Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?

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In the mining business, he was a tyrant. A meddlesome and micromanaging boss, his top managers routinely quit within months of being hired. Those who managed to stay with him he eventually fired. Bahamas, Ho! Owen's book on the Oakes murder [40] claims that de Marigny was the murderer. In the December 2006 television documentary Murder in Paradise [41] Owen, the presenter, stated that he had seen documents from the British National Archives that were not intended for public release. They contained details of a Scotland Yard investigation that took place four years after the trial, and which concluded that de Marigny was the murderer. The programme noted that as a possible motive, Oakes had uncovered corruption during the building of Nassau International Airport, and was scheduled to fly to Miami to make a statement to the authorities the day after he was murdered. But vestiges of the robust summer colony remained. Two of the Oakes’s neighbors—the Atwater Kents and the Ned Stotesburys—happily squandered their millions on furnishing their mansions and throwing lavish parties during the Great Depression. A Rough Side Show

The so-called “trial of the century” began in October. Both Edward and Wallis expected de Marigny to be convicted. It’s easy enough to imagine how Count de Marigny, with his French accent and cultured deportment, would appeal to Nancy, who was horrified by her own parents’ manners. And it’s easy enough to imagine how a lithe and beautiful 17-year-old would appeal to the thirty-two-year-old Freddy.

When Harry Met Freddy and Eddy

On 30 June 1923, Oakes married Eunice Myrtle McIntyre in Sydney, Australia. They had met aboard a cruise ship, and she was approximately half his age when they married. Another suspect had been no less than Meyer Lansky. The famed mobster, then based in South Florida, wanted to bring casinos to the Bahamas, but Oakes would have resisted that, fearing it would destroy the islands’ image. And so I did, years later, in my novel Any Human Heart (2002). Among the many things the novel contains is a full account of the murder of Harry Oakes, the identification of his murderer and the crucial role played in the case by the Duke of Windsor and how he did his utmost to pervert the course of justice and condemn an innocent man to death. It's a measure of the enduring infamy and controversy of the case that it was still capable of ruffling feathers four decades later. The defendant: the man’s son-in-law, a society dandy so elevated he had four names, starting with “Count.” It would take a Bahamian jury two hours to acquit him. No one else ever has been charged.

Wallis, meanwhile, wrote to her aunt that, “I am afraid there is a lot of dirt underneath… one wonders how far it will all go… I do not think there is a big enough laundry anywhere to take Nassau’s dirty linen.”The plot was perfect. There was blood and the thunder of a rampaging tropical storm,” Gardner said. “Who could need more?” The duke wrote in August that the playboy was “a despicable character… with the worst possible record, morally and financially, since his adolescence.” Historians have alleged that the Duke of Windsor bungled the case, by enlisting the assistance of Miami policemen James Baker and Edward S. Melchen, rather than relying on Bahamian detectives, which was typical of the widespread racial discrimination in that era.