by Noel Hynd
He had enemies. But he deserved better than to be heinously murdered as he slept.
I came to think of him as a rough-hewn Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s anti-hero, exiled to the Bahamas as a quasi-colonial. Gatsby was a crook, of course. Harry wasn’t. But there was a kindred spirit, or maybe I only imagined it.
I’m tempted to say that Sir Harry was no better and no worse than any other man and that he deserved justice, even in death. But then I re-assess and I do admit that after he was murdered, he won me over. Dare I say, I even admired him, flaws and all, the way he would go banging around town in his old mining gear. He was a self-made man as so many of the lions of his generation were. One had to admire that: his dynamism. His frontier mentality. I grew to like him and wanted to help bring justice to his case. I couldn’t.
Oddly, he formed a strange triumvirate of self-made men in the case, men I liked and respected. Harry seemed like a distant great uncle, wealthy and cantankerous. Ray Schindler seemed like a wise cousin to me, a man of experience in a rough world. And Mike Todd, peripheral to the case but in and out of my orbit during the Forties and Fifties, seemed like an irascible big brother. As the years passed, I liked all three of them even more. The world was a smaller place without such outsized men.
Over the years, Harold Christie became very wealthy. Property values boomed in the Bahamas. Gambling and new hotels brought tourists. Tourists brought money. Westbourne, where Harry Oakes was murdered, became the site of the Playboy Casino, part of the Ambassador Beach Hotel. Creepily, the casino building bore a shocking resemblance to Harry’s old estate.
For all his good work in bringing prosperity to the Bahamas, Harold Christie was knighted in 1964 by Queen Elizabeth II, the niece of Edward VIII. Not long thereafter, white colonial rule gradually ended in the Bahamas and the country inched toward its independence, which it gained in June of 1973.
A few months later, Sir Harold Christie was on a business trip to West Germany when he suffered a heart attack. He died the same day. He was seventy-seven.
When I read the news in The New York Times, the Oakes case had a final echo. Christie’s obituary mentioned that on the night forty years earlier when the millionaire baronet was burned and beaten to death Harold Christie “had heard nothing but the sounds of a severe rainstorm.”
There it would forever remain.
I read the obituary twice. I angrily folded the newspaper and threw it away.
Alfred de Marigny did not kill Sir Harry Oakes.
Apparently, no one did.
END
Notes and Acknowledgements
The primary source for the story contained in this book was the years of conversations that I had with my father as I was growing up. We spoke many times on the subjects that he wrote about, including what he wrote and published on the Oakes case.
In attempting to recreate Alan Hynd’s narrative voice with as much accuracy as possible, I’ve even incorporated some of his text in the Oakes case into this book. As noted previously, as a true crime reporter he covered more than a thousand true crime cases in a long career. I’m more than familiar with most of them. Our conversations on cases frequently included what couldn’t be printed at the time, mostly due to the invasion of privacy laws as well as the libel laws.
Alan Hynd was in fact a friend of Raymond Schindler and a friend of Mike Todd. Their inclusion here is an affectionate nod. The apparent attempt on his life in 1951 happened as it is portrayed here. He was no friend, of course, of many of the main players in the Bahamas, who didn’t care much for his reporting. I was four years old at the time and my father left our home in an ambulance during the right. It’s a vivid memory and not a pleasant one. The Duke of Windsor was not a fan, either, and feelings were mutual. I remember it quite well.
The Oakes case, the Lindbergh case and the Ponzi case were always foremost of what he covered, but he was equally an authority on the desperado outlaws of the Great Depression, notably John Dillinger. He even struck up an acquittance with John Wilson Dillinger, Johnny’s dad, when the bank robber’s father went on the vaudeville circuit in the late 1930’s. But that’s another story for another day….
Alan Hynd really was a New York Times Best Selling author with a book titled Passport To Treason in 1943. All of his newspaper and work in the true crime field is accurately portrayed here.
Research on the book, however, included many further sources. Many books have been written on the Oakes case. Some of them contain passages remarkably similar to Alan Hynd’s own final account which appeared in 1958 in a big compendium of true crime titled, Murder, Mayhem and Mystery. I’ve looked at all of them. They are remarkable in the sense that no two arrive at exactly the same conclusion over who-dun-it. In any case, I used them for sources on Nassau in 1943, the trial, and many of the players in the drama. In chronological order, the books are as follows:
The Life and Death of Sir Harry Oakes. Geoffrey Bocca. 1959
Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? Marshall Houts, 1972 and 1976.
Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? James Leasor, 1983
King of Fools John Parker 1988
The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life Charles Higham, 2005
A Conspiracy of Crowns, Alfred de Marigny and Mickey Herskowitz 1990
Carnal Hours: A Nathan Heller Mystery, Max Allan Collins 1994
Any Human Heart, William Boyd 2002
A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon to O.J. 2003, Colin Evans 2003
Blood and Fire: the Duke of Windsor and the Strange Murder of Sir Harry Oakes, John Marquis. 2005
A Serpent in Eden, James Owen 2006
It was more than amusing to find that two of the books above took their titles from the title of Alan Hynd’s 1958 article which appeared in Murder, Mayhem and Mystery and one took a title, The Carnal Hours, from a phrase he used in the third line of his account of the case.
Having said that, I’m particularly indebted to James Leasor’s Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? for its fine description of wartime Nassau and to James Owen’s A Serpent in Eden for its detailed account of the legal proceedings in which Albert de Marigny was accused of murder. Specific credit is gratefully acknowledged here. Both are commendable works and, let’s face it, the question posed in the title Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? is a pretty good one and not the province of any single writer. I also used The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nassau Tribune, The Hollywood Reporter and Wikipedia for various further details, including background on Ernest Hemingway, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joe Schenk, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Thomas Dewey, Mike Todd, Bill McCoy and Fulgencio Battista. I should also note that Herbert Nossen was a real person and his parents did die in something very real known as “the Holocaust,” something we should never forget.
On a lighter note, may I confirm that there really was a joyously disreputable New York tabloid named The New York Evening Graphic? I wouldn’t overexaggerate the type of illustrations they used on their front pages, such as the one of Rudolph Valentino and Enrico Caruso meeting in Heaven. I wouldn’t and I couldn’t. My only question would have been whether Rudy and Caruso spoke English or Italian. For better or worse, they were pioneers in what might be called “junk journalism” and those Jesus-is-in-my-toast moments.
Nor can I underestimate what a valuable experience it was for me to pick up some assignments that my father didn’t want in 1968 when I was twenty years old. My start in professional writing was in true crime for a small press syndicate based in Oslo, Norway. I filed American police cases to them, about 2000 words each, four reports a month, and they set them up in the foreign true crime mags of the era. I figured the job was temporary. It was, but it ran for eighteen years, long after I’d started writing spy stories like Flowers From Berlin.
All of which brings us to a final bonus article from Prescription Murder, Volume One by Alan Hynd, which along with several of Alan Hynd’s other works, is available on Kindle.
Enjoy.
Noel Hynd
October 2017
Readers can read Noel Hynd at [email protected].
Arsenic, Old Lace and Sister Amy Archer
By Alan Hynd, re-edited by Noel Hynd in 2014
The eerie sound of the hearse creaking to a stop in front of The Archer Home for old folks and chronic invalids in the ink-black pre-dawn hours of the steaming August night awakened the two old maids who lived in the snug brick house across the street.
“Heavens!” said Mabel Bliss to her sister, Patricia, as she drew the bedroom curtain aside and peered out. “That’s the third time somebody’s died over there in less than a month! And always in the middle of the night.”
A light went on in the vestibule of The Archer Home and the front door opened to admit two burly men who had jumped down from the driver’s seat of the death wagon, opened the rear door and dragged out a box six feet long. They weren’t inside very long when they reappeared with the box, which now seemed to be more of a burden to carry. They shoved it into the hearse and clattered into the gloom.
Now a light went on in the parlor and the Bliss sisters could see Sister Amy Archer, founder of the home bearing her name, wearing nothing but a very fancy nightgown, settling herself at a little organ. (The “Sister” was a title she had bestowed on herself. It had nothing to do with any religious order.) The windows were open and presently there wafted across the narrow street the sweet sad strains of Nearer, My God, To Thee, accompanied by Sister Amy’s pleasant soprano.
Sister Amy Archer, one of the few arch-murderesses in criminal history who could quote passages from the Bible from Genesis to Exodus, was only half way through the hymn when a second figure appeared, a brooding giant of a man with a red puffy face and walrus moustache, in nightshirt and bare feet. This was Big Jim Archer, Sister Amy’s fifth spouse, a coarse type in his forties who seemed to be an odd sort of a mate for our heroine. Sister Amy, though in her late thirties, looked a good decade younger, and, though sharp-featured, was a very attractive little woman with snow-white skin, jet-black hair and a divine form that even the starch in her professional uniform simply couldn’t hide. Not that she was hiding much that August night after the hearse left, nor was Big Jim hiding anything, either, when the music stopped and the lights went out.
It was Sister Amy’s views on sex that puzzled the Bliss sisters. For somebody who was so devout and stern, and who was so unalterably opposed to alcohol and tobacco in any form, Sister Amy was simply mad about sex. Nor did she make any bones about it.
“One man in bed at night when the lights are out,” she had said to the Bliss sisters after coming up from New York six months previously to establish The Archer Home in an abandoned rich man’s mansion in the tree-shaded village of Windsor, just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, “is worth ten on the street in broad daylight.”
After breakfast in the morning, when the twenty residents of The Archer Home, assorted widows and widowers who were, in one way or another, breaking up and coming apart at the joints, were out on a veranda that swept across the front and ran around one side of the big gray frame ramshackle Home, Big Jim clumped across the street and knocked on the front door of the Bliss house. Sister Amy, a simply superb cook, had sent him over with some of her hotcakes and maple syrup. He was both a comic and tragic figure, Big Jim, none too bright, and turned out in brown derby, baggy light-brown suit and heavy black shoes.
“We see you lost another one during the night, Jim,” said Mabel Bliss.
“Yeah,” said Big Jim, “another heart case.”
“That’s what the other two died from, isn’t it, Jim?”
“Yeah. It’s gettin’ to be a regular epidemic.”
“They always seem to die during the night, don’t they?”
“Yeah, don’t they! Well, I gotta to be goin’.”
Six nights later, that hearse was there again, and in the morning, Big Jim was over with something tasty from Sister Amy for the two spinsters.
“Who was it this time, Jim?” asked Mabel Bliss.
“A woman. First woman we’ve lost.”
“What was it this time, Jim?”
Big Jim, who had a flair for the dramatic gesture, didn’t reply with words but, raising his eyes toward the ceiling, pointed to his heart.
There was a total of three doctors who had staked out the village of Windsor in the year of 1908, all driving up from their offices in Hartford. None of the three, luckily enough for Sister Amy, was a wizard in the field of diagnostics. And, since all of the deaths in the Home were sudden, and in the dead of the night, none of the physicians was ever able to be at the bedside when the Grim Reaper appeared. It was never until morning, when the corpse was already embalmed, that Sister Amy phoned one of the physicians to get his name on the death certificate.
“What was it, Sister Amy?” the doctor would inquire. The physician, realizing that Sister Amy had been a head nurse in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where Big Jim had been an orderly before coming to Connecticut, had such complete respect for Sister Amy’s knowledge in the field of diagnostics, that he would never question her word when she said, “The heart,” or, “A general breaking up due to the infirmities of age.”
There were ten bedrooms for the residents of The Home, each a double, and the residents, who averaged sixty years of age or more, which was old age in that period, were kept equally divided as to sex, so that there could always be two residents in each room. Sister Amy’s deal was a unique one for the day: one lump of money or property, anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, depending on the resident’s age, physical condition and what the fiscal traffic would bear. For that sum, the resident was to receive a lifetime contract from Sister Amy, including everything from food and lodging and medical care, with a fine plot in Windsor’s leading cemetery thrown in as a cheerful after-death bonus.
“I’m going to take such good care of my charges,” Sister Amy told the Bliss sisters shortly after founding The Home, and explaining her plan, “that they’ll be eating me into the poor house, praise the Good Lord!”
The Archer Home had been functioning for about a year and a half, and that hearse had been there in the night nineteen times, when Big Jim Archer, who did all the chores around the place, from emptying the bedpans to sweeping up, began to feel himself breaking up. There was a fine Irish saloon, Paddy’s, just three blocks from The Home and Big Jim, despite Sister Amy’s strict ban on booze, began to sneak around to it when he got the chance. After a few shots, he’d pop some cloves into his mouth.
As time went on, Paddy, a discerning man, saw that Big Jim was beset by troubles of some sort and one night he asked him just what was wrong.
Big Jim, wiping the foam from a beer chaser from his walrus moustache, looked levelly at Paddy for a little while. Then he said, in a voice filled with sorrow:
“It’s my wife, Paddy.”
“Sister Amy? Why, is she ill or somethin’?”
“Far from that, my friend.”
“What is it, then?”
Big Jim looked around him to make sure none of the other men at the bar were within earshot, then said,
“It’s her demands at night.”
“You mean they’re more than you can handle, Jim?”
“More than I can handle now. I used to be able to handle things fine but her demands have increased since we came up here from New York.”
“If I’m not asking too much, Jim, just how great are her demands?”
“Two and three times.”
“A week?”
“No, a night.”
“Good God, Jim, that’s enough to put a man in an early grave!”
As the months wore on, and that hearse continued to stop at The Archer Home on an average of once a month, always at night, Jim continued to confide in Paddy. He was now patronizing a quack doctor down in New York, who was fixing him up with an aphrodisiac. The pills worked for a time. Then one night Jim appeared in Paddy’s with simply woeful tidings.
“The old clock,” he confided to his friend, “has not only run down, it’s stopped altogether.”
“You mean…?”
“The very worst,” said Big Jim, almost breaking into a fit of sobbing, “has happened.”
“And Sister Amy? Is she complainin’?”
“That’s just it,” came the reply. “She don’t say nothin’ when we go to bed and I lay there useless. In the mornin’, when it’s daylight, she has a funny way of lookin’ at me. I’d give a year of my life to know what’s goin’ on in that mind of hers. There’s an awful lot about Sister Amy that I could tell you if I wanted to.”
One day, when Jim was sweeping out the dirt at the back door, there appeared a redheaded, baggy-pants stranger carrying a knapsack on a stick over his shoulder.
“The name’s Gilligan, Michael Gilligan,” he announced to Big Jim in a deep, cheerful voice, “and I’m lookin’ for work.”
“There’s no work here for you,” snapped Big Jim, who was later to tell Paddy that instinct told him that, what with his dried-up condition, Gilligan would be a dangerous man to have around his wife. “Beat it. And beat it quick.”
Big Jim had just ordered Gilligan off the property when he was conscious of Gilligan’s eyes meeting those of somebody who had come up silently behind him. Turning, he saw Sister Amy. She was looking straight at the stranger, tall, handsome, and obviously bursting with what it took when the lights were out. He shuddered, he was to tell Paddy that night, for he hadn’t seen Sister Amy with that light in her eyes since the first time she had laid eyes on him.
Within an hour, Michael Gilligan, having been fed enough for three men by Sister Amy, who overruled her spouse in important matters, was addressing himself to assorted repair chores around The Home.