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A Murder in the Bahamas
The question of who brutally killed Sir Harry Oakes, favorite golf pal of the Duke of Windsor, has tormented cold-case aficionados for almost 80 years
It was July 8, 1943, an hour after dawn. It was a time and a season for everything to be quiet and slow-moving on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. But not this morning. Frantic phone calls destroyed the drowsy, sultry calm. The largest landowner in the Bahamas, a man worth $200 million, had been found dead and the cause was anything but natural.
Sir Harry Oakes, 68, born and raised in Maine, possessor of a Canadian gold-mine fortune and a British title, had been bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of Westbourne, his bougainvillea-adorned Nassau estate. From the looks of the crime scene, he’d also been set on fire. The walls bore bloodstains. Feathers were everywhere, their source a torn pillow, although some of the wilder rumors claimed they came from a chicken, evidence of a voodoo ritual.
To deal with the shocking murder and control the soon-to-balloon scandal, an aide woke up the governor of the Bahamas. The governor just happened to be a British royal, and an infamous one at that: the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who in 1936 gave up his throne “for the woman I love,” American…
