Fatal Confession: A Girl’s Murder, a Man’s Execution, and the Fitton Case

Carolyn Strange, Fatal Confession: A Girl’s Murder, a Man’s Execution, and the Fitton Case. Published by the University of British Columbia Press. Carolyn Strange is Professor of History at the Australian National University. In the mid-1950s most Canadians still believed that murder merited the death penalty. It was also a time when modern approaches to combat the problem of sex crime were first implemented. This book traces the tension between those themes through the rape-murder of a girl and its legal consequences. R. v Fitton was a unique landmark in the criminal law and a window on Canadian society. The murder of children, particularly sex murders, invariably produces strong reactions, but the character of those responses is tied to time and place. This murder in Toronto in January 1956 flushed out ambivalence over the culpability of a males tempted by precocious females, disagreements over latitude of police to extract confessions, and disquiet over the royal prerogative of mercy’s administration by the federal cabinet. This crime was no mystery: Robert Fitton admitted to police that he killed Linda Lampkin. Yet, there were other mysteries. Why was Fitton sentenced and convicted of murder? Why, despite a robust defence at trial, on appeal and before the Supreme Court, was he executed at Toronto’s Don Jail on 21 November 1956? Why was he executed despite being recommended for mercy by both the trial jury and the trial judge? By weaving politics and culture into legal history and biography, Carolyn Strange answers these questions.