The Trouble with Harry

Who killed Sir Harry Oakes? Like Sir Harry himself, the issue had been dead for 16 years, and Nassau's nice people never talked about it. But last week Cyril Stevenson, an irreverent minority member of Nassau's House of Assembly, loudly claimed that he knew who did Sir Harry in. Stevenson did not identify the culprit, Sir Harry's murderer stayed doggo, and the whole effect was rather like spilling the canape tray at a Government House garden party.

Dark-skinned Cyril Stevenson. 45, editor of the weekly Nassau Herald, has never wasted any love on the potent clique of financiers and real-estate barons known as the "Bay Street Pirates" who control the Assembly. As he told it last week. Sir Harry's killer was one of the Bay Street boys, and Stevenson had the evidence to back it. Actually, his evidence is nothing more than a list of unanswered questions that have been puzzling Raymond Schindler, 77, U.S. private detective, ever since 1943.

Dead in Bed. Schindler was hired by Sir Harry's daughter, Nancy Oakes de Marigny, after Sir Harry was found-dead, bludgeoned and fire-scorched in bed --by his lone house guest, Bay Street Real Estate Tycoon Harold Christie, now 62. The private eye showed that preliminary investigation of the murder was botched, helped get an acquittal for the prime suspect, Nancy's husband. Count Marie Alfred de Fouquereaux de Marigny. When De Marigny was expelled from the islands after his acquittal, Nancy had the marriage annulled, tried marriage a second unsuccessful time, has been seen around London lately with Prince Philip's former private secretary, Lieut. Commander Michael Parker.

Two months ago Schindler listed a few of his unanswered questions for the Toronto Telegram. Why did Harold Christie wait several hours after he found the body before reporting it? When the Duke of Windsor, Governor of the islands in 1943, summoned a Miami police expert, why did he mislead him into bringing the wrong equipment by describing Sir Harry's death as suicide? Who told Sir Harry's watchman he could have the night off? Who washed the bloody handprints from around the window in Sir Harry's bedroom? Why was the pistol removed from Sir Harry's bedside table? How can a certain Bahamas Negro with no visible means of support buy himself a new car each year?

Bubble Trouble. Whom does Schindler suspect? He named no names, but he fingered the man who ordered the killing as "the real power in the Bahamas." What was the motive? Said Schindler: Sir Harry, who dug his fortune out of an eastern Ontario gold mine, was about to prick the then-swelling Bahamas bubble (TIME, April 20) by liquidating his real-estate holdings and moving to South America.

Stevenson grabbed eagerly at Schindler's suspicions, puffed them into a demand that the Assembly reopen the investigation and call in Scotland Yard. He expected to be voted down, which could have left the suggestion that the Assembly Bay Streeters were covering up for one of their own. Instead, the motion was passed, thus in effect telling Stevenson to put up or shut up.

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