Sir Harry Oakes: The Gold Prospector Who Got Rich in Canada and Was Murdered in the Bahamas
On the morning of 8 July 1943, one of the richest men in the British Empire was found dead in his bed in Nassau. Sir Harry Oakes had been hit four times on the side of the head, his body had been set alight and somebody had scattered pillow feathers over what was left. A former king of England took personal charge of the case and made a mess of it. The only man ever tried walked free, and more than 80 years later nobody's been convicted. That's the bit everyone remembers. The 68 years before it are just as good.
Quick Answers
Who was Harry Oakes? A Maine-born prospector, born on 23 December 1874, who found the Lake Shore gold mine at Kirkland Lake in Ontario and became one of the wealthiest men in the world.
How did he die? He was beaten to death and partly burned in his bedroom at Westbourne, his estate near Nassau, in the early hours of 8 July 1943.
Who was accused? His son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, who was acquitted in November 1943 after the fingerprint evidence against him fell apart.
What did the Duke of Windsor have to do with it? As governor of the Bahamas he tried to suppress the news and brought in two Miami detectives instead of using local police or Scotland Yard.
Was the murder ever solved? No. The most common suspect in later books is Oakes's friend Harold Christie, but nobody else was ever charged.
A Maine Boy Who Wanted Gold
Oakes was born in Sangerville, Maine, the third of five children in a comfortable family. He went to Foxcroft Academy, graduated from Bowdoin College and did two years of medical school at Syracuse before deciding, at about 22, that he'd rather be rich. News of the Klondike strike had reached the East Coast, and in 1898 he packed in medicine and headed north, as the Bangor Daily News tells it.
He didn't find his fortune in the Klondike. He didn't find it anywhere for a very long time. For the next 15 years he chased rumours of gold through Alaska, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Africa and the American West, the same desert circuit of boom towns that produced places like Goldfield, Nevada. He worked as a surveyor, a farmhand and a shaft sinker to keep going. A 1950 profile in Maclean's records the stories he told about those years, including being blown ashore in Siberia and arrested by Cossacks, and waking from a nap in a Colorado cave to find he was sharing it with rattlesnakes.
It wasn't all wasted time. The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame points out that in Kalgoorlie in Australia and Cripple Creek in Colorado he'd seen how gold turned up in a particular kind of rock, and he'd learned to recognise it. That knowledge was about to pay.
Kirkland Lake: Staking a Claim at 52 Below
In June 1911 Oakes got off a train at Swastika, a rail stop in northern Ontario, with about three dollars in his pocket. Nobody's sure why he chose it. Maclean's lists three competing legends: that he picked the name off a map, that he was thrown off the train for not having a ticket, or that it was simply where his bottle of Scotch ran out. What he said when he got there was more to the point: "I'm going to make a one-man mine."
He teamed up with the Tough brothers, Tom and George, and on the night of 7 January 1912, with the temperature at 52 degrees below zero, he and George Tough hiked out and staked five claims near Kirkland Lake. That became the Tough-Oakes mine, the first in the camp. Oakes then staked ground of his own on the south shore of the lake, convinced the real prize was there.
Almost nobody agreed. The big names in Canadian mining turned him down, so he raised money the hard way, selling shares for around 40 cents and signing over half a million of them to a group of Buffalo investors in a contract scribbled on brown paper. In early 1918 a tunnel finally cut into what miners came to call the Main Break. In places the gold-bearing rock was 100 feet wide. Lake Shore went on to produce nearly 8.5 million ounces of gold between 1918 and 1965 and was, for a time, the biggest producer in the Western Hemisphere.
Because Oakes had hung on to control, most of that came to him. Reports from the time put his income from the mine at around $60,000 a day. His former home in Kirkland Lake, a copper-roofed chateau built in 1929 with a six-car garage in the basement and fairy-tale reliefs on the nursery walls, is now the Museum of Northern History, an Ontario Heritage Trust property.
The Richest Grump in Canada
Money didn't make him charming. Oakes was short, stocky and blunt, and he held grudges. Maclean's records that he once sacked seven men in a day over a misplaced pair of skis, liked to spit grape seeds across the room in front of dinner guests and would wander off mid-conversation in an odd shuffling dance. His future son-in-law was no kinder. "He looked like a union boss or a butcher," Alfred de Marigny wrote, in a line quoted by Portland Monthly.
There was another side. In 1923, on a round-the-world cruise, the 48-year-old Oakes met Eunice MacIntyre, an Australian roughly half his age. They married and had five children: Nancy, Sydney, Shirley, William and Harry. He became a British subject, moved the family to Niagara Falls and built Oak Hall, a 35-room mansion with 17 bathrooms and its own golf course.
Then he started giving things away. He donated 16 acres for a public park and gave the land for the Oakes Garden Theatre beside the falls, all detailed in Niagara Falls's own history of him. Biographer Charlotte Gray, who wrote Murdered Midas about him, told Artsfile that the people who liked him best were the ones who worked for him.
What he couldn't stand was tax. By his own estimate he was handing the Canadian government $17,500 a day. He'd also bankrolled the Liberals in 1930 in the hope of a seat in the Senate, and they lost. The Canadian Encyclopedia puts his exit down to ill health, that Senate snub and the rising tax bill. In 1934 he left Canada for good.
Nassau: Sir Harry and His Island
The man who talked him into the Bahamas was Harold Christie, a Nassau estate agent and former bootlegger who'd made it his mission to sell the colony to rich foreigners. There was no income tax. Oakes arrived, liked it and started buying. He ended up with around 10,000 acres on New Providence, which made him the biggest landowner on the island.
He spent as energetically as he'd prospected. He built an airfield, a golf course, a polo ground and a country club, bought a hotel, set up bus services and put about 1,500 Bahamians on his payroll, a tally set out in the Nassau Guardian. He won a seat in the House of Assembly. He also gave a large sum to St George's Hospital in London, and in June 1939 he was made a baronet, so the prospector from Sangerville became Sir Harry.
In August 1940 Nassau acquired an even more famous resident. The Duke of Windsor, who'd given up the throne as Edward VIII four years earlier, was sent out as governor, largely to keep him and the Duchess well away from Europe. The Windsors and the Oakeses became friends. Nassau's small white elite, the Duke, Christie and Oakes among them, lived in each other's pockets, along with a Swedish industrialist called Axel Wenner-Gren who'd been blacklisted by the Allies as a suspected Nazi sympathiser.
The Son-in-Law Nobody Wanted
In 1942 Oakes's eldest daughter Nancy eloped with Count Alfred de Marigny. They married in New York the day after her 18th birthday, a detail noted by the New England Historical Society. Freddie, as everyone called him, was a 32-year-old yachtsman from Mauritius who'd been divorced twice and whose boat was named Concubine. Oakes was livid. The Duke of Windsor couldn't bear de Marigny either and later described him in an official telegram as an unscrupulous adventurer and a spendthrift.
Father-in-law and son-in-law rowed in public more than once over the following year. Everybody in Nassau knew about it, which turned out to matter a great deal.
The Night of 7 July 1943
Oakes's wife and children were away for the summer at The Willows, the family's 27-room house at Bar Harbor in Maine. On the evening of Wednesday 7 July he had a few friends to dinner at Westbourne, his rambling seafront house west of Nassau. The guests had gone by about 11pm. Christie stayed the night, in a bedroom close to his host's. Some time after midnight a violent thunderstorm broke over the island.
At about 7am Christie went in to wake Oakes and found him dead. He'd been struck four times just in front of his left ear by something that left small triangular wounds. The weapon has never been identified. His body and the bed had been doused with something flammable and set on fire, and the flames had burned out before they took hold of the room. Feathers were stuck to the burned skin, which set off lurid talk of a voodoo ritual. The duller explanation is that a pillow burst in the fire. Dried blood ran across his face in a direction that made no sense for a man lying on his back, which suggested he'd been moved after he died.
Christie said he'd slept through all of it apart from the storm. He told the court he'd tried to give his friend a drink of water and wiped his face with a towel before he realised there was nothing to be done.
The Duke Takes Charge
The Duke of Windsor was told that morning. What he did next has been argued over ever since. He tried to impose a news blackout, which failed almost at once. Then, in place of the Bahamas police or Scotland Yard, he rang Miami and asked for Captain Edward Melchen, a detective who'd once acted as his bodyguard. Historian Andrew Lownie, who has been through the surviving files, writes in his account of the case that the Duke asked for help tidying things up.
Melchen flew in with a colleague, Captain James Barker, who was presented as a fingerprint expert. The pair had left their fingerprint camera behind. They let people wander through the bedroom touching things. A bloody handprint on the wall by the bed was never properly recorded and was later scrubbed off, and muddy footprints on the stairs were ignored, as Crime+Investigation's file on the case sets out.
Within about 36 hours they had their man. De Marigny had been at a dinner party of his own that night and had driven guests home along the road past Westbourne. The detectives said some of the hairs on his arms were singed, though a doctor who examined him for the defence found no burns at all. More importantly, Barker said he'd found de Marigny's fingerprint on a Chinese screen that stood beside Oakes's bed. On 9 July the Count was arrested and charged with murder. In Nassau, where hanging was the penalty, a rope was ordered.
The Trial and the Fingerprint That Wasn't
The trial opened on 18 October 1943 before the Chief Justice, Sir Oscar Daly, and it knocked the war off front pages around the world. Crime writer Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, was among the reporters. Nancy stood by her husband, hired the American private detective Raymond Schindler and sat through every day of it. Her mother gave evidence for the prosecution.
The Crown's case came down to that one fingerprint, known as Exhibit J, and the defence barrister Godfrey Higgs took it apart. Barker couldn't say where on the screen he'd found it. He hadn't photographed it in place. He'd lifted it in a way that destroyed the original. He'd also, it emerged, told Lady Oakes about the print days before he claimed to have identified it, while his partner Melchen said he hadn't heard about it until around 19 or 20 July.
Then came the background. The screen was covered in an ornate pattern, and a print lifted from it should have carried traces of that pattern. Exhibit J had a perfectly clean background, like a print taken off glass. Higgs put it to Barker that he'd lifted it from a tumbler de Marigny had been handed during questioning. Barker denied it. TIME reported that the singed-hair evidence had withered as well and that the Crown's case had gone oddly flat.
Christie had a rough time in the witness box too. A Nassau police officer swore he'd seen him being driven through the centre of Nassau in a station wagon at around midnight, when Christie insisted he'd been in bed at Westbourne.
In mid-November the jury took less than two hours to acquit, reportedly by nine votes to three. The courtroom erupted. De Marigny got a telegram from a friend that read "won by a neck", a detail recalled in The Oldie by Charles Owen, who was a child in Nassau that night. The jury then did something odd and added a recommendation that the man they'd just cleared should be deported. He was gone by the end of the year.
So Who Killed Harry Oakes?
With de Marigny acquitted, the investigation stopped. No other suspect was ever questioned. That vacuum has been filled by eight decades of theories, and it's worth being straight about which have any support.
Harold Christie is the name that comes up most. He was in the house. He said he heard nothing. A policeman placed him in town at midnight. Several writers, including de Marigny in his 1990 memoir A Conspiracy of Crowns, have argued that Christie owed Oakes money or stood to lose land if Oakes carried out a rumoured plan to pull out of the Bahamas for Mexico. Lownie's reading of the files points the same way, and he reports that the colony's police commissioner believed he was closing in on a suspect when he was abruptly transferred to Trinidad. There's a less dramatic version of that, too: the commissioner had asked for a transfer himself after being criticised over a riot the year before. Christie always denied it. He was never charged, was knighted in 1964 and died in 1973. Lownie repeats a story that at a party in the 1960s Lord Beaverbrook called across the room, "Come on, Harold, tell us how you murdered Harry Oakes." Christie just smiled.
The Mafia theory was popularised by Marshall Houts's 1972 book Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? In this version the American mobster Meyer Lansky wanted casinos in Nassau, Oakes was blocking them and a warning visit went wrong. It's a good story with holes in it. Lansky didn't turn his attention to the Bahamas until later, the big casinos were another 20 years off and the scene looked nothing like a professional hit. The one loose thread is Barker, the Miami fingerprint man, who was widely said to have been on Lansky's payroll.
A third theory ties the killing to money. Wenner-Gren, Christie and the Duke are alleged to have been moving funds to Mexico in breach of wartime currency controls, with Oakes either part of the scheme or threatening to expose it. Supporters point to the gap between Oakes's reputed fortune of $200 million and the roughly $13.5 million his personal estate was valued at for probate. The simpler explanation is that the $200 million figure was always a guess, and the FBI, which looked into the rumoured Mexican accounts, found no evidence of money laundering.
The best sober guide to all this is a 2010 review of the Oakes books by Cathleen LeGrand in the International Journal of Bahamian Studies. Her verdict is that the case against Christie is the strongest but purely circumstantial, and that nearly every book on the murder leans on anonymous informants, unverifiable conversations and guesswork dressed up as reporting. De Marigny's own memoir, she says, is entertaining and far-fetched.
And then there's the awkward possibility that the jury got it wrong. Lownie reports that a Scotland Yard review in 1946 concluded de Marigny was the killer after all and that the case had simply been mishandled. Gray, for her part, is wary of all of it, and has said the pile of competing books mostly shows how easily history can be bent in any direction. The DuJour account of the case quotes her verdict on the victim himself: "He wasn't likable."
What Happened to Everyone
De Marigny told reporters after the verdict, "I am staying in Nassau. I love it. It is my home." He wasn't given the choice. He and Nancy went to Cuba, where they stayed for a while with Ernest Hemingway, and the marriage ended in 1949. He spent years looking for a country that would have him, became an American citizen in 1975, settled in Texas and died in Houston in 1998, having always insisted he was innocent. Nancy died in 2005.
The Duke of Windsor left the Bahamas in 1945 and never held another official post. He didn't attend the trial and made sure he was off the island for it. Barker went back to Miami with his reputation in pieces. In 1952 he was shot dead with his own gun by his son.
The case nearly came back to life once. In May 1959 Cyril Stevenson, an opposition politician and newspaper editor who claimed to know who the killer was, moved that the House of Assembly reopen the investigation and call in Scotland Yard. To general surprise the motion passed, as TIME reported that June. A few weeks later three shots were fired into his home and newspaper office, an episode pieced together from the press of the day by Bahamianology. Scotland Yard made enquiries and nobody was charged.
Nassau kept its secrets with some force. In 1950 an American lawyer named Betty Renner arrived saying she intended to look into the case, and within days she was found beaten and drowned in a well, a killing that also went unsolved. LeGrand's caution applies here: for decades, any unexplained death in the Bahamas has tended to get pinned on the Oakes mystery whether or not there's a link. Decades later Nancy publicly asked the Bahamian government to reopen her father's murder, whoever the truth might embarrass. Nothing came of it. The novelist William Boyd, who put the case into Any Human Heart, has described being warned off at a party at Lyford Cay in 1985 simply for asking about it.
Oakes himself was taken home. He's buried in a marble mausoleum in the family plot at Dover-Foxcroft, a few miles from where he was born. His old school's football field still carries his name.
Why the Case Will Not Go Away
Rich victim, royal governor, bungled evidence, a courtroom twist and no ending: the Oakes case has the same pull as the disappearance of Lord Lucan or the vanishing of Dorothy Arnold. Like the Wall Street bombing of 1920, it's a crime where the official investigation closed down long before the questions did. Nicolas Roeg turned it into the 1984 film Eureka, with Gene Hackman as a thinly disguised Oakes.
What tends to get lost is the man. Harry Oakes spent 15 years broke, cold and laughed at, staked a claim in the dark at 52 below, refused to sell and ended up owning one of the great gold mines of the century. Whoever killed him also managed to make him a footnote in his own story.
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Sources
Maclean's (1 September 1950): The Murdered Midas of Lake Shore
Bangor Daily News: This Maine-born gold tycoon's murder is still a scandal
Andrew Lownie: A Royal Cover-Up? The Duke of Windsor and the Murder of Sir Harry Oakes
The Nassau Guardian: The cold case murder of Sir Harry Oakes
Bahamianology: Trying to reopen Harry Oakes case almost costs Cyril Stevenson his life, 1959
New England Historical Society: The Sensational Murder of Sir Harry Oakes
Artsfile: Midas touched, the amazing life and tragic death of Sir Harry Oakes
