Ashes From A Burning Corpse (An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century Book 3)

by Noel Hynd

  At nine a.m., the doors opened to the public. There was a rush to fill the five benches in the courtroom that had been allocated to spectators. At half past ten, a crier, dressed in the British colonial garb of the 1700s, cracked a staff on the floor and called the court to be in session. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the living relic, the crier, bellowed. “All persons having anything to do before His Majesty’s Supreme Court in the Bahamas draw near and you will be heard! God save the King!”

  Then from a door that led from his private chambers, the Chief Justice, Sir Oscar Daly, emerged in a crimson gown and a shoulder-length white wig. The judge was an Irish King’s Counsel who was also a former Great War intelligence officer. He arrived in the Bahamas after distinguished legal service in Kenya. The Irish lilt in his voice and impish humor marked him as a character among legal colleagues.

  But it was the attire that struck everyone. I sat close enough to the visiting press corps to hear a few muffled snickers. The gowns, the arcane language, the wigs—also worn by all members of the court—the overly bloated courtesies and obsequies, made the spectacle look less like a 20th Century legal proceeding than a movie with Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers.

  But it commenced in earnest.

  The high-ceilinged courtroom, notoriously oppressive and insect-infested, was cramped and stank of insecticide. De Marigny sat in the defendant’s box in a lightweight grey suit and blue tie. From time to time, he winced. He was suffering not just from the indignities of being the accused, but from having spent two months in a hot fetid cell. Facing him across the room was the pew for the jury, not yet selected.

  Although Adderley was nominally the prosecutor, the man who was expected to send de Marigny to the gallows was the Attorney General, a nasty ambitious man named Eric Hallinan. Hallinan was a barrister-at-law of the Irish and English Bars. He was also the former Crown counsel of Nigeria.

  “The Brits have brought in their top colonial team, haven’t they?” I whispered to Schindler, who sat next to me.

  Ray nodded. “They’ve done all of that,” he said. “They want no mistakes here. Just want to get this done.”

  In comparison, the defense team looked like a trio on law students. Godfrey Higgs, in his mid-thirties, was one of the youngest members of the Bahamas Bar. His assistant, Ernest Callender, was even younger, though he’d practiced criminal law for several years.

  The trial began. De Marigny was given the opportunity to respond to the charges against him. “Are you guilty or not guilty?” asked the court registrar.

  “Not guilty,” replied the prisoner in a firm clear voice.

  The games began.

  First came the jury selection. There were challenges, legal exchanges, and a fistful of legalisms. Twelve men were quickly installed, including a few that Schindler described to me as “religious nuts.” Nassau being a tiny incestuous place, everyone on the jury knew de Marigny, which did not mean that he had any friends. What defense lawyers needed to hope for was that none of them had an ulterior reason for stringing up the Count. The jury selected a foreman, a businessman named James Sands, a well-known local man best known for driving an agonizingly slow old Ford around Nassau. Sands, however, at least had the reputation of being fair-minded.

  The presentation of the case thus began.

  Adderley was out of the gate fast and effectively. He portrayed de Marigny as a near penniless con man with a grudge, and a flagrant womanizer as well. Adderley scored his points. On the day before the murder, he said, the accused had a substantial overdraft at the Royal Bank of Canada. Adderley then went to work on the antagonisms between Sir Harry and his son-in-law. He joyously reminded the jury of de Marigny’s elopement with Nancy Oakes, just two days after her eighteenth birthday. The prosecution’s case was thus premised on de Marigny’s thorough dislike of Sir Harry and a desire to solve his financial problems and sustain his status as one of the world’s most successful freeloaders.

  The jury listened intently. I watched them. They were buying it.

  Adderley also hammered away on the collection of well-publicized comments de Marigny had allegedly made in the hours following Sir Harry’s death. The comments deepened the Count’s predicament.

  But the prosecution’s most crushing disclosure centered on that single fingerprint, found on the Chinese screen in Sir Harry’s bedroom. Adderley recalled that de Marigny, by his own account, had said the last time he had visited Westbourne was three years before the murder. How, then, did his fingerprint appear on the screen? Here was the evidence that put him in Sir Harry’s bedroom at the relevant time. It was enough to hang a man and everyone in the courtroom knew it. Schindler and I exchanged glances as Adderley worked the fingerprint angle. Ray blew out a long breath. He leaned over to me.

  “Well, that’s why we brought in our own experts,” he whispered.

  Next, Adderley made a pivot that raised my eyebrows. He maintained that any doubts that existed about the whereabouts of Harold Christie on the night Sir Harry was snuffed did not undercut the Crown’s case.

  As the trial proceeded over the following days, everybody in the courtroom wondered just how Harold Christie was going to do. He was finally called as a witness on October 20th, three days into the purported search for justice. Under the circumstances, he made out all right. For a while, at least.

  Christie gave a simple account of his discovery of the murder. If there had been any commotion in Westbourne during the commission of the crime, he had not heard it. The tropical storm would have drowned out any disturbance in the chamber of his longtime friend and business associate, he explained.

  In terms of his actual testimony, he did fine. In terms of his physical presentation, he flunked. He was deeply unnerved by the proceedings. Perspiration soaked and darkened his suit jacket. He gripped the rail in front of him, appearing for no reason to be on a white-knuckle ride to oblivion. Several writers in court were to dwell on his extraordinary demeanor. If Christie was not guilty of anything, he surely didn’t look it.

  The question arose whether Christie had spent the entire night of July seven and eight at Westbourne. If the evidence of others could establish that he was lying, and that he was up and about during the night of Sir Harry’s murder, it would prove he had something to hide.

  But what?

  Attorney Higgs had done some homework. The first obstacle for Christie to overcome was the evidence of a woman named Mabel Ellis, a local housemaid. Mrs. Ellis made two points about Christie’s car which contradicted his version of events.

  According to Christie, he had driven off in his own car on the morning of July 7th to attend an Executive Council meeting, but Mrs. Ellis said he had left the auto at Sir Harry’s. That evening, said Christie, he had asked his driver, Levi Gibson, to bring the car to Westbourne in case it was needed to ferry dinner guests.

  What did it matter? Quite a bit. The position of the car on Westbourne’s grounds, and whether Christie left it there during July 7th, were significant. It raised questions about whether the car was subsequently used for an illicit purpose, or at an unusual hour. Had Christie parked it away from the house, near the country club, instead of outside the main entrance?

  But there was a bigger issue to be raised by the car.

  The jurors knew Sears and knew him to be an honest man, beholden to no one. He said he believed he had seen Christie in a station wagon in George Street, in downtown Nassau, perhaps a few minutes past midnight in the first minutes of July eighth.

  If Christie were to be believed, he was by that time already ensconced in his bedroom at Westbourne. But Sears insisted that he had seen Christie. Sears, it seemed, was doing his rounds at the time of this sighting. His vehicle passed the station wagon under a street light. There was no doubt in his mind that Christie was in the passenger seat, but he was unable to identify the driver.

  “Perhaps you could explain that to the court,” Higgs said.

  “If Captain Sears said he saw me out that night, I would say that he
was very seriously mistaken and should be more careful in his observations,” replied Christie.

  “No! I put it to you,” insisted the attorney. “Captain Sears saw you in a station wagon in George Street around midnight that night.”

  “Captain Sears was mistaken,” Christie shot back.

  Under further questioning, the witness accepted that Captain Sears was a reputable person, but reputable persons made mistakes, too, he said.

  The Sears testimony made Christie burn, but he was unable to refute it. And it had raised questions in the minds of the jurors on whether Christie, respected and feared as he was, was telling the whole truth or a variation on it. The court proceedings had raised a mountain of speculation and hearsay. Higgs’ team kept hammering at the notion that Christie was holding back information. They questioned why he had parked his car some distance from Oakes’ house, something Christie couldn’t completely answer.

  In concluding the cross-examination, Higgs led Christie through his actions immediately after discovering Sir Harry’s body. The young attorney managed to unsettle the witness to such a degree that Christie blew up. As he stepped down from the witness-box at the end of his ordeal, he lumbered like a shaken old man. If Christie had been expected to add something to the sum of the prosecution’s case, he had failed. Adderley’s response to his evidence was to invite the jury to discount it. The Crown had flubbed it royally.

  There followed the evidence of Dr. Hugh Quackenbush. Quackenbush had driven to Westbourne after receiving a telephone call early on July eighth. He had found Harold Christie in his pajamas in the hall, he said. He proceeded upstairs, where he found Sir Harry’s burned mutilated corpse on his bed. There was a “perforating wound” in front of the left ear, he testified, large enough to admit the tip of his left index finger.

  “I assessed that Sir Harry had been dead for two-and-a-half to five hours,” Quackenbush told the court. “Most of the burning had occurred after death. Later, at the mortuary, I noted four head wounds that could not have been self-inflicted. This was obviously no suicide. All four were close to the left ear, of different depth and triangular in shape.”

  “Could you suggest what the murder weapon might have been?” Higgs asked.

  The doctor theorized that the murder weapon had been a heavy blunt instrument with a well-defined edge. The victim’s skull was fractured, probably by a series of quick blows. The blows, he believed, were struck before Sir Harry was burnt.

  The trial lumbered into its sixth day. International film crews with cameras surged upon the trial location. They set up on the square outside the court, creating more public interest and more havoc. Cameramen strained to get the protagonists “in the can” as they made their way to court. Barristers preened themselves international exposure. Bit players in the trial readily gave interviews. A carnival atmosphere was creeping upon the Bahamian capital.

  Then on that same day, Saturday, October 23, a new scandal broke on the front page of the local newspaper and rocked Nassau. Much of it was premised on the missing information that Ray Schindler had never received from New York.

  The town’s leading living citizen, Harold Christie, most recently seen on the witness stand trying to hold his composure, was a fugitive from American justice, the newspapers were saying. He had been for twenty years. His past was finally starting to catch up with him.

  In 1923, the newspapers reported, Christie had been charged with illegally transferring a schooner from the American to the British registry of ships, in order to make it easier to smuggle alcohol into the United States. He had been indicted in Boston, but had fled and was still wanted by the authorities.

  Even if Christie’s days as a rum-runner were known by the “in crowd” and the older residents of Nassau, and remembered with an affable wink, this was still a sensational story. And now it was out in the open. It was enhanced by the fact that it was true and verifiable. The FBI’s files showed that in the early 1920s Christie was regarded as a major player in the battle of the bottles and was one of the Bureau’s main targets.

  “Christie is one of the big guns in the rum-running game,” one FBI agent had opined in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. “It would be a significant victory for Prohibition to arrest him.”

  Christie had led a hide-and-seek existence, visiting the States in disguise or under an alias. Traps were set for him and he had eluded all of them. The files, according to the newspaper, was several hundred pages. Identifying Christie as “a mulatto,” certain amount of time was even spent trying to ascertain how much “colored” blood he had, as if that explained something.

  Ray and the defense team wouldn’t be able to present an official document at the trial. But now, no juror could possibly not know Christie’s background. He might still have been popular. But he was a lot less credible.

  “The Good Lord,” Schindler said to me with a wink during a break in the proceedings, “works in wonderful ways, does He not?”

  CHAPTER 24

  Whenever there’s a big trial, there’s invariably some local place, usually a bar, often a hotel bar, which becomes the hangout for the visiting press or others who want to talk about the events of the day. In the case of the de Marigny trial, the venue was the hotel bar at the British Colonial Hotel, a short walk from the courtroom.

  When I entered on Saturday night, October thirtieth, I spotted Erle Stanley Gardner holding court at the far end of the bar.

  The boisterous New York Journal-American, owned by William Randolph Hearst, always prided itself on its breathless treatment of such scandals. Hearst’s rag had gone one better than its competitors by hiring Gardner, someone adapt at writing about sudden death.

  Erle had a law degree and was still a practicing lawyer in California. But for more than ten years, Gardner’s pulp novels, some of them featuring his creation Perry Mason, the mouthpiece who never lost a case, had been growing in popularity. Erle was into some great luck as a writer. During the trial, his fictional mouthpiece-detective was to find a much larger audience with the broadcast on CBS of the first radio serial of Mason’s adventures.

  Gardner, then fifty-four, had been given complete liberty by Hearst. He had as much space to fill as he wanted. He normally filed three to six pages. He knew what the public craved and he dished up generous helpings of it to the unwashed masses.

  But any writer can have his or her little goofs. Erle had recently had a good one: Early in the proceedings, when the press was shown around Westbourne, Gardner noticed the game of Chinese checkers that Oakes had been playing with his dinner guests.

  “Well, Major,” he said breezily to one of the local police officials. “There’s the checkers board! Just as it was on that fateful evening.”

  “Sorry to spoil your story, mate,” the officer answered. “But the constables have actually been playing checkers there for the last four months.”

  “Not a problem,” Gardner responded evenly, ever the realist. “Facts never get in the way in a Hearst paper.”

  Gardner was a guy who always had a keen eye on the profit and loss aspects of being a professional writer. He had once dropped one of the lasting pearls of wisdom about the art, philosophy and boundless spirit of creativity. When he was asked by a literary critic why his heroes always snuffed villains with the final bullet in their guns. Gardner elucidated, “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has fifteen cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re crazy.”

  I waved to Gardner when he caught my gaze. He was at the end of the bar where he was holding court with some of his adoring public. Erle, sometimes an arrogant soul, gave me a curt wave in return.

  I mouthed the words “Chinese checkers” to him and he laughed.

  I spotted Ray sitting with at a table for four with Captain O’Neil and Professor Keeler. They had saved me a seat. I slid onto a wooden chair, but it was under a ceiling fan so I had no complaints.<
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  “Alan, do you know Ernest Hemingway?” Captain O’Neil asked.

  “I met him once,” I answered.

  “In Paris in the Twenties?” Ray asked. “I know you were both there.”

  “It would make a better story,” I said. “But Hemingway and I have had the same editors at The Saturday Evening Post,” I said. “The Post is published in Philadelphia. We crossed paths there.”

  “De Marigny claims him as a friend,” Keeler said. “Think there’s truth to that?”

  “There could be,” I said. “They both like to hang out with wealthy famous people. Same as Ray here,” I added, tossing a gentle dart at my friend.

  “What your opinion?” O’Neil asked.

  “Personally or professionally?” I asked.

  “Either or both.”

  “I’m willing to keep an open mind for the future, but I’ll tell you what I think right now. Ernie is a great writing talent. People will read his books for years, long after he’s dead. But he is not a great person. He leaves massive amounts of human wreckage in his wake. His wives. Is there anyone who doesn’t feel for poor Hadley, who financed him and truly loved the son of a bitch? His children. His ill-chosen lovers. His betrayed friends. More than one editor in New York has had his job on the line not because Ernie turns in bad copy, but because he overspends his budget and puts his editors in the crosshairs of their own bosses.” I quaffed a rum and Coke as soon as it arrived. “Almost everyone who crosses his path suffers some degree of damage, be it professional or personal.”

  “Does that include you, Alan?” Ray asked. “Do we hear experience talking?”

  “Honestly, no, Ray,” I said. “I’ve kept my distance. You hear a reporter talking. I don’t pass myself off as a friend or even an acquaintance. Just someone who’s come close enough to draw some conclusions, all of which I just shared with you.”