s u m m e r g u i d e 2 0 1 7 1 7 5 Bar HarBor HistoricaL societ whereupon he made a chilling discovery. Sir Harry lay dead upon his bed in a grisly state. His body had been doused in gasoline and set alight, but the wind and rain gusting through the open window had put out the flames before he was en- tirely consumed. As it was, his face and body were badly burned and blistered, and he was haphazardly covered with feathers from a pillow, as though to make it appear a ritual slaying. His face was bloody, and near his left ear were four puncture wounds which reportedly fractured his skull. But curiously, the blood had run up his face rather than down onto the sheets, indicat- ing that he had not been killed in his bed. This lurid scene is at the heart of the film Passion and Paradise, in which Rod Steiger plays Sir Harry Oakes. the aftermath mmediately after he discovered Sir Harry’s body, Christie reported the death to the governor of the Bahamas, who was none other than the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of In- dia. The Duke of Windsor had stunned his nation by abdicating his throne in or- der to marry the American divorcee Wal- lis Simpson, and his well-publicized Nazi sympathies had proven a further embar- rassment to his country. He was report- edly given the governorship of the Baha- mas in 1940 as a gentle way of exiling him from Great Britain. Inexplicably, the Duke of Windsor seemed more interested in keeping the murder under wraps than in solving it. Word got out, however, and–pressured to take action–he called upon Miami police captain Edward Melchen, whom he knew from a previous trip to Florida. Bahamians could not understand why he hadn’t turned to the local police force or even to Scotland Yard. But if his intention was to compro- mise the evidence and muddy the investi- gation, he couldn’t have chosen a likelier of- ficer than Melchen, who arrived in Nassau (Continued on page 256)