The richest man in the British Empire. Four wounds no one can explain. And the son-in-law the Crown tried to hang for it.
On a humid July night in 1943, the richest man in the British Empire was murdered in his own bed. Sir Harry Oakes was found scorched and bloody in his Nassau mansion, his skull pierced by four small, identical holes in an almost perfect square above his left ear. The wounds were made by a weapon that has never been found, never been named, and never been explained.
Within forty-eight hours, after an investigation so cursory it would later be called a disgrace, the Bahamian authorities arrested his son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, and charged him with the killing. The trial lasted thirty-two days. The jury acquitted him. It made no difference. Word went out from Nassau to every British and friendly territory in the world: treat this man as a murderer at large. For four years no country would let him in.
Behind the crime lay a wartime Nassau that bore little resemblance to the rest of the embattled Empire. It was a sun-bleached refuge for the rich and the ruined, presided over by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, threaded with currency smuggling, business intrigue, broken promises, and conduct that edged close to treason. Now, for the first time, the man the Crown tried to hang tells what really happened in that bedroom, who stood to gain, and why the truth has been buried for more than forty years. This is Alfred de Marigny's own account of the murder, the frame, and the long road back to his name.
