Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?

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All of the murder theories offered over the past seventy-five years, seem to run the longest of miles just to walk 18 feet. For it was just 18 feet between Sir Harry Oakes’ bedroom, and the bedroom in which Harold Christie supposedly slept in, while Oakes was being battered, butchered and set on fire. H. G. Christie says he slept like a baby and never heard a thing or smelled a single thing. Christie rose at 7:00 am, the next morning 8th July 1943, under some ridiculous pretext, of the two men always enjoying breakfast together on Oakes’ veranda. Harold makes a beeline straight for Oakes’ bedroom to wake him up. Again, the intimate closeness of these men must be seriously considered.

A simple, even if at first sight improbable suggestion, was a lovers rage, not money, is what pushed Harold Christie to murder Harry Oakes, on the night of July 7, 1943. Edward telephoned the Miami City Police and asked for Captain W E Melchen, chief of the Homicide Bureau. His five children mostly grew up in Palm Beach, where he owned mansions, and the family belonged to numerous local clubs. Of the five children, his first-born Nancy was just a teen when she fell in love with the man who later would be accused of killing her father. For years after the trial, people came forward to say they knew — knew! — who killed Sir Harry Oakes. Oakes bought property just above Dufferin Islands from the estate of Walter H. Shoellkopf, on July 15, 1924. [30] He constructed a 37-room Tudor- style mansion (by Findlay and Foulis in 1929 and later gatehouse and stables in 1931), [31] where he and his wife lived from 1928 to 1935, known as Oak Hall. Oakes moved to the Bahamas afterward, due to what he felt was excessive taxation by the Canadian government - the Bahamas were virtually tax-free. Oakes' son, Sir Sydney Oakes, later occupied the residence. Since 1982, Oak Hall has been the headquarters for the Niagara Parks Commission. A portion of the estate was sold off in the 1960s and is part of Marineland of Canada.By this time, Bar Harbor was past its heyday as a summer resort for the wealthy families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Letters to the local newspaper complained of the number of empty cottages. Storefronts were vacant. A public solicitation was created to shame the Congregational Church on Mount Desert Street into cleaning up trash and debris that accumulated in the churchyard. Patricia Luisa Oakes (born 1951-2012), who married Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. (1914–1988) in 1977, with whom she had one son before divorcing in 1981. Patricia later married Robert Leigh-Wood in 1984, [12] with whom she had a daughter. [13] Patricia's children are:

Christie died fourteen years later at age 77, while on a business trip to Frankfurt, West Germany. He collapsed while visiting the Bahamas Tourist Office. 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.The murder weapon never was found. Because the autopsy was private, and rushed, scholars have argued the holes in Oakes’ head might have been made not by a bludgeon but by bullets. This on an island where only the elite had guns. Sir Harry is killed. Four stabs to his head. His body is set on fire and feathers from a pillow are scattered over the body. His genitals are practically burnt off. This may sound too good to be true. It may sound like the plot to a best-selling pot-boiler. And it all serves to explain the continuing interest in the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, often referred to, hyperbolically (and hyperbole is in no short supply in the coverage of the murder), as "the crime of the century." (deMarigny 41) Count Marie Alfred de Fonquereaux de Marigny was of French extraction but was born in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean that then was a British possession. He was, by his own admission, a ladies’ man. After his first wife, the daughter of a London banker, dumped him, he married a New York heiress and settled in the Bahamas. That marriage also failed. He met Nancy Oakes in Nassau, and in 1942, the couple eloped to Mexico. He was 33. Nancy was a tender 18.

Simpson’s uncle was S. Davies Warfield, a Baltimore banker and president of the Seaboard Air Line railroad. In 1925, just before Martin County split off from Palm Beach County, Warfield had come to tiny, isolated “Indian Town,” which he expected would become a popular stop on his rail line. He created the Seminole Inn (a young Wallis Simpson reportedly briefly worked there and definitely stayed there) before his bigger dreams for Indiantown ended upon his sudden death in late 1927. After a two-hour deliberation, he was acquitted, albeit with a strange codicil: the jury suggested that he be deported from the Bahamas immediately. If Oakes was about to ruin H. G. Christie, by pulling his money out of the Bahamas, and calling the loans he made to the man, why would he let Harold Christie sleep in his house? Not just one night, but two nights and possibly longer if the murder hadn’t taken place. Fourteen years after the trial, Gardner’s fictional character would become a TV star, too. “ Perry Mason” would run from 1957 to 1966. The plot was perfect. There was blood and the thunder of a rampaging tropical storm,” Gardner said. “Who could need more?”Quiet, stubborn, driven, generous, proud, short-tempered—all these could describe Sir Harry Oakes. At the time of his death, at age 68, some saw a mellowing multimillionaire finally relaxing into his wealth and status. Others saw a tyrannical drunk tilting at decades-old slights and insults and bent on self-destruction.