Her Father Was Canada’s Richest Man. Her Husband Was Charged With His Murder. She Chose Her Husband.

In the early hours of July 8th, 1943, a tropical storm broke over the island of New Providence in the Bahamas.

Inside a beachfront mansion called Westborne, the richest man in Canada lay dead in his bed.

Sir Harry Oaks was struck four times in the skull, dowsed with a flammable liquid, and set on fire.

A pillow above him lay torn open, and feathers were still drifting through the room when his body was found.

Within 36 hours, the island’s governor had steered the investigation toward a single suspect.

This suspect was a French count who had married Oaks’s 18-year-old daughter in secret the year before.

The daughter was 19 now, away at college in Vermont, and she came home to a terrible choice.

Her murdered father lay in one grave while her husband sat in a cell awaiting the gallows.

The island had already decided which of the two she ought to abandon.

She looked at the reporters waiting for her and offered a steadfast defense of her husband.

She declared that Freddy could not have done this and that she was the only person who could help him.

Harry Oaks was born on December 23rd, 1874, in Sangville, Maine, as the third of five children.

His father was a justice of the peace named William Pit Oaks, and his mother was named Edith.

The family was respectable and comfortable without being rich, moving to Dover Foxcroft for better schooling.

Harry was a shy boy who grew into an able and self-assured student at Foxcroft Academy.

He took a Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in 1896 and enrolled at Syracuse Medical School.

He studied medicine for two years, following a path his family expected him to walk.

In the summer of 1896, he heard rumors coming down out of the Klondike gold country.

From that moment, he never seriously intended to become a doctor at all.

He left medical school without his degree and turned north at the age of 22.

He carried little more than the clothes on his back and a conviction that gold was out there.

His mother pressed her savings into his hand to help him on his way.

A brother in the lumber trade promised seventy-five dollars a month, and a sister pledged whatever she could spare.

The Klondike gave him nothing when he reached the Yukon in 1899.

The great rush was already over, with the richest claims staked and the crowds thinning out.

His two years of medical training turned out to be the single most useful thing he carried north.

He spent part of that first brutal winter treating other prospectors for frostbite and injury.

What followed was one of the most stubborn campaigns of unrewarded persistence in mining history.

Over the next dozen years, Oaks prospected in Alaska, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, and Mexico.

He traveled to West Africa, the Belgian Congo, California, Nevada, and Colorado.

He chased rumors and geological hunches from one end of the mining world to the other.

A storekeeper who knew him remembered a man who made everyone in the room faintly uneasy.

This unease came from a relentlessness that left no room for small talk or discouragement.

He had spent two years being told he was wrong, and it had only hardened him.

Two things he noticed in his wandering would eventually make him one of the wealthiest men alive.

In Western Australia, he saw that gold often hid inside a greenish mineral called telluride.

This mineral was so easy to mistake for worthless pyrite that untrained eyes threw it away.

In Colorado, he found those same tellurides locked inside a volcanic rock called porphyry.

Most prospectors of the day dismissed it as useless red granite and walked past.

Oaks did not walk past it and kept his eyes open for similar formations elsewhere.

By 1910, he heard of gold and silver strikes in northern Ontario and hurried back to Canada.

He found the ground around those strikes staked solid for miles in every direction.

Then a prospector mentioned granite formations off to the east of a small settlement named Swastika.

In June of 1911, at 36 years old, he stepped off a train there with his tools.

He arrived with roughly two dollars and sixty-five cents to his name.

Within days of pitching his camp at Kirkland Lake, Oaks found exactly what he had trained to recognize.

It was porphyry threaded with weak gold-bearing quartz and studded with greenish telluride grains.

Nearly every other prospector in the district had glanced at it and abandoned it as worthless.

At the local general store, he announced to a skeptical owner that he would build a one-man mine.

When the man doubted him, Oaks told him simply to wait and watch.

The stories behind figures like Harry Oaks run deep in history and reveal private wreckage.

The Oaks saga belongs near the top of the list of fortunes that tore families apart.

He arranged to have his best ground staked and kept exploring the wider country.

When his money ran out entirely, he struck a grubstake deal with two brothers named Tom and George Tough.

He traded a share of a second promising claim for the funds to carry on his work.

The mine those brothers helped him open was the first working mine in the Kirkland Lake camp.

By the end of 1912, it was producing rich telluride-laced ore.

The first shipment of 101 tons brought back more than forty-six thousand dollars from the smelter.

Oaks poured those first earnings straight back into the ground he had staked for himself.

He sank a shaft on the property he named Lake Shore and bet everything on what lay beneath.

The early results there were poor, and money to keep digging grew harder to find.

He was convinced that the real riches lay deeper than anyone had yet drilled.

He told everyone who would listen and formed a public company to raise capital.

In early 1918, seven years after he first walked into Kirkland Lake, a crosscut struck the main break.

It was a continuous wall of gold-bearing rock one hundred feet wide at its richest.

This structure would eventually be mined to a depth of eight thousand feet.

The property he had nearly abandoned held the richest gold in the camp.

Over its working life, the Lake Shore mine gave up more than eight million ounces of gold.

It stood in its era as the single largest gold producer in the entire Western Hemisphere.

By 1927, nine years after the strike, the mine had paid Oaks twenty-eight million dollars in dividends.

After that, it went on handing him roughly three million more in a typical year.

By the early 1940s, his fortune was estimated at around two hundred million dollars.

This sum made him, by common reckoning, the wealthiest man in the country.

A single interview he gave years later caught the whole temper of the man.

He recalled rising before daybreak every morning and working harder than anyone else.

He also marveled at the engineers who had turned up their noses at his red granite.

The man who had collected the fortune was not much easier to like than the ore was to reach.

He dressed like a miner long after he had any need to.

He kept blunt and demanding manners that sat strangely on a wealthy man.

He carried a deep suspicion of governments, banks, and lawyers, believing they wanted his money.

That suspicion of the state would soon drive him out of the country his gold enriched.

Oaks’s relations with the Canadian state had always been wary and adversarial.

He came to see the government less as his country than as a rival with its hand in his pocket.

The conservative administration levied taxes that he calculated cost him seventeen thousand five hundred dollars a day.

This amounted to close to eighty-five percent of his gold revenues.

There was wounded pride in it as well because he had wanted a seat in the Canadian Senate.

When he was passed over for the Senate, his departure caused an uproar at home.

Critics read his move as disloyalty to the country his gold had helped enrich.

He waved away this charge with his usual bluntness.

In 1934, he left Canada altogether, moving first to England and then to the Bahamas by 1935.

Nassau was a British colony where the tax on his enormous income fell all the way to five percent.

His marriage had come to him late in life, the way domestic settlement comes to men in camps.

He married Eunice McIntyre in 1923 when he was forty-eight and she was thirty.

The marriage proved devoted and lasting, producing five children.

The eldest of them, born in 1924, was a daughter named Nancy.

Nancy would one day stand between a murdered father’s memory and her husband’s life.

In Canada, the family lived like the newly rich in a thirty-seven-room Tudor mansion above Niagara Falls.

The mansion had taken four years and half a million dollars to build.

In Nassau, Oaks poured the same restless energy into his adopted island that he showed in Ontario.

He gave heavily toward the building of the Nassau airport and enlarged the largest hotel.

He invested widely in island real estate alongside a property developer named Harold Christie.

It was the philanthropy of a man with little patience for committees and total confidence in himself.

He won a seat in the Bahamas House of Assembly where his money eased the way to votes.

His closest business tie on the island was to Christie, whose name would be braided through his death.

When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in 1940, the Duke served as governor.

The Oaks family became their social intimates almost at once.

The royal couple even stayed at Westborne while Government House was being made ready for them.

He and Lady Oaks gave lavish dinner dances at Westborne for as many as three hundred guests.

Yet to anyone who crossed him or circled his money, he remained as implacable as ever.

In June of 1939, the king made Oaks a baronet for a fifty thousand pound gift to a London hospital.

The abrasive prospector became Sir Harry Oaks, first baronet of Nassau.

He was sixty-four years old and richer than he could spend.

He was still as suspicious and hard-edged as the young man who arrived in Kirkland Lake.

He had rewritten his will shortly before and weighed whether to shift his fortune to Mexico.

This move would add yet another motive to the tangle after his death.

Into this glittering and gossiping world there sailed a tall Mauritian with a yacht and a borrowed title.

Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marini was born in Mauritius in 1910 into a well-off family.

The name de Marini came from his mother’s side rather than any patent of nobility.

The title of count was a courtesy he awarded himself.

A genealogist put it flatly that he asked to be styled a count which he most certainly was not.

Nassau society variously humored or mocked the pretension behind his back.

He was hard to overlook, standing six feet five inches tall and deeply tanned.

He sailed a yacht he had provocatively named the Concubine, courting disapproval as a matter of style.

The Duke of Windsor loathed him thoroughly, calling him an unscrupulous adventurer.

The Duke cited an evil reputation for immoral conduct around young girls.

Even people who liked him noticed he carried himself as if rules were written for other people.

Ernest Hemingway counted him a personal friend, and writer Earl Stanley Gardner followed his trial.

The Nassau establishment had him marked as a scoundrel long before anyone spoke of murder.

He came to Nancy Oaks with two marriages already behind him that told unflattering stories.

His first wife was a wealthy Alsatian woman he married in Paris in 1937.

They divorced about four months later without him returning her sizable dowry.

It was a plain pattern where a beautiful woman married him and left poorer.

That divorce, filed in Florida and flawed by residency rules, would later unravel his marriage to Nancy.

His second wife left her husband and traveled to Reno to divorce him.

She married de Marini on the very day her decree came through.

Her money financed his life in Nassau, his yachting, and a successful chicken farm.

When wartime restrictions threatened her American assets, the couple divorced in Miami.

They carried on so amicably afterward that they shared a telephone number and a post office box.

She would later sue him for the return of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars she lent him.

The former couple went on so amicably that the second wife was astonished by his third marriage.

The flaws in these divorces would sit like loose stones to bring his marriage to Nancy down.

This time the bride was an 18-year-old girl whose father owned the largest gold mine in the hemisphere.

De Marini began his courtship of Nancy Oaks when she was just 17 and living with her parents.

On May 19th, 1942, only two days after her 18th birthday, the two eloped without telling her parents.

They turned up that night at a New York restaurant where Nancy announced the marriage.

The news traveled back to Nassau like a thrown match into dry grass.

Her father roared with rage, her mother wept, and the whole of Nassau lifted its eyebrows.

The groom was 32 to the bride’s 18, twice divorced, and effectively penniless beside the Oaks fortune.

The newlyweds left at once for Mexico City where the marriage nearly ended before it began.

Nancy came down with typhoid fever and a severe mouth infection at the same time.

Her parents flew to her bedside, and de Marini gave his own blood for transfusions.

Everyone who watched him at that bedside saw he was genuinely devoted to his sick young wife.

None of this softened Sir Harry toward the young man.

When Nancy told her mother she was pregnant, doctors advised she was too weak to carry the child.

Doctors ended the pregnancy on medical grounds with her father’s firm insistence behind it.

Sir Harry then barred his son-in-law from the house altogether.

Both he and Lady Oaks revised their wills to exclude de Marini.

Oaks instructed his lawyer that de Marini was not even allowed to write letters to Nancy.

To an acquaintance, he called the younger man a sex maniac to his face.

The bad blood between the two men curdled into loose talk that sounded dark later.

De Marini was heard to call his father-in-law a stupid old fool no one could reason with.

Oaks’s mine manager testified that the younger man once threatened to kick him.

This talk of hatred sat differently once there was a body in a bed.

In the moment, it was simply the ordinary poison of a rich man at war with a young husband.

Nancy sat in the middle of it, loved by a difficult father and married to a difficult husband.

By the spring of 1943, the marriage had eased into an uneasy separation.

Nancy was enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont while de Marini stayed behind in Nassau.

Sir Harry meant to travel north to join his family early in July.

Then, for reasons no one ever fully explained, he changed his mind and stayed behind.

Westborne was the trophy a mining camp man builds when he wants to know he will never sleep in a tent.

It sat on Cable Beach on the western shore of Nassau.

It was a rambling colonial house wrapped in verandas and bougainvillea with lawns running to the sea.

On the evening of July 7th, 1943, Sir Harry hosted a small and quiet dinner there.

His wife and all five children were away at the family’s summer place in Maine.

The guests were the usual island company, with Harold Christie among them.

Christie was his oldest friend in Nassau and the developer who first talked him into moving there.

Christie stayed the night in a bedroom on the same floor after the others left around eleven.

In the small hours, a violent summer storm rolled over the island with wall-to-wall rain and thunder.

The wind pulled at anything not tied down, providing cover for anything done unseen.

Somewhere in the eastern wing of the house between two and five in the morning, Sir Harry was beaten.

In the morning, Harold Christie knocked on the bedroom door to ask about breakfast.

Getting no answer, he pushed the door open and found what was left of his oldest friend.

Oaks had been struck four times behind the left ear with something pointed and multi-pronged.

The wounds were small and tightly grouped rather than the ragged smashing of a club.

Investigators would argue for years over whether the weapon was a miner’s pick or an ice pick.

No weapon was ever found, and small blisters on the body were never explained.

After death, someone soaked his body in a flammable liquid and set it alight.

The fire only half caught and left a corpse burned but recognizable.

A torn pillow had thrown feathers across the bed and the body.

The ceiling fan was still turning so that some feathers drifted in the air when people reached the room.

Bloody handprints stood out on the lacquered Chinese screen beside the bed, on walls, and on doors.

These prints would become the very center of the trial to come.

Christy stated he had not grasped at first that his friend was dead and tried to revive him.

His hands touched the body and the bed before a single policeman set foot in the room.

Christy telephoned several other people that morning before it occurred to him to call the police.

By the time Bohemian officers arrived, people had entered and left the room repeatedly.

Handprints were smeared, objects sat out of place, and the crime scene was dissolving.

Word had reached the Duke of Windsor at Government House early that same morning.

The governor moved with a speed and a strangeness that have puzzled historians ever since.

He had known Oaks well and lived under his roof when he first arrived on the island.

He might have been expected to want the fullest possible inquiry into his friend’s death.

Instead, he clamped a blackout on the press which correspondents pierced within hours.

The killing soon shouldered news of the war off the front pages in America, Canada, and Britain.

He ordered his Bahamian detectives to stand aside and did not send for Scotland Yard.

Whether the yard was truly unavailable in wartime or whether that was a convenient story remains debated.

Most accounts treated the refusal to summon the yard as a deliberate choice.

Instead, the Duke picked up the telephone and called Miami.

He personally reached out to his own contacts and summoned two officers of the Miami police.

One was Captain Edward Melchin, who had once been the Duke’s own bodyguard on visits to Florida.

This personal connection made him trusted by the governor despite lacking murder inquiry experience.

The other was Captain James Barker, Melchin’s colleague and a fingerprint specialist.

The pair flew across to Nassau that same day to take charge of the situation.

What the pair conducted once they arrived was less an investigation than the demolition of one.

The scene was never properly sealed, and people wandered through touching what they liked.

The bloody handprints on the screen and walls were never photographed before being wiped away.

By the evening of July 9th, roughly 36 hours after Christy pushed open the door, detectives settled on a man.

De Marini fit the shape of a suspect well enough for the establishment’s liking.

He was known to loathe the dead man and had driven near Westborne in the small hours.

Singed hairs showed on his arms and beard, which he put down to lighting cigars and candles.

He had walked into a police station that morning asking whether his vehicle could be inspected.

Defenders called this the conduct of an innocent man, while the prosecution read it the other way.

The motive wrote itself in the establishment’s telling as a penniless young husband cut out of a will.

All Nassau believed him guilty, and a rope was said to have been ordered for hanging before trial.

On the evening of July 9th, barely 36 hours after the body was found, they arrested him.

Nancy Oaks de Marini was 19 years old, sitting in a dormitory at Bennington when word reached her.

She came back to Nassau at once into a situation that would have flattened most people.

Her father had died in a gruesome manner, and her mother was already persuaded of her husband’s guilt.

The island’s social order had convicted him in private and was sharpening its knives in public.

Her husband sat in Nassau prison waiting for a trial most expected to end in a hanging.

Into this wall of hostility walked a teenage girl with no legal training and no allies among rulers.

She carried nothing but certainty about her husband and a shrewdness nobody expected from her.

From the moment she stepped off the plane, Nancy told anyone who would listen that Freddy was innocent.

She stated clearly that she was the only person alive who could help him.

She was 19 and standing in the wreckage of her family without weeping for cameras.

Correspondents poured in from the United States and Britain as the murder knocked the war off front pages.

Her mother sat in grief, certain that the young husband had killed her father.

Nancy grasped faster than anyone that this trial would be fought in newspapers as well as courtrooms.

She set out to win in both arenas at once by feeding the press a sympathetic image.

Her first real move was the shrewdest of the whole affair for a 19-year-old.

Hiring Raymond Schindler brought one of America’s most celebrated private detectives onto the case.

He had cut his teeth on cases like the Leo Frank affair and the Hall-Mills murder.

She brought him in to run a parallel investigation beside the defense and check the Miami men.

Schindler went to Nassau and turned an expert eye on everything the two Miami men had done.

His findings, handed quietly to defense lawyers, would take the prosecution’s case apart in open court.

The man he handed those findings to was a local barrister named Godfrey Higgs.

Higgs was badly outmatched on paper but was about to prove lethal in practice.

The trial opened on October 18th, 1943, in the Bahamas Supreme Court before Chief Justice Sir Oscar Daly.

The case fed newspapers around the world for three months, and the courtroom filled every single day.

Among correspondents was Earl Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason and a well-paid writer.

He arrived with a novelist’s eye and a trained lawyer’s suspicion of loose procedure.

He expected a sensation and found instead a slow demonstration of how a murder case falls to pieces.

The crown had retained Sir Alfred Adderley, the most formidable barrister in the Bahamas.

De Marini had tried to hire Adderley first, but the prosecution reached him beforehand.

The defense fell to Godfrey Higgs, a less seasoned advocate backed by a junior named Ernest Callender.

On paper, it looked like a route waiting to happen against a comparative journeyman.

The contest would end up hinging on a small handful of physical facts that reputations could not paper over.

Chief Justice Sir Oscar Daly presided with a fairness that every observer remarked upon.

He refused to let the island’s hunger for a conviction bend the proceedings.

Gardner judged Adderley’s opening address as fine a speech as he had ever heard in a court of law.

On paper, the crown’s case had real weight with a declared hatred and a poor alibi.

Every ugly thing Oaks had ever said about the man could be pressed into service now.

De Marini testified later and made little effort to soften the hostility between them.

The prosecution had motive on its side and a defendant with an ugly reputation.

What the prosecution did not grasp was that the physical case rested on a single fingerprint.

Captain James Barker swore he had lifted a latent fingerprint from the lacquered Chinese screen.

He identified it as the right little finger of Alfred de Marini.

It was the one piece of physical evidence placing the accused inside the murdered man’s room.

Logged as exhibit J, it was meant to be the nail in de Marini’s coffin.

Over several days of cross-examination, Godfrey Higgs pulled that nail out of the wood.

Barker never photographed the print on the screen before lifting it away.

Everything he claimed about where the print came from rested on his own unsupported word.

The lifted print carried none of the raised background pattern of the screen’s embossed lacquer.

Other prints Barker took from the same screen carried that pattern plainly, but exhibit J did not.

A visiting fingerprint man from New Orleans, Captain Maurice O’Neill, testified about this inconsistency.

Pressed repeatedly, Barker was unable to say where on the large screen the print had been found.

Then the case’s spine snapped clean in two when Barker and Melchin contradicted each other.

Barker placed the identification on July 9th, while Melchin swore he heard nothing until ten days later.

Two detectives on the same case disagreed completely on when the decisive piece of evidence appeared.

Higgs laid his own theory before the jury without flinching.

He argued that the two detectives questioned de Marini informally upstairs at Westborne on July 9th.

During that session, de Marini had handled a water glass and a pack of cigarettes.

From one of those objects, Higgs contended, Barker lifted the print and produced it as evidence.

Barker denied the theory hotly but could not account for the missing background pattern.

He could not point to a spot on the screen and had been caught in a plain lie on the stand.

Photographing a print where it sits is the first rule of the craft because it fixes placement beyond dispute.

The chief justice in his summing up called Barker’s methods incomprehensible and Melchin’s admissions extraordinary.

He told the jury plainly that the fingerprint was not evidence they could safely trust.

With its one hard exhibit lying in ruins, the crown’s case leaned on the testimony of Harold Christie.

Christy’s account did not hold together cleanly as the prosecution needed it to.

He slept in the house, heard nothing through the storm, and found his friend dead in the morning.

Then the defense called Captain Edward Sears of the Bahamas Police.

Sears swore under oath that around one in the morning he had seen Christy driven through downtown Nassau.

Christy flatly denied ever having left the house during the night.

Both accounts could not stand at once, and the contradiction was never resolved.

Darker still was a thread that ran entirely outside the courtroom involving a night watchman.

The watchman had reportedly seen Christy with an unidentified man at a strange boat the night before.

That watchman drowned under murky circumstances before he could ever testify.

The defense noted that Christy had parked his car some distance from Westborne on the night of the dinner.

None of these threads proved Christy had done anything, but they left the prosecution’s account untidy.

The Duke of Windsor had personally chosen every turn of the investigation from Miami detectives to blackout.

He had arranged to be in the United States for the whole of the trial.

He was never called to the stand and never came back to Nassau to answer for his decisions.

De Marini took the stand in his own defense, composed to the edge of arrogance.

He freely admitted the hatred and flatly denied the crime.

The singed hairs came from candles and cooking at his own party, backed by guests who were there.

Nancy was the last witness the defense called after spending weeks at the center of the trial.

She testified for her husband while running a fever and nearly fainting in the box.

Her mother remained seated in the room, still believing the young man guilty.

When the prosecutor rose to make his closing attack, Nancy stood up and walked out of the courtroom.

She stated she could not sit and listen to such filthy things said against her husband.

The walkout ran in newspapers around the world as the act of a loyal wife.

Whether spontaneous or judged, no gesture was better calculated to move a watching public.

The jury retired on November 12th, 1943, and was gone for only about two hours.

The foreman rose and delivered a verdict of not guilty by nine votes to three.

The room came apart with noise, and de Marini was hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd.

Most of them were black Bahamians who watched the white colonial establishment botch the case.

Nancy had done exactly what she set out to do when she stepped off that plane in July.

Then the same jury attached a rider recommending that de Marini be deported as an undesirable alien.

Freedom and banishment were tied together in a single verdict.

He had once called the Duke of Windsor a pimple on the empire.

Four days after the acquittal, the Duke’s executive council ratified the order sending him off the island.

The man was found innocent of murder and expelled from the island in the same motion.

Nancy chose without apparent hesitation to follow her husband into exile.

In the end, the case closed not with an answer, but with an expulsion.

The murder of her father was never reinvestigated, and no one else was ever arrested.

No other theory was ever tested in a court of law.

The four small wounds behind Sir Harry’s ear have gone unanswered for the better part of a century.

Historians have circled Harold Christie with unexplained movements and sums of money.

They have circled the Duke of Windsor’s frantic mismanagement of the case, but circling is all they can do.

The rope reportedly readied for the hanging was never needed.

Harold Christie went on to be knighted and to prosper for decades to come.

His contradictions in the case were never resolved and never pursued by anyone in authority.

The Duke of Windsor finished his term and was never asked under oath to account for his choices.

Nancy Oaks had stood at 19 between a murdered father and a husband half of Nassau wanted hanged.

She picked her husband without flinching and never once publicly looked back.

The choice cost her the closeness of her grieving mother and tied her to a suspicious man.

She had gambled on her own judgment against her father’s memory and the settled opinion of society.

She proved right in the only room where it counted.

She lived roughly eighty years in all, and the choice she made at 19 followed her through them.