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.