By James Aitchison

Nassau, the Bahamas.  8 July 1943.  It was after midnight when Sir Harry Oakes, aged 68, one of the world’s richest men, was murdered with a silver ice pick from Simpsons-in-the-Strand.  It punctured the side of his head.  He was then struck four times behind the left ear with a miner’s hand pick, after which his body was doused with petrol — some experts said insecticide — and set on fire, the flames concentrating around his eyes.  Finally, his body was sprinkled with feathers from a mattress.

A blood-stained handprint was found on the wall above the bed, as were muddy footprints on the stairs.  The post-mortem discovered blisters on the body that were not caused by fire; rather, they suggested Oakes had been tortured.

More than a gruesome murder, it became one of the most baffling unsolved cases of the twentieth century involving many high-profile personalities.

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Born in 1874, Oakes was an American gold mine owner, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.  He made his fortune in Canada before moving to the Bahamas in 1935 for tax purposes.  There he became a British citizen and was knighted for his massive donations to charitable causes in 1939.  By the early 1940s, Oakes was the colony’s wealthiest, most powerful resident.  Among his investments he owned the British Colonial Hilton Hotel Nassau, a golf course and country club, and around one-third of the principal island in the Bahamas. 

His five children included his eldest daughter Nancy Oakes (1925-2005), and it was Nancy who would play a central role in events before and after her father’s murder.

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On the night of the murder, Oakes had entertained some dinner guests including his close friend, property developer Harold Christie.  Oakes’s family were abroad on vacation at the time.  Christie stayed the night in a spare room.  In the morning he found his host’s body.  He claimed he had heard nothing all night.

Immediately the murder was discovered, the Governor of the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor, took charge of the investigation.  In fact, he and Oakes had been due to play golf that very morning.

Formerly King Edward VIII, the Duke had abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.  The British Government, alarmed by the Duke’s support for Hitler, shipped him out to the Bahamas — as far away from Europe as possible — to minimise his embarrassment to the royal family and involvement with the Nazi regime.  As Winston Churchill put it, “to where he would do the least damage to the British war effort.”

Since arriving in the Bahamas, the Duke had become close friends with Oakes.  He urgently tried to censor news of the tycoon’s murder but failed.  Oakes’s vast wealth, his British title and the grisly details of his death made headlines worldwide.

Under normal circumstances, the Governor of the Bahamas would have called in Britain’s Scotland Yard to investigate the murder.  In wartime, that was impossible.  While the Duke lacked faith in the local police, he could have asked British security personnel based in Washington and New York to fly down and take the case.  Instead, he took the extraordinary step of asking two detectives he knew from the Miami police force to investigate.

By evening on the second day of their investigation the two detectives — Captain Edward Melchen and Detective James Barker — arrested Oakes’s son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny.

A French-Mauritian businessman, de Marigny had eloped with Nancy Oakes, aged 18, marrying her against her parents’ will.  Witnesses attested that Oakes and de Marigny were on bad terms; Oakes detested de Marigny’s playboy lifestyle and the fact he had twice married wealthy women before taking up with his daughter.

The acrimonious relationship between Oakes and de Marigny was a potential motive for murder.  The two had not spoken in months.  Significantly, on the night of the murder, de Marigny had driven two of his dinner guests to their home — a mere hundred yards from Oakes’s mansion.  A second, even stronger motive emerged when de Marigny was shown to be virtually bankrupt.  Meanwhile, Oakes was in the process of changing his will, putting his daughter’s inheritance well beyond her husband’s reach.   

When Nancy Oakes learned of her father’s death and husband’s arrest, she refused to believe de Marigny was guilty.  She hired a leading British barrister and an American investigator.  Together, they soon found serious flaws in the prosecution’s case.  The two Miami detectives had thoroughly botched their investigation.  Not only had they forgotten to bring their own latent-fingerprint camera to Nassau, they left large numbers of crime scene fingerprints unprocessed, allowed visitors into the crime scene, and then scrubbed Oakes’s bedroom clean.  

In fact, at de Marigny’s trial, the defence proved that evidence had been fabricated.  A fingerprint of de Marigny’s, found on a Chinese lacquered screen in Oakes’s bedroom, had been lifted from a water glass that de Marigny had used during his questioning.  The two Miami policemen were sent packing and de Marigny was acquitted.

During the trial, the Duke of Windsor had arranged to be away from the Bahamas, to avoid being called as a witness.  After the trial, despite many requests, he refused to allow the case to be reopened.  Significantly, he had de Marigny deported from the colony immediately after the acquittal. 

De Marigny and Nancy went to Cuba and stayed with their old friend Ernest Hemingway.

De Marigny and Nancy divorced in 1949; de Marigny was deported from Cuba, and also later from Canada, due to his “unsavoury character”.

Nancy married a German baron whose estates in Estonia had been confiscated by the Soviets.  She later lived in Hollywood where she had a long affair with British actor Richard Greene, famous for starring in the TV series Robin Hood, until his death in 1985.

Nancy Oakes died in 2005, but books, movies, documentaries and even a West End play have kept her father’s murder continually in the public eye.

In 1972, Marshall Houts, an American lawyer and FBI agent, published his book Who killed Sir Harry Oakes?  Houts argued that American gangster boss Meyer Lansky was behind the tycoon’s murder.  Lansky, along with other mafioso, already had thriving casinos in Cuba. 

According to Houts, Lansky had met with the Duke of Windsor in Miami and obtained his permission to develop casino gambling in the Bahamas.  Property developer Harold Christie, Oakes’s friend, was also keen to support Lansky’s plans.  However, Sir Harry Oakes opposed the idea and his influence posed a serious threat.  Lansky was enraged.  He sent henchmen to meet Oakes on the night of his murder.  The rendezvous took place on a fast powerboat that had travelled from Miami.  In the ensuring “negotiations”, Oakes was killed.  His body was then moved back to his house and a crime scene fabricated.

To this day, the Oakes murder case remains unsolved.  Conspiracy theories aside, the investigation was certainly flawed, corrupt and totally unprofessional.  Whether the blame for this can be attached solely to the Duke of Windsor is moot.  He was definitely “implicated in the attempt to pervert the course of justice and frame an innocent man”. 

Allegedly, the Duke was keen to conceal his financial dealings with Axis allies, and feared a deeper, broad-ranging investigation.  One theory points to the possibility that both the Duke and Sir Harry Oakes were laundering money.  Another theory suggests that the Duke was involved with Swedish millionaire industrialist Axel Wennergren, rumoured to have close ties with the Nazis.  Had Oakes discovered that the Duke and Wennergren were Nazi spies thereby sealing his own fate?

And what of Oakes’s friend Harold Christie: he claimed not to have heard any suspicious noises from Oakes’s bedroom, just down the hall.  Was this because he was helping to transfer his friend’s body from the real murder scene aboard the powerboat and back to his mansion?  A local police officer testified he had seen Christie in town travelling in a station wagon from the docks.  And a nightwatchman claimed to have seen two men come off an unfamiliar boat in the harbour on the night of the murder; he mysteriously drowned before he could give 0evidence in court.

Small wonder the Oakes case ranks among the world’s most sensational unsolved crimes of the twentieth century.