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Canadian British philanthropist

Sir Harry Oakes, 1st Baronet (23 December 1874 – 7 July 1943) was a British gold mine owner, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. He earned his fortune in Canada and moved to the Bahamas in the 1930s for tax purposes. Though American by birth, he became a British citizen and was granted the hereditary title of baronet in 1939. Oakes was murdered in 1943 under mysterious circumstances, and the subsequent trial ended with acquittal of the accused. No further legal proceedings have taken place on the matter, the cause of death and the details surrounding it have never been entirely determined (though are thought to be unusually grisly) and the case has been the subject of several books and four films.

Oakes was born in Sangerville, Maine, one of five children of William Pitt Oakes and Edith Nancy Lewis. His father was a prosperous lawyer. Harry Oakes graduated from Foxcroft Academy and went on to Bowdoin College in 1896, and he spent two years at the Syracuse University Medical School. One of his sisters, Gertrude Oakes, died in the 1935 sinking of the ocean liner SS Mohawk off the New Jersey coast.

In 1898, Oakes left medical school before graduation and made his way to Alaska, at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, in hopes of making his fortune as a prospector. For 15 years, he sought gold around the world, from California to Australia. Oakes arrived in Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario, Canada, on 19 June 1911. On September 23, 1911, he registered the transfer of claim T 1663, purchased from George Minaker, and established Lake Shore Mine.

Oakes was murdered sometime after midnight on July 8, 1943. He was struck four times behind the left ear with a miner's hand pick, to disguise the wounds from a silver ice pick (Simpsons of the Strand), and was then burned all over his body using insecticide, with the flames being concentrated around the eyes. His body was then sprinkled with feathers from a mattress. When Oakes was discovered, the feathers were still being gently blown over his body by the bedroom fan.

The Bahamas’ governor, the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom), who had become a close friend of Oakes during the previous three years, took charge of the investigation from the outset. The Duke first attempted to enforce press censorship, but this was unsuccessful, since the Bahamas Tribune newspaper broke the story to the world within a few hours. Oakes' vast wealth, fame and British title, combined with the ghastly nature of the crime, generated worldwide interest in the case. Etienne Dupuch, the colony's foremost newspaper publisher and a close friend of Oakes, ensured constant coverage of the case for the several months which followed. The Duke believed that the local police lacked the expertise to investigate the crime, and since World War II was raging, making it difficult to bring detectives from Scotland Yard in London, which was what normally would have been done, the Duke turned to two American policemen he knew in the Miami force. The Bahamas was a British Crown Colony at the time, and there were British Security personnel stationed in wartime in New York City and Washington, D. C. who could potentially have traveled easily and quickly to Nassau for an investigation. Bringing in the Miami Captains Melchen and Barker (Melchen had earlier guarded the Duke in Miami) proved an unfortunate decision. The two American detectives were, in theory, called upon to assist Bahamian law enforcement, but to the dismay of the local police, they completely took over the investigation. The two American policemen had forgotten their fingerprint kits in Miami, and in any case, the local Bahamas police force did have fingerprint kits available right in Nassau. De Marigny was committed for trial, and a rope was ordered for his hanging. However, he was acquitted in a trial that lasted several weeks, after the detectives were suspected of fabricating evidence against him. The chief piece of evidence was a fingerprint of his, which Captain Barker claimed had been found on a Chinese screen in Oakes' bedroom where the body had been found. Later, it was discovered that the print had been lifted from the water glass that de Marigny had used during his questioning by the Miami Police captains, and that de Marigny was being framed. Significantly, the Duke of Windsor arranged to be away from the Bahamas while the murder trial was in progress so he was not available to be called as a witness.

After the trial Nancy went with de Marigny to Cuba to stay with their old friend Ernest Hemingway. De Marigny was deported to Cuba after a recommendation by the murder trial's jury, because of his supposedly unsavoury character and frequent advances towards young girls in the Bahamas. De Marigny and Nancy separated in 1945, and divorced in 1949. He moved to Canada in 1945 and served for a time in the Canadian Army, but was later deported from Canada. He married his fourth wife, settled in Central America, and died in 1998. De Marigny was a tall, handsome man, a charming and bright conversationalist and an accomplished competitive sailor who won many regattas, and he later wrote two books. Nancy had left Cuba by the late 1940s, and lived in Hollywood, California, where she had a long affair with 1950s English Hollywood film and British TV star Richard Greene. They had a daughter, Patricia Oakes. She remained close friends with Greene until his death in 1985. In 1952 she married Baron Ernst Lyssardt von Hoyningen Huene (adopted cousin of the artist George Hoyningen Huene, the only son of Baron Barthold Theodor Hermann (Theodorovitch) von Hoyningen Huene, a German nobleman who had estates in Estonia that were confiscated by the Soviets during World War II and was the German ambassador to Portugal during World War II,). They had a son, Baron Alexander von Hoyningen Huene. The marriage lasted until 1956. Nancy died in 2005 and was survived by her two children and two grandchildren.

Oakes' former home in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, is now the Museum of Northern History, dedicated to his life and to the region's mining history. Kirkland Lake is where he made his fortune as a prospector. He was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. The Oakes baronetcy of Nassau, was assumed by Oakes's son Sir Sydney Oakes (1927–1966). On his death, Sir Sydney's son Christopher (born 1949) inherited the title. A district in Nassau was named after Oakes, complete with a memorial. Foxcroft Academy, a private school in Dover Foxcroft, Maine, has its football field named after Harry Oakes. He was portrayed by Scott Hylands in "Rex v De Marigny", a 1993 dramatization of the murder trial for the Canadian drama anthology series Scales of Justice.

During the Great Depression, Oakes donated a parcel of land in what is now the central area of Niagara Falls, Ontario. He funded a make work project and supplied tools to build a park at the location. Crews worked for $1 per day, switching every five days to permit as much employment as possible. Oakes Park was opened on August 31, 1931. It is a multi use, municipally owned and operated recreational complex. The main facilities are a baseball stadium used by the Greater Niagara Baseball Association and other elite youth and senior baseball clubs, two smaller baseball fields for younger divisions, a soccer pitch, and athletics facilities including a 400 metre track. The main baseball diamond has outfield dimensions of 318 402 322 ft, and has a press box, electronic scoreboard, and clubhouses.

Designed as an amphitheatre, Oakes Garden Theatre was opened in September 1937. Oakes, a member of the Niagara Parks Commission, donated the land at the foot of Clifton Hill and Niagara Parkway to the commission in 1936. The landscape architecture was done by Howard and Lorrie Dunington Grubb, the building's architect was William Lyon Somerville with sculptures by Florence Wyle, Frances Loring and Elizabeth Wyn Wood.

Oakes bought property just above Dufferin Islands from the estate of Walter H. Shoellkopf, on July 15, 1924. He constructed a 37 room Tudor style mansion (by Findlay and Foulis in 1929 and later gatehouse and stables in 1931), 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 (85%) 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.

In 1938 Oakes and his family purchased a summer home called "The Willows" in Bar Harbor, Maine, designed by the firm of Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul in 1913. Lady Eunice Oakes gave it to Bowdoin College in 1958 and operated it as the Oakes Center, a conference center, till the early 1970s when it was sold to brothers James and Sonny Cough. They developed the land and built an oceanfront hotel consisting of several buildings called the Atlantic Oakes. Much of the mansion was significantly altered and covered in vinyl siding. It is now called The Atlantic Oceanside Hotel.

Oakes graduated from Foxcroft Academy in Dover Foxcroft, Maine, founded in 1823, three years after statehood, one of the very few public high school "academies" left in Maine. The present campus is on the former Oakes farm on outer Main Street on the way to Sangerville, his birthplace.

After the disastrous Florida Hurricane of 1928 and the Great Depression, Oakes bought of partially developed land in northern Palm Beach County, Florida, from Harry Seymour Kelsey, who lacked the finances to rebuild his shattered development. Oakes spent a great deal of money on development of this property, which was later bought by John D. MacArthur, who completed its development. It includes most of North Palm Beach, Lake Park, Palm Beach Gardens and Palm Beach Shores. Oakes' castle like home in North Palm Beach became the clubhouse for the village country club.

# Date Name Author/Director Notes 1 1959 The Murder of Sir Harry Oakes Bahamas Tribune newspaper Published in Nassau by the colony's leading newspaper, which was edited at the time by Etienne Dupuch. 2 1959 The Life and Death of Sir Harry Oakes Geoffrey Bocca Published in the United States by Doubleday and Company. Bocca, then working as a bartender in New York City, had met private detective Raymond Schindler, one of his customers, who had investigated the Oakes case for Nancy. Bocca used Schindler's notes, researched the case very thoroughly, and his book was a best seller. 3 1972 (1st ed)1976 (2nd ed) Kings XWho Killed Sir Harry Oakes? Marshall Houts The 1st edition (1972 book Kings X) and the second edition (1976 as Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?) was published in London by Robert Hale publishers. Houts was an American lawyer, and an FBI agent. In the first and second editions of his book, Houts proposed the theory that American gangster boss Meyer Lansky was behind the killing of Oakes, due to Oakes' resistance to casino gambling in the Bahamas. Lansky had apparently already obtained the approval of the Duke for his plans to develop gambling on the islands, after meeting with the Duke in Miami. Lansky was working with Christie, a property developer and Bahamian legislator, and other notable Bahamians, including Stafford Sands (who was the jury foreman at the de Marigny murder trial), It had troubled Bahamian legal authorities in the lead up to the de Marigny trial that Oakes' body had apparently been moved, ascertained by examination of blood data, which showed blood flowing uphill, according to the case presented by prosecutors. Houts also wrote that Lansky later privately punished his henchmen who had been involved with the murder, but did not specify the punishment. 6 1988 King of Fools John Parker One theory put forward in the book, which was a biography of the Duke of Windsor, expanding on the work done by Houts a decade earlier, is that Oakes was murdered by associates of mob boss Meyer Lansky, after Oakes resisted Lansky's plans to develop casinos on the Bahama Islands. Lansky, together with other major organized crime figures, already had extensive casino interests in neighbouring Cuba. Early in his career, Parker had worked as a journalist in the Bahamas for several years, and dug into the Oakes case quite deeply. The two Miami police detectives were suspected of being on Lansky's payroll, and the Duke was warned off instigating a more professional investigation. Parker goes so far as to draw potential business connections between Lansky and the Duke, who had earlier met in Cuba. Parker wrote that the Duke had tried unsuccessfully to impose press censorship of the case from the start. The Duke directed the murder investigation from the beginning, but he and the Duchess of Windsor contrived to be visiting the United States during the de Marigny trial, so the Duke was not called as a witness. The Duke kept silent about the murder for the rest of his life. 7 1989 Passion and Paradise Harvey Hart Television movie made about the case starring Armand Assante as de Marigny and Rod Steiger (with an inaccurate Maine accent) as Oakes. 8 1988 (1st ed)2005 (2nd ed) The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life Charles Higham Higham wrote about the case in the first (1988) and second (2005) editions of his biography of the Duchess of Windsor. He devoted a chapter, entitled 'Crime of the Century' in the first edition, and 'Death in Nassau' in the second edition, to the case. He carried out a thorough investigation with the assistance of modern experts in criminology. He also dug deeply into archival sources, including previously classified files of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. His conclusion in both the first and second editions is that Oakes was murdered by an African ritual specialist from South Florida, who had been hired and brought into Nassau by airplane on the day before the murder, by Harold Christie, a Bahamian mulatto business associate of Oakes. Christie and Oakes, the much wealthier man, had been friends and business partners for many years, and Christie had facilitated Oakes' move to the Bahamas. The two had apparently fallen out shortly before Oakes' death, because of Christie's dealings over the sale of Bahamian property on the island of New Providence, which was scheduled to be used for a new airfield by the Royal Air Force, a project of which the Duke of Windsor would certainly have been aware and involved with, since it had important strategic and economic implications, and would involve large expenses. Christie, a member of the colony's House of Assembly, had been a dinner guest at Oakes' home on the evening the murder occurred, and had stayed overnight in Oakes' home on many previous occasions. Christie said that he had slept in a bedroom the night of the murder, only a few metres away from that of Oakes on the night of the murder, and claimed he had neither heard nor seen anything suspicious. Christie had to take the witness stand for an extended period during the de Marigny trial, and his testimony was not convincing to the jury. Christie was later knighted for his contributions to the Bahamas, and died a wealthy man in 1973. He had apparently told close friends several years afterwards that he was directly involved in Oakes' murder. 9 1990 A Conspiracy of Crowns Alfred de Marigny and Mickey Herskowitz Alfred de Marigny—the accused killer in the Oakes trial—wrote his own account, along with Mickey Herskowitz, published in 1990. 10 1994 "Carnal Hours: A Nathan Heller Mystery" Max Allan Collins Another fictionalized account concerning the death of Sir Harry, with speculations concerning the killer(s). This was the sixth novel in the historical fiction series featuring private detective Nathan Heller. 11 2002 Any Human Heart William Boyd The murder was fictionalized in Boyd's novel in which a British spy, sent to keep an eye on the Duke, refuses to help the US detectives frame de Marigny for the crime. In 2010 the novel was adapted as a British TV serial of the same name. 12 2003 A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon to O. J. Colin Evans Details: Publisher John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, USA; This book was written by experienced forensics author Colin Evans, who has written several prior similar books. Evans writes concisely and thoroughly in this volume. He examines in detail 15 of the most important and controversial forensics cases throughout history, including a chapter on the Oakes case: 'Alfred de Marigny', pp. 90–103. Evans focuses on the Oakes murder and its bungled forensics aspects, including a planted fingerprint, which, when brought to the murder trial of de Marigny, with precise and strong cross examination by the accused's lawyer, proved decisive in securing de Marigny's acquittal. 13 2005 Blood and Fire: the Duke of Windsor and the Strange Murder of Sir Harry Oakes John Marquis Marquis' book was described by American reviewer Art Paine as 'the best written of all the Oakes books to date' and by Sir Christopher Ondaatje in Canada's National Post as the most 'explicitly accusatory' of all the Oakes books. Marquis dismisses the Lansky theories, and claims the murder was strictly a local affair, with white Bahamian businessmen—including Sir Harold Christie—getting rid of Oakes to prevent movement of his vast fortune to Mexico, a move that would have undermined the Bahamian economy. Marquis, who was editor of Nassau's leading daily newspaper for ten years, also believes the Duke conspired to frame de Marigny by hiring two crooked Miami detectives to conduct the murder investigation. This, he maintains, was also to prevent inquiries by the FBI and Scotland Yard, who he feared would expose his own involvement in illegal money transfers to Mexico during wartime currency restrictions. Marquis makes two very significant revelations in support of his theories: one concerns a passport found amongst rubble in a Nassau street, the other a comment from the Bahamas police chief who was transferred to Trinidad and Tobago at the height of the Oakes inquiries (also used by other authors). He also cites the involvement of the Oakes' family lawyer, Walter Foskett, who he claims was robbing Oakes and was in dispute with him at the time of the killing. Blood and Fire was listed in the Wall Street Journal among the top five books about unsolved crimes. 14 2006 A Serpent in Eden James Owen Owen's book on the Oakes murder claims that de Marigny was the murderer. In the December 2006 television documentary Murder in Paradise 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. 15 2019 Murdered Midas: A Millionaire, His Gold Mine, and a Strange Death on an Island Paradise Charlotte Gray A Canadian author delves very deeply into the life and death of Harry Oakes, in this most recently published book; Toronto, 2019, by HarperCollins. 16 2021 Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor Andrew Lownie Scottish historian Andrew Lownie includes a chapter on the Oakes murder in his new, very thoroughly researched work. Lownie cited brief information about a long forgotten 1959 Canadian TV program on the case. Lownie concisely hits most of the major points made by earlier writers who have examined the case. But he also includes sources which avow that $15 million was missing, and never publicly found, from the very wealthy estate of Oakes after his death. This money had been secretly sent earlier to Mexico by Oakes, for investments there, to escape wartime currency controls. Lownie avers this money was later equally divided three ways, by the Duke of Windsor, Bahamian business and political powerhouse Harold Christie, and the senior banker brother of the Mexican president; these three were supposedly the only ones who knew of the secret transaction. Lownie believes this was the real motive for the Oakes murder, which was likely arranged by Christie, a close friend of Oakes, who slept overnight at his home the night of the murder. Christie stood to lose heavily should Oakes have continued to withdraw money on this scale from the weak Bahamian economy.