The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Captain Barker took fingerprints from Alfred de Marigny - and within hours had announced a match with the print he claimed to have collected from the bloodied Chinese screen in Sir Harry’s bedroom. The count was bundled into Nassau’s jail. The fire brigade formed a cordon outside, to protect him from angry islanders. Most Bahamians seemed convinced of his guilt, and a rope was quietly ordered for the hanging.

  As soon as Nancy heard of her husband’s arrest she hurried back to Nassau. Grieving for her father, she was nevertheless convinced that Freddie could not be the murderer. Strikingly beautiful and often compared to Katharine Hepburn, she quickly became a favourite of reporters and photographers. At one press conference she said: ‘I know my husband well. Not only would he never commit such a terrible act, he could never commit it. He is a gentle and good man and I will do all in my power to help establish his innocence.’

  The murder charge was postscripted by a series of dubious and suspicious events. Particularly disturbing was the telephone call that police ‘forgot’ to make on Alfred de Marigny’s behalf. Soon after arriving at the jail, he asked his captors to ring Nassau’s most respected barrister Sir Alfred Adderley, who had won many major cases. Sir Alfred did not call back. Subsequently, he told journalists that the police had never contacted him. ‘I would have accepted the case for the defence,’ he said.

  The Crown (seemingly with a little help from Freddie’s jailers) reached Sir Alfred first - and engaged him to lead the prosecution team. Freddie had to make do with a less-revered lawyer, Sir Godfrey Higgs.

  Death-Room Scrubbed

  Also extraordinary was the Miami detectives’ behaviour in Sir Harry’s room. Nancy, convinced that her husband was being railroaded to the gallows, hired an American private detective, Raymond Schindler, to monitor proceedings. Schindler subsequently described the case as one of the most alarming he had been involved in.

  Accompanied by a fingerprint expert he flew to Nassau to conduct an independent investigation. With his colleague he stepped unannounced into the murder bedroom to find detectives Melchen and Barker hard at work scrubbing down the walls. At the subsequent trial Schindler testified: ‘We both were astonished. The two were in the act of cleaning away a handprint formed from blood. When I enquired why they were destroying vital prints, Officer Barker said they were not Alfred de Marigny’s prints and were therefore of no interest. He said further that he’d taken photographs anyway, so they would be sufficient evidence.’

  Later in the trial Captain Barker conceded that he had flown back to Miami to have plates of the handprint and other clues developed. However, all of these plates had been destroyed by exposure to light. The identity of the person who had left the bloody palmprint on the wall would never be known.

  The Crown’s principal piece of evidence against de Marigny was his fingerprint, which Barker said he had found on a Chinese screen near the bed on which Oakes died. The prosecution pointed out that as de Marigny had not paid a social visit to the house in many months - and as fingerprints swiftly deteriorated in Nassau’s humidity - this clue would form conclusive evidence against him. But Sir Godfrey Higgs had already caught the Miami detectives out in a morass of evasions and mistakes - and he made short shrift of the fingerprint ‘evidence’.

  Under Higgs’s polite cross-examination, Captain Barker said he had lifted the count’s print cleanly off the Chinese screen. When Higgs enquired whether any trace of the powdered original remained on the screen, Barker mumbled a reluctant no. Higgs then asked where on the screen Barker had found the print. To the court’s astonishment, Barker could not remember. It was the trial’s turning point - lending further credence to the defence’s suggestion that the detectives had framed de Marigny with a print from a drinking glass that also had been adduced as evidence.

  Throughout the proceedings Nancy, the count’s passionately loyal wife, played a role the world came to admire. Her outward demeanour was generally as low-keyed as the behaviour of her ally Sir Godfrey. But she seemed expert, despite her mere 19 years, at attracting attention and sympathy to herself - and by indirection to Freddie. Appearing in the humid courtroom in a different dress every day, she demonstrated a powerful sense of the dramatic. Once, when giving evidence, she seemed close to fainting. Later, while the attorney-general was delivering his closing speech, she stormed from the courtroom, saying, ‘I won’t listen to such filthy things being said against my husband.’

  The trial not only made headlines internationally, it brought the sailing and sporting activities of the island’s rich citizenry to a halt. ‘Like playgoers,’ reported Time magazine (22 November 1943), ‘Nassau’s lush sun set had paid early rising natives one pound a day for places in the tiny courtroom - unless, like the Baron of Trolle, they chose to have their servants bring their own chairs. Between sessions Count Freddy waltzed by himself in the police station, read books on sailing.’

  The all-white jury took two hours to reach its decision - acquitting de Marigny by a nine-to-three majority. The crowd outside the courthouse, no longer in lynch mood, chaired the count aloft and bore him, cheering, to his chauffeured limousine.

  Freddie de Marigny had not waited to hear the jury’s second recommendation: that he be deported immediately from the Bahamas. This stricture had little to do with the murder - of which he was patently innocent - but more closely reflected the dislike the colony’s officials and mercantile classes felt for him. A free spirit, he had long enjoyed mocking Nassau’s ‘ridiculous’ conventions - and had inspired particular outrage when he described the Duke of Windsor as ‘a pimple on the arse of the empire’.

  With doubtful legitimacy, the duke’s executive council approved the deportation. Nancy de Marigny followed her husband into exile: their first stop being the home of Freddie’s close friend, novelist Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. The couple divorced in 1949. Nancy, always optimistic, married unsuccessfully twice more - never sure that her vast inherited wealth might not have been a fateful obstacle to her happiness. She died, frail and blind, on 16 January 2005, aged 80. To her last days, she insisted that Freddie had been the victim of a conspiracy - and that her father’s murder had actually been engineered by powerful enemies, motivated solely by the desire to increase their wealth and impose their political will on the idyllic island colony.

  The person (or persons) who killed Sir Harry Oakes remained at large. The Bahamas, and the world, waited for a fresh murder investigation. But to public dismay, the authorities took little further action.

  This monument to mysteriously murdered philanthropist Sir Harry Oakes still stands in Nassau.

  From this point the hunt for the killer was left largely to theorists.

  Their consensus was that Sir Harry had probably died because his integrity and high moral standards were somehow blocking the ambitions of certain ruthless people. But who were those people? Analysts, in the years following the murder, speculatively suggested four principal candidates:

  The prime target of conjecture was Axel Wenner-Gren, the suspected head of a Nazi spy-ring in the islands.

  Oakes, a notoriously blunt man, had never concealed his dislike of this Swedish lightbulb millionaire who, having bought large land-holdings in the Bahamas, set about worming himself into a relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Oakes was deeply suspicious of the Swede and his friendship with Hitler’s Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering - a link which British intelligence believed was enabling Sweden to remain neutral while her neighbours endured German occupation.

  The British government, convinced Wenner-Gren was at the least a Nazi sympathiser, was deeply concerned about his closeness to the former king - and eventually managed, by means of diplomacy and force, to quarantine him in Mexico. But there were strong suspicions that a nest of Nazi agents remained intact in Nassau itself. According to some historians Sir Harry Oakes had information that might have helped identify these spies - but died before he could share it.

  Under the heading ‘Strange Outing’, Time (on
22 November 1943) revealed, ‘One day in midtrial, banker John Anderson, friend and confidant of Sir Harry’s, took the reporters on an excursion…to admire Shangri-La, the fabulous estate of Swedish tycoon Axel Wenner-Gren. US and British blacklistings keep (him) in Mexico for the duration, but the reporters found 17 gardeners pushing back the lush jungle growth, awaiting the end of the war and the master’s return. One or two reporters wondered whether the excursion had a meaning.’

  Next hypothetical candidate was Sir Harold Christie, who claimed he had found the body. In his capacity as a real estate broker, Christie had made large profits by selling Bahamian properties to Sir Harry Oakes. But he wanted more. With an associate, Frank Marshall, he had devised a scheme to introduce casinos to the islands - but when he proposed the idea, Sir Harry witheringly rebuked him. The philanthropist, who had spent years building free schools and hospitals for the disadvantaged native people, believed institutionalised gambling would cause great harm. Oakes assured Christie that he would use his popularity and moral authority to thwart the plan. Furious, Christie might have committed the murder himself, or through hirelings.

  The other cardinal suspects were Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Like Christie, these Mafia mobsters regarded the casino plan as a ticket to vast post-war wealth. They would have seen Harry Oakes as a simple obstacle to be removed. The possibility that the pair engaged assassins to dispose of the multi-millionaire gained some credence at the trial. A policeman told defence counsel that on the eve of the murder a nightwatchman had seen a speedboat, with two men aboard, berth in Nassau harbour. They were driven away in a dark car which, the defence hinted, might have been driven by one of Sir Harry’s business associates.

  The nightwatchman himself was unable to testify. Shortly after Count Alfred de Marigny was arrested, the man’s drowned body was found floating in the harbour.

  The behaviour of the Duke of Windsor was one of the greatest mysteries of the ugly affair. As governor he had shown a remarkable lack of faith in the abilities of his own passably efficient local law-enforcers. Most historians agree that if Nassau police and Bahamas CID had been allowed to follow normal procedures, they would not have allowed visitors to contaminate the crime scene. Nor would Bahamian detectives have actively scrubbed clues from walls, or allowed photographs of evidence to be destroyed.

  Possibly for reasons of protocol, the former king never publicly explained why he had so absurdly appointed those two incompetent detectives from Miami, or why the investigation into Sir Harry Oakes’s death had descended so disastrously into farce.

  The duke died in 1972, his motives unexplained.

  * * *

  ‘Don’t Disturb the Dead’

  Enigma of the Iceman’s

  Curse

  * * *

  Nobody could say with certainty why the American molecular biologist Dr Tom Loy died. At the inquest, conducted in Brisbane in 2005, a coroner could find only that the renowned scientist had expired of natural causes, an accident, or both. But while the tragic affair remained shrouded in doubt, one stark assertion was being repeated around the planet: Tom Loy was the latest victim of the Iceman - the ninth person to perish after contact with Oetzi, a 5300-year-old corpse found frozen in the Italian Alps. Whether these deaths were attributable to coincidence or to curse, the grim list was growing longer…

  THE ANCIENT HUNTSMAN’S CADAVER had rested deeply entombed in the alpine glacier for 53 centuries. Bearskin-hatted, attired in a woven-grass cloak, armed with a copper-headed axe, the perfectly preserved Stone Age warrior inhabited this place long before Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Cheops were dreamed of.

  But now that long span of silence and primal darkness was drawing to a close.

  The searing northern summer of 1991 had melted the permafrost in the Otztal mountains to its lowest level in 2000 years, casting up the forgotten artefacts of countless generations; revealing stores and weaponry from World War I and conflicts long before.

  The unfortunate discoverers of the Iceman were two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, who were hiking near the border of Austria and Italy. Glimpsing a head and shoulder protruding grotesquely from the ice sheet, they assumed they had stumbled upon evidence of a murder - a modern murder - and hastened to a nearby mountain refuge where they alerted the landlord.

  On 19 September 1991 an Austrian rescue group arrived and tried, unsuccessfully at first, to chip and power-drill the corpse from its glacial grave. Next day a reinforcement team flew in. Applying greater muscle, but rather less skill, the workers managed to work the Iceman free, breaking his longbow in the process.

  Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist, picked up the corpse with his bare hands and placed it in a bodybag. Dangling from beneath a helicopter the Iceman’s disinterred remains were flown to Innsbruck, in Austria. Aboard the aircraft, in a plastic bag, were the huntsman’s last pathetic possessions: among them the axe, a flint dagger in a woven sheath, and the broken bow.

  Older than the Pyramids: grim remains of Oetzi the Iceman.

  Local police, imagining a bullet might have created a hole they found in the skull, immediately opened a murder inquiry. But before long a forensic pathologist had advised that the cranial fissure was probably the result of sun-damage, inflicted long ago. And a mountaineer, after unofficially studying the body, opined that it might be the century’s greatest archaeological discovery. He was right. Within days the Iceman had been named Oetzi, after the mountain range in which he was found, and was wrapped in a sterile operating gown. He was then subjected to carbon dating, which placed him circa 3300 BC. Next came examinations of his whipworm-infested gut, the contents of his stomach and intestines, the remains of his brain - and even his penis.

  After 5300 years of frozen silence, the corpse of Oetzi the Iceman was suddenly at the heart of chaos. While biologists scraped antique scraps of venison and edible grasses from his stomach, film cameras whirred and specialists minutely photographed the 60 tattoos that ornamented his body. Astonishingly, the pictures’ positions coincided with the pressure points used in acupuncture, thought until then to have originated in Asia 2000 years after Oetzi’s death.

  Throughout the busy days and nights, the stir of activity around the antique corpse was constant and loud - as were the disputations of a procession of visiting academics. Everyone had an opinion on how and why the Iceman had perished. Some pointed to the deep cuts on his right hand and forearm and the flint arrowhead lodged in his body and pronounced that an enemy must have ambushed him, fatally. Others suggested that the ridges on his fingernails, which might have been deemed unlucky, had led to him being ritually murdered.

  But the most intense argument of all centred on who owned the cadaver. Austria, whose rescue teams had retrieved Oetzi in the first place, insisted that he was state property and defiantly held him in a government laboratory. But Italy was adamant that it owned the Iceman, whose remains, it asserted, had been retrieved from its sovereign territory. Eventually an international boundary commission agreed - and in 1998 the Iceman was uprooted again and transported in a refrigerated truck over the Brenner Pass to Italy. His new home became the South Tyrol museum in Bolzano where scientists of every persuasion have since studied him. Not even the mummies of ancient Egypt have been subjected to scrutiny so intense. Oetzi is possibly the most-watched corpse in history.

  He is also an invaluable tourist attraction. Vacationers pay millions of dollars annually for the right to peer through a small window beyond which he lies on a glass slab, an arm across his chest, staring up at the ceiling of his high-tech tomb. To heighten the effect a recording of a whistling alpine wind is piped through to the visitors.

  In the museum’s specialist shops, tourists can buy everything from Oetzi T-shirts, plates and cups to bottles of Iceman soda-pop, pizza triangles and bars of chocolate decorated with a crude reproduction of the cadaver’s elegantly dressed remains.

  ‘Stop the Curse - Bury Him, Now.’

  Unsurprisingly many people
(clergy in particular) are distressed by this exploitation of a dead man, regardless of whether the reasons are commercial or scholarly. They believe that Oetzi deserves a funeral and the right to lie again in his grave, free of gawkers and experimenters.

  One tireless campaigner for the Iceman’s right to peace is the Italian archaeologist Professor Domenico Nisi: ‘Proverbs along the lines “Do not disturb the dead” can be found in every culture and every age,’ he wrote. ‘This is an ancient person, but he is also, simply, a dead person and should not be endlessly tweaked and measured and harvested and subjected to indignities, and neither should he be used to make money. He should be respectfully buried again, in the place where he was found. Put him back and leave him alone. And then perhaps the curse will end.’

  Few of Nisi’s fellow academics are incautious enough to use the word ‘curse’ when discussing the nine circumstantially linked deaths that have followed the Iceman’s exhumation. The scholars prefer to talk about chance, coincidence, or a series of unrelated events. But other observers are less sure. They believe it’s at least possible that the deaths form an unsettling pattern, generated by forces beyond our understanding.

  The ‘curse’ - confined entirely to people who had had close contact with the mummy - began to operate in 1992, the year after Oetzi was removed from his ice tomb. First to die was forensic pathologist Dr Rainer Henn, 64, who headed the team that first examined the body. He perished when an oncoming vehicle crashed into his car head-on. Dr Henn was the man who had lifted the cadaver with his bare hands and placed it in the bodybag that swung beneath the helicopter en route to Innsbruck. When Henn was killed he had been on the way to a conference at which he planned to describe new findings regarding Oetzi’s remains.