When the body of thirteen-year-old Linda Lampkin was found, raped and strangled, on Toronto’s industrial waterfront in 1956, locals feared a sex maniac was on the loose. Within a day, detectives announced the arrest of Robert Fitton. He was charged with murder, although Fitton claimed the sex was consensual and the strangulation accidental. Fatal Confession is a compelling analysis of that violent encounter and the ensuing legal and political entanglements, which ended in the hanging of Fitton despite the jury’s and judge’s recommendation of mercy. The case exposed judicial ambivalence about the criminal definition of constructive murder in connection with rape, disagreements over the voluntariness of confessions to police, and widespread doubt over the culpability of males “tempted” by precocious females.
Weaving together politics, culture, legal history, and biography, Fatal Confession unravels a case that ultimately called into question both capital punishment and masculinist legal interpretations of sexual consent.
Carolyn Strange is a professor in and past head of the School of History at the Australian National University, Canberra. She is a fellow of both the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Among her publications are The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History, Discretionary Justice: Pardon and Parole in New York from the Revolution to the Depression, and Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion. In addition to writing and teaching, she has curated several museum exhibitions and organized public symposia on a range of social, legal, and cultural issues. She lives in Australia.
