Event Details
Toronto Book Awards Finalist, Carolyn Strange, will read a passage from Fatal Confession, followed by a moderated conversation with Isabel Slone, Senior Culture Editor, Toronto
Event Details
Toronto Book Awards Finalist, Carolyn Strange, will read a passage from Fatal Confession, followed by a moderated conversation with Isabel Slone, Senior Culture Editor, Toronto Life
Speakers for this event
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Carolyn Strange
Carolyn Strange
Carolyn Strange is an historian who uncovers forgotten and misunderstood parts of the past. Born in Toronto, she has taught at Queen’s University, Carleton University and the University of Toronto; she is currently emeritus professor of history at the Australian National University. As a specialist in the history of gender and criminal justice, her first book was Toronto’s Girl Problem: the Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 (1995). She is an internationally acclaimed historian of the death penalty and clemency, the subjects of Qualities of Mercy: Justice Punishment and Discretion (1996), True Crime, True North: the Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines (with Tina Loo) (2004), Discretionary Justice: Pardon and Parole in New York, from the Revolution to the Depression (2016), and The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History (2020). Her latest book, Fatal Confession: A Girl’s Murder, A Man’s Execution and the Fitton Case (2025), returns to Toronto and a long-forgotten rape murder that became a turning point in the history of capital punishment in Canada.
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Maddy Mahoney
Maddy Mahoney
Maddy Mahoney is an award-winning journalist and a features editor at Toronto Life magazine. Their writing has appeared in Toronto Life, Xtra, Maisonneuve, CBC Arts and This Magazine, among others. Recent publications include: “Notes on an Academic Scandal,” an investigation into a demotion and DEI at Toronto Metropolitan University; “North Stars,” an unfettered roundtable with CanCon’s queer mafia; and “Quality Trash,” a profile of Hallmark’s most prolific director.
Books
Fatal Confession
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.
Murders of children, particularly sex-related killings, invariably produce strong reactions, but those responses are tied to place and period. In the mid-1950s, popular true crime non-fiction was taking off and Canadians, most of whom supported the death penalty, were deeply anxious about sex crime. Fitton was convicted and executed, but his case exposed judicial ambivalence about the Criminal Code’s 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 politics and culture into legal history and biography, Fatal Confession unravels a case that ultimately lent momentum to the death penalty’s abolition and opposition to masculinist legal interpretations of sexual consent.
Beyond its clear relevance to scholars of socio-legal history, criminal justice, gender and sexuality, and Canadian history, this gripping account of a landmark legal case will keep all true-crime readers turning its pages.
AuthorCarolyn Strange
PublisherUBC Press