by Noel Hynd
ASHES FROM A BURNING CORPSE
A Novel based on a true crime
By Noel Hynd
© 2017 Noel Hynd
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My late father, Alan Hynd, was a true crime writer in the United States for more than fifty years, starting in the 1920’s and ending in the 1970’s. He covered more than a thousand cases in his career. The New York Times in 1952 (*) called him “probably the most successful financially” of fact crime writers of the day.
Of those thousand cases, three stand out as having had the most impact upon him both personally and professionally. The first was the case of the swindler Charles Ponzi in Boston in 1920. The second was the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son in 1932 and the execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in 1936. The third, which follows here, was the horrific depraved murder of Sir Harry Oakes in The Bahamas in 1943.
Oakes at the time was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Alan Hynd’s frank coverage of the case resulted in his being permanently banned from the Bahamas and his life being threatened.
I’ve set about to use my father’s material, his reporting, his work, the many conversations he and I had about these cases long ago, and his first-person voice, as the basis of three novels that will form a trilogy: An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century. These works are not so much about the cases as they are about the profound effects they had on a reporter who covered them. This is the first of those novels, though it’s chronologically the third.
Enjoy.
Noel Hynd
October 2017
(*) NY Times, October 12, 1952, Book Section, Page 31
The Murder of Sir Harry Oakes
For
Jeremy Noel Hynd,
Alan’s grandson
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
Notes and Acknowledgements
Arsenic, Old Lace and Sister Amy Archer
Also by Alan Hynd
CHAPTER 1
I’m going to tell you about a murder—or several murders, plus some attempts that failed. The murder in question took place on a stormy early morning of the eighth day of July 1943, in a mansion known as Westbourne, a sprawling baronial luxury home in Nassau, the Bahamas, once owned by a woman named Maxine Elliott, who was a celebrated American actress. The property faced the sea in the western part of Nassau.
On the night the crime was committed, there were no servants in the main house. The victim was a man named Sir Harry Oakes, a well-known gold mining executive reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. The only other person on the premises was one of Sir Harry’s closest friends, Harold Christie, a governing official of Nassau and maybe the island’s second wealthiest and best-known citizen. Christie, who had spent the night with Sir Harry to wrap up some business transactions in which they were jointly involved, said he discovered the body about seven o’clock in the morning. He put through telephone calls to the police and to Dr. Hugh Arnley Quackenbush, a prominent Nassau physician. The Doctor arrived at Westbourne about seven-thirty. Not long afterwards, another man arrived: Major Herbert Pemberton, the deputy commissioner of the Nassau police.
Sir Harry, or what remained of him, lay face-up on a bed in a luxurious second floor chamber that overlooked the beach. There were four wounds behind his left ear, triangular gashes about half an inch wide at the most. It was Dr. Quackenbush’s opinion that the wounds had been made by the end of a sharp metal instrument. Whoever had handled the weapon had probably been a person of unusual strength.
Each wound was more than a quarter of an inch in depth. The four wounds appeared to be the cause of a quick and sudden death. The left side of the victim’s head had been shattered. Blood coated his face. The stench of burning flesh hung in the air. Someone had tried to incinerate the body.
Oakes had been dead between two-and-a-half and five hours, Quackenbush decided when he examined the body, fixing his death between two-thirty and five o’clock in the morning. As Quackenbush conducted his initial exam, the bedchamber remained heavy with smoke. Part of a rug was smoldering. The head of the bed and part of the mattress had been burned, as had the corpse. There was a second bed in the room, but it was empty aside from a pair of pants and a white shirt that the victim had worn the previous evening. Between the beds was a small table on which lay a pair of reading glasses, a set of false teeth, and a lamp. There was also a Chinese screen in the room, a five-section piece that was currently stylish. There was a print design on the screen, but the piece had been charred and scorched by the fire.
Sir Harry had been the target of an intense flame, particularly around the eyes and his genitals. It appeared he had been burned both before and after death. His body contained wet blisters which arise only when a person is still alive, and dry ones which occur only after death.
As if all this weren’t enough, the corpse on the bed had been sprinkled with feathers taken from the pillows. The feathers were not burned, so they must have been put there after the fire was out.
The Superintendent of Police, Colonel R. A. Erskine-Lindop, reached the scene shortly after Dr. Quackenbush and Major Pemberton, perhaps around eight o’clock. The police knew at a glance that they were facing something horrific and depraved. The concentrated flame that had been applied around the eyes and the genitals smacked of an uncivilized hatred; the feathers gave the crime a touch of witchcraft, voodoo or some form of the occult. The outer islands around Nassau were thick with native men whose familiarity with primitive jungle ritual of one kind or another was far from extinct. No perverse explanation could be eliminated.
At eleven o’clock in the morning, some four hours after Harold Christie had reported finding Sir Harry Oakes’ body, His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor, Governor of the Bahamas, having been notified of his close friend’s untimely death, sat in Government House trying to arrive at a grave decision.
The Duke, formerly King Edward VIII of England, was rusty in arriving at important decisions, having been free of the necessity of making any important ones since he decided to forego his crown a few years previously. His problem now was whether to entrust the local constabulary with the formalities to be performed about the passing of an important citizen. His option was to call in out-of-the-country cops.
With a few exceptions, the Bahamian cops would have warmed the heart of Mack Sennett, the old-time Hollywood movie maker whose Keystone Kops supplied nickelodeon patrons with belly laughs a third of a century before. So the Duke decided that the local boys might need some help. He picked up a telephone
and put through a call to the United States to the Miami, Florida, Police Department. There the Duke connected with Captain Edward Melchen, chief of the Homicide Department. The Duke was personally acquainted with Captain Melchen, who had previously arranged special guards for him when Windsor had passed through Miami.
“A very prominent citizen is dead here,” said the Duke to Melchen, “and it might be suicide. Can you come at once?” Captain Melchen said he would catch the next plane. The Duke, for reasons unexplained, was apparently not in possession of much clear information about the discovery of Sir Harry’s body when he made the call.
Obviously, this was no suicide.
The Duke’s mistake in reporting Sir Harry’s death as a suicide rather than a murder proved to be, as the Duke himself later put it, “most unfortunate.” An investigator sets out with considerably more equipment to investigate a murder than he takes with him to consider a suicide. Gas, poison, or shooting causes most suicides. So, when Captain Melchen, Chief of Detectives in Miami, accompanied by his pal Captain James Barker, head of the Miami Police Identification Department—the fingerprint unit—left on the eleven fifty a.m. airplane, they were carrying with them equipment for investigating only those three methods of self-destruction. Fingerprints, as it turned out, were to be of the utmost importance in the investigation, but Captain Barker was carrying only a small portable fingerprint kit and no fingerprint camera, the standard equipment of the day.
Melchen and Barker landed in The Bahamas with solid credentials. First, they were said to be the handpicked choices of the Duke, which gave them a bit of luster. Second, there were their resumés. Melchen, aged fifty and hefty to the point of being porky, was the head of Miami’s Homicide Bureau, a busy unit considering the heat, tempers and fast money for which that city was noted. Barker was eight inches taller than Melchen and a solid good-looking American southerner with accent to match. He dressed well, usually in a good suit, and habitually wore a homburg. He had worked fingerprints on more than five hundred cases and had been President for one term of the International Association for Identification, the most prestigious forensics organization in the United States. By any accepted standards, Barker was an accomplished fingerprint expert.
Melchen and Barker arrived in Nassau at one thirty-five in the afternoon. Local police drove them directly to Westbourne. As soon as they saw the murder room, of course, they realized the Duke’s message had started them off on the wrong foot. But that wasn’t all. Though the murder room and the immediate vicinity were jumping with bloody finger and handprints, everything was so damp from the heavy storm of the night before that dusting for prints was out of the question. A fingerprint is comprised of one percent body oil and 99 percent water. The body oils do not show up under conditions of extreme dampness, so Barker said he would wait until the following day, when he hoped to be able to develop prints.
The Miami cops took a good look at Sir Harry’s body, which had been left in place pending their arrival. They decided that somebody must have poured some highly flammable agent over Oakes, and in the process, the killer might well have received some burns himself, because of proximity to the blaze. They thought exclusively in terms of a male suspect or suspects. The force of the blows on the skull ruled out from the beginning a likelihood that the crime had been committed by a woman.
As a matter of normal police routine, Harold Christie, as the only other known occupant of Westbourne at the time of the murder, was subjected to a microscopic examination to determine whether he had any singed hairs on his head, his face, or his hands and arms. He hadn’t.
During the examination, the affable but shaken Christie informed the police on the situation at Westbourne. Lady Oakes and the five Oakes children were in the United States, having gone North sometime before to escape the suffocating heat of the summer months in Nassau. They did this every year. The fact that this year, 1943, was a dark year during World War Two did nothing to discourage them. To the contrary, for a wealthy family, the mainland of the United States was a safer haven than an island off the east coast of Florida where German U-Boats prowled.
Christie, at the invitation of Sir Harry, had come over to Westbourne to stay with him while finalizing some business matters until Sir Harry was ready to go on a business trip to South America. Sir Harry’s trip had been scheduled for that very morning.
On the previous evening, according to Christie, Sir Harry had thrown a party for himself at Westbourne, a farewell party. It was a comparatively small get-together of friends, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It broke up quietly about midnight.
Then Sir Harry and Christie had another drink or two by themselves while the servants cleared away the debris left after the festivities. The servants finished putting the house back in order by about one o’clock, and left for the nearby cabins in which they lived. Christie and Sir Harry had then said goodnight to each other and gone to their respective rooms.
Shortly thereafter, somebody or several somebodies murdered Sir Harry Oakes as he slept peacefully in his own bed.
CHAPTER 2
Two evenings after the murder, I was at home in my Manhattan apartment with my wife and eighteen-month-old daughter, savoring true big-time financial success, a modest bit of fame as an author—I had had a book titled Passport to Treason on the New York Times Best Seller list for a good part of that year—and a wonderful second marriage. We lived at 530 Park Avenue on the eighth floor. We had a gorgeous nine-room spread, with a study that overlooked the corner of Sixty-First Street and Park Avenue. My specialties were true crime and espionage, and I had done very well writing about both. Financial success lands a man in some nice places: not all the time, but most of the time.
“Alan?” asked the voice on the line.
The caller was Kenneth Gelb, my most senior editor at Fawcett Publications and Editor in Chief at True Magazine. Fawcett had a magazine empire perched in New York’s West Forties, a not unpleasant walk from where I was living. As miserable as life was for most of the world in 1943, life was rosy for me.
I was not directly in the war, and there were three reasons. I was forty years old. I had a shattered knee cap from an auto accident and still sometimes limped along with a cane. I’d tried to volunteer after Pearl Harbor, but was given 4-F due to my age and my leg. I was helping the war effort in my own way—writing, propagandizing, whatever you want to call it. I was selling the victory line in any publication that I sold to and trying to add to the effort on the home front. It didn’t seem like much compared to the guys who were fighting in Europe and the South Pacific, but it was what fate sent my way. We all get by as we can, and I was getting by much better than most.
My call from Ken Gelb piqued my interest from the get-go. It ran twenty-five minutes, and then the call ended. My wife appeared at the door to my study. She sensed something, as women do when they know you too well. I said nothing.
Outside there was a warm rain falling. The world was going to hell. Canadian, American and British forces had just established beachheads in Sicily and were starting the long slog northward that would hopefully lead to Rome and toppling the little tinhorn dictator Mussolini, Hitler’s pal. Men were fighting and dying and bleeding.
I rose from my desk in my apartment and lifted my daughter. I put an arm around my wife. It was bedtime for the little girl and I was a lucky man.
“What was the phone call?” my wife said to me.
“Ken Gelb at Fawcett publications. It’s an assignment.”
“What and where?” she asked.
I bounced the little girl.
“A murder case. The Bahamas.”
She blinked. “Not the murder case?” she asked.
“Yes. That one,” I said. “Fawcett’s wants reports every three days, if possible.”
Like anyone else in the civilized world who could read or hear, she knew all about the Oakes slaying. It had been not just all over the news, it had been the news, the story that had pushed the war aside. The Baha
mian crime—like another case that I had covered, the Lindbergh case in New Jersey years before—was populated with a distinguished, sordid and colorful cast of characters of which the deceased was the star.
Sir Harry Oakes himself, as Ken Gelb described it, had been a belligerent, barrel-chested man of sixty-eight who had more enemies per square foot of Bahama real estate than any other man in the islands. Not the least of which among Sir Harry’s enemies were a legion of husbands of occasionally straying local wives. Then there were so many of his questionable business dealings. The fact that Sir Harry had attained his sixty-eighth birthday without being knocked off earlier was as much of a mystery as the murder itself. He had for much of his life been accumulating enemies and asking for it.
Or so said my editor.
Oakes was a notable character not only in the Bahamas, but also in the United States, Canada, England and South America. His fortune was estimated to be in the range of two hundred million dollars at the time of his death. Oakes circulated only in the rarified precincts of the social world and participated in events with such high-profile figures as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whom he counted as close friends. His death by malice aforethought thus became a world-wide sensation even during a global war.
“Nassau?” she asked. “Nassau!”
“Nassau,” I said.
“Isn’t Nassau dangerous? Isn’t travel dangerous?”
“Life is dangerous,” I said. “And I can’t sit at home.” I shrugged. “I’ll probably be back in two weeks.”
“Two weeks often turns into six weeks,” she said after a few moments of silence.
She had a point. Often, she did.
We put my daughter to bed.
“How much money did he offer you?” she asked.
The average guy earned two thousand dollars a year at the time.