intrigue 260 P r t L a n d montHL maga ine revealed the deed to be a brutal murder. After de Marigny’s arrest, he ordered the local police to thoroughly clean the mur- der room, thereby destroying all forensic evidence and any future hope of identify- ing the killer. Finally, as the trial demon- strated, the two captains had illegally at- tempted to railroad a man to the gallows; they wouldn’t have done so without the tacit approval of–and instructions from– their employer, the Duke of Windsor, who despised de Marigny and saw him as the perfect scapegoat. nother possibility is that Har- old Christie–soon to become Sir Harold Christie for his contributions to the island’s econ- omy–committed the crime, or had it done. It was Christie who origi- nally persuaded Sir Harry to move to the Bahamas and, according to author William Boyd, owed Sir Harry a considerable sum. When Sir Harry–who was considering a move to Mexico–called in his marker, Christie canceled both the debt and Sir Harry in a sin- gle blow. Marquis also points to Chris- tie, who he posits was in league with a crooked, status-seeking Florida lawyer named Walter Foskett. Foskett, Marquis argues, considered the Oakes fortune his “personal piggy bank,” charming his way into the family’s good graces and pocketbooks, until he cheated Sir Harry on the purchase of a Rembrandt painting. Oakes swore to “straighten him out,” whereupon Foskett–seeing his swin- dling schemes coming to an abrupt end– colluded with the ambitious Christie to do away with Oakes. The Duke of Wind- sor helped cover up the murder, since he and Christie were friends and probable business partners, and Foskett was his le- gal advisor. The debate over other possibilities still rages on. Pointing to the feathers on Oakes’s body, some have claimed it was a ritual slaying carried out by the native pop- ulation, but this is highly unlikely. Sir Har- ry had worked diligently to improve the lives of the island’s inhabitants and was widely respected by them, nor is there any reported history of a pattern of such slay- ings on the island. According to another theory, the shad- owy Swedish industrialist and Nazi spy Axel Wenner-Grenn (the inventor of Elec- trolux vacuum cleaners), who was pur- portedly involved in a money-laundering scheme with the Duke of Windsor, slew Sir Harry to prevent him from revealing the Duke’s involvement. Then there are those who return to Count Alfred de Marigny as the likeliest suspect despite his acquittal, hypothesiz- ing that Sir Harry was about to expose his son-in-law’s shady business dealings, so de Marigny killed him to keep him quiet. Nonetheless, over time, the most per- sistent allegations have continued to swirl around Sir Harold Christie. Defense at- torney Higgs declared in open court that Christie’s account of his actions on the night and morning of the murder was “implausi- ble.” During the trial, Christie testified that he’d spent the entire night inside the man- sion, but a Nassau policeman who knew him by sight stated that he’d seen Christie driving downtown that evening. Despite the fact that it brought Christie’s credibility in- to question, this discrepancy was never pur- sued. Christie also claimed to have been ig- norant of any disturbance in the night, even though his guest room was next door to Sir Harry’s bedroom and there almost certain- ly would have been significant noise. His ac- count was indeed implausible. There have been numerous at- tempts to unearth further evi- dence over the years, many of which have been met with vio- lence. In April 1950, a Washing- ton attorney named Betty Renner arrived in Nassau for the express purpose of solving the murder. Two days later, she was bludgeoned and drowned in a well. Marquis calculates that in the 16 years fol- lowing Sir Harry’s death, investi- gators researching the Oakes case that Nassau’s power elite failed to solve were murdered at the rate of one a year. any years after her father’s death, Nancy Oakes de Marigny–long since divorced from “Freddie”– issued a heartfelt entreaty that read, in part: “For justice and for decency, [the govern- ment] should insist on a vigorous effort… to clear this up, regardless [of] who might be affected by the truth.” Her plea was met with silence. Sir Harry Oakes’s funeral was held at the family’s Bar Harbor estate. He rests in his family’s marble mausoleum at Dover- Foxcroft cemetery, the central figure in a crime that was sloppily committed, off- handedly and corruptly investigated, and ultimately left unsolved. Were it not for the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby some 18 years before Sir Harry’s grisly murder, one might surmise that the author had based his hero on the eccentric prospector: a driven man of humble begin- nings who accumulates fabulous wealth, then dies a tragic, violent death. ■ oyouhaveanyphotoso the estbournemansion There are no houses in existence today [other than The Willows, the Sir Harry Oakes Chateau in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, and Oak Hall in Niagra Falls, Ontario, now a museum] that Sir Harry actually lived in. The rest have all been torn down. The Oakes family home- stead in Dover Foxcroft is now Oakes Field at Dover-Foxcroft School. hen asthelasttimeyousa he illo s We come to Maine nearly every year for a few days at least–but not to Bar Harbor. he arry a es onumentisahardtomissin assau. s yourgrand atherslegacyisstillreveredontheisland He died a long time ago! A ter ir arr s death uni e akes ught a aranda use in assau el .Its still ned the akes a il t da . FO N SIR ARRYS GRAN A G TER PATRICIAOAKESLEIG WOO