The Deptford Mask Murders & Adolf Fittler

Adolf Fittler tells the story of a young boy growing up in the 1950s in the industrial town of Middlesbrough in England during the Windrush era, who like his father and his grandfather before him was fast becoming a racist. This was when immigrants were arriving in the town from commonwealth countries to help fill the gap in the labour market after the war. As Adolf said “I started my life as a racist; I had little choice, as growing up that was all that my father talked about, every conversation always seemed to revolve around or relate to black or Asian people. I had little to do with any immigrants, the ones that were in our school I avoided, as did most of the other white kids in the school and the black and Asian kids tended to stick together as there was safety in numbers. In June 1959 there was a turning point in my life, an event that would transform the way that I would view the world and live my life when Winston and Kaleisha Brown, two kids from Jamaica moved into a council house on Granville Street in the Cannon Street area of town, just two doors down from the Fittler house”

DEPTFORD MASK MURDERS

In 1905 a crime took place in London that would change the way that police forces around the world would identify criminal suspects, the Deptford Mask Murders.

On the 27th of March 1905, Thomas Farrow was found beaten to death in an oil and paint shop he managed in Deptford. Ann Farrow, Thomas’s wife was also badly beaten and succumbed to her injuries and died in hospital one week later. This was the crime that the Scotland Yard Fingerprint Bureau had been waiting for since the bureau was formed in 1901, a high-profile crime that would put the spotlight on the science of fingerprinting as a reliable, efficient and infallible system of identifying criminals. The book is based on those true events and is my interpretation of what I believe could have happened 115 years ago when fingerprints were used for the very first time in Great Britain to convict the Stratton brothers of willful murder. All of the main characters in this book who played their part in having the brothers convicted were real people in this extraordinary historical event.