDonald-McClintic links
McDonald said she met McClintic twice at her mother Carol's house but never really spoke with her.
"We were going to breed our dogs. That's not a rumour, that's a fact," she said, adding they were going to offer them furniture because they had none.
She said after two meetings with the elder McClintic, she refused to have anything more to do with them.
McDonald said she developed some suspicions about Terri-Lynne after the surveillance footage came out and then when a sketch was released on April 21.
Her boyfriend James Goric went over to the McClintic home two or three days into the ordeal. By that time, Terri-Lynne had cut her hair.
McDonald has battled an Oxycontin addiction, but when asked about any drug ties to the McClintics, she said: "Absolutely not."
McDonald on her ordeal
For a 42-day period, McDonald had to cope with the immense stress of being the mother of a missing child while being a suspect in her disappearance.
"I told everybody from the beginning that we had nothing to do with it," she said.
Whispers started about her, both in conversation around town and in electronic forums such as Facebook, once surveillance video of Tori leaving school with a woman in a puffy white coat came out and a composite sketch of the suspect.
There is some resemblance, but McDonald was both older and heavier than the person in the video.
"It was hard, but at the end of the day, there's two things we were sure of -- that we had nothing to do with it and number two, that we're amazing parents," McDonald said of her ex-husband Rodney Stafford, Tori's father.
Police at one point did directly say she was a suspect, McDonald said, but she couldn't recall when that happened.
"I was disgusted," she said, but added part of the police's job is to make a person feel guilty to try and make them "come clean."
They did question her after she failed some lie detector questions.
"It's wasn't that they were extremely rude about it or pressing, but it was always a gnawing suspicion from us that they were looking at us," she said.
Her son Daryn, 11, recently took out his feelings by breaking a metal mop stick in the backyard, she said, adding they have told him that "your sister has gone to heaven."
