Tutuola was raised in the Harlem area of New York City and was six years old during the 1968 riots following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, making his birth year 1961 or 1962. When he was a child, he witnessed his mother being murdered by a business rival of his father, a petty criminal; 30 years later, while investigating an unrelated case, he discovered that his mother's killer was himself murdered.