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

by Noel Hynd

“Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “None. I appreciate it. My son is doing well. Ten years old. Private school in Fairfield, Connecticut.”

  “You’re a wealthy man,” he said.

  “Not in terms of finances.”

  “You’re a wealthy man.”

  “Talk to me about Oakes, Ray. Who do you think did it? Who killed him?”

  “A well-placed and prominent person in the Bahamas,” Schindler answered. “A man, or men, with huge financial interests.”

  “Harold Christie?”

  “No.”

  “Mob people?”

  “No.”

  “Local people? A sex angle? A racial angle?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you going to tell me anything?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “I need a bestseller, Ray.”

  “Listen, Alan,” he said, leaning forward. “You made yourself unpopular in the Lindbergh case, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You have that habit.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Schindler leaned back and sipped his iced tea.

  “This case has obsessed you, hasn’t it?” he asked.

  “For more reasons than I can count, yes,” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “I can’t say it hasn’t had the same effect on me, damn it,” he said. “I get it. I understand. Look, if I could go down to Nassau again, follow up on everything that was left hanging, I’m damned sure I could get to the resolution of the case. But I’m not going. I’m not doing that. And you’re not either.”

  Then he continued.

  “There’s a big reason for you to lay off, Alan,” he said. “You have a lovely wife. A fine family. A few words to remember if you ever take any of God’s blessings for granted again: The manchineel tree. And what it did to you. And nearly did. Most men don’t get second chances after something like that. God smiled on you.”

  “I know,” I said gently.

  “Do you?”

  “If I didn’t,” I said, “I do now. You just reminded me.”

  “Good.”

  There followed an awkward pause between us, the most awkward moment that ever existed in the four decades we had known each other.

  “Come on, Ray,” I finally urged. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  After more silence, he replied. “All right,” he said. “I will. But if I tell you something off the record. You’re not to print it. But, now that I consider it, I don’t want to take it to the grave with me. So? Ready?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “A few years ago, a man told me a story,” Ray began. “He said that Frank Christie drove into Westbourne’s grounds late on the murder night in a vehicle with two or three men who had arrived by boat in the storm from off the island. They ran up the outer staircase of Harry’s home and, according to the story, into Sir Harry’s bedroom. There were voices. Angry ones. There was a fight. Flames flickered briefly, before being extinguished, maybe by the wind. Then the men rushed away. Let’s suppose this story is true. Did the killers include Harold Christie? Or would he have been there to guide along the intruders? Harold was never named by the gentleman who told me this story. And the man who told me this was an underworld figure with something to sell. Who knows if the story is true? Perhaps Harold was in bed with his lady friend when the murder took place. Maybe there was thunder and a driving rain at exactly that time. Either way, it was important for Harold Christie to insist that he remained in his bedroom all night, that he was completely innocent and that he had heard nothing to suggest his friend was being butchered by killers just a few feet away. Whether an adulterer or killer, it was so important to Christie that his real whereabouts remained a mystery that he was prepared to lie about it, and declare that Captain Sears was mistaken.”

  “Is that story true?” I asked.

  “I have no way of knowing, Alan. The source was not reputable, as I said. And it seems a trifle convenient. Make of it what you will and hold onto it for fifty years. Happy?”

  “Not very.”

  “Good. I’m not, either.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and he kept talking. I knew enough to shut up.

  “Listen to me. I’ll now tell you something else. A few years ago, I was having a drink with an old friend,” Ray began, “a man who’s been in publishing for many years here in New York. Paperback books. Newspapers. Some girlie smut mags. Gets his stuff on all the newsstands. Does well. Makes a lot of money. Let’s call him Norman.” Schindler’s eyes found me. “Norman does a lot better than his competitors. His competitors sometimes have acid thrown on their newspapers and paperbacks.”

  “So, he’s a connected guy?”

  Schindler shrugged but his eyes said yes. He kept talking.

  “The subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping came up. I don’t know how. Or why. I’m a detective, Norman’s a publisher. These subjects come up. I guess we were talking crime. Norman told me that he had some friends in New Jersey. People in positions of influence, let’s say. Trucking industry. Norman referenced the Lindbergh boy and the kidnapping and one of these goombah wise guys turned to him and said, ‘Norman, would you actually like to know what happened? Who really did it? Where the money went? Who did the job? Who killed the kid? Where the body went?’”

  “And?”

  “And Norman gave the only wise answer,” Schindler said. “He said, ‘No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’” Schindler paused for a long time. “It’s not worth it, sometimes, Alan,” he concluded, shaking his head. “It’s just not worth it.”

  I sighed. I knew right there that I would no sooner get the Sphinx to get up and do a song and dance than I’d get Raymond Schindler to tell me anything more. Our meeting was cordial. But it appeared to be over.

  “You’re a good man, Alan. You tried. Take care of yourself,” Ray said.

  “You, too.”

  We stood. We shook hands. I walked back to my car and slid into the driver’s seat. For a moment, I took time to glance around Ray’s gorgeous estate. I turned the key in the ignition, backed up and turned. I drove through the high gate. It closed behind me.

  I drove home. There was a crackle in the air and suddenly a hint of winter.

  There would be no big best seller for me on the Oakes case. And not for Ray, either, although many books on the case came and went. Occasionally, Ray would give an interview in the papers or magazines. He was right about many things. Foremost among them, no one in the Bahamas wanted the case solved.

  I read an interview with Ray in early 1959 and he was still banging the same drum. He could solve the case if he would be allowed to visit the islands. But the Bahamian government wouldn’t grant him a visit. Finally, in May of 1959, Nassau finally asked him to submit in writing any new evidence that he had and “the proper authorities” would review it.

  I doubt that he ever submitted anything. The late investigation was a potential whitewash. We all knew it. A few weeks later, Ray Schindler had a massive heart attack sitting in that same green leather chair where I had left him. He died that same afternoon at the local hospital.

  Four days later. I went to the funeral. I saw people I knew. I didn’t linger. I didn’t chat with anyone. No point. Nothing good could have come from it. It just wasn’t worth it.

  CHAPTER 37

  As the 1970’s arrived, I began looking backward. Often what I wrote about over the course of a half century was brutal stuff, stories filled with men and women driven to extremes of human behavior. They were possessed by greed, passion, despair, loneliness, or just the general rottenness and meanness of a cold empty world and the need to survive in it.

  There was no shortage of that in the case of Sir Harry Oakes, but here there were extra spins: a framed man, a distinguished victim, vast wealth, a forbidden romance, royals, an unusual venue, and racial antagonisms. All this played out against wartime. Keep in mind, the world of 1943 was one where the fate
of the world was still in doubt. Hitler might have won. Tojo might have won. America might have lost. The Soviet Union might have occupied all of Western Europe. The bad guys might have gotten the nukes first. A dunderhead like Windsor might have climbed back into power and sold out Europe to the people running the concentration camps.

  Think about that next time you toss back a drink or two.

  Ray Schindler, much as he mentored me, much as I respected the man, much as I loved our conversations about books, people and murder, Ray was a hired gun. He had his detractors. There were people who said Nancy Oakes overpaid, but put yourself in her size seven heels: Your dad’s been murdered and your husband, whom you know to be incapable of the crime is arrested and locked in a black hole by people so intent on framing him that they had already hired the hangman and bought the rope.

  You have an unlimited bank account. Wouldn’t you have gone to New York and hired the best detective money could buy?

  If you say, no, you wouldn’t have, you don’t understand. We don’t think alike.

  In the years immediately preceding his death, Raymond Schindler wrote or gave his name to several articles about the Oakes case. One of them speculated on the voodoo aspects of the case and earned Nancy Oakes’ enmity. The article suggested there was a curse on anyone who dabbled in the Oakes murder too long or who was in any way associated with it.

  I don’t believe in curses any more than I believe that an evil pixie few into my home and put poison in my morning coffee. More likely, some bastard probably slipped me something on my travels in New York. But one does wonder about the evil star that seemed to twinkle upon this case. A disproportionate number of people involved either intimately or tangentially suffered great and painful misfortune.

  Others fared even worse.

  Leonarde Keeler, the polygraph expert, was never quite the same shortly after the case. On the surface of things, in the public view, things continued to go well for him. He remained

  instrumental in the popularization of modern polygraphs in criminal investigation and job screenings. He went as far as appearing in person in the 1948 film noir docudrama, Call Northside 777 with Jimmy Stewart and Lee J. Cobb. He was a minor celebrity and played himself.

  Much like a crime on a stormy night, however, the truth was well hidden. In 1930, he had married a fellow psychology student, a smart pretty lady named Katherine Applegate. Kay, as she was called, was also trained as a forensic expert and became the nation’s first female handwriting analyst. At about the time of the Oakes investigation, Kay left Keeler for another man, a swaging USO paratrooper named Rene Dussaq. Kay joined the WASPS, the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots. She died in 1944 near Patterson Field in Ohio while flying solo across the country to help halt the disbanding of the WASPs. Devastated by the betrayal and death of the only woman he had ever loved, Keeler buried his sorrow in alcohol, cigarettes, anxiety and depression. Keeler died of a stroke in 1949, at the age of forty-five.

  Captain Edward Melchen was still an officer in the Miami force when he died of a sudden and massive heart attack on July 5, 1948, almost five years to the day after being called to Nassau. Melchen never quite lived down the Oakes case. The lingering suspicion that he had conspired with Barker to trick de Marigny into leaving his print on a drinking glass, followed him to the moment he drew his last breath. And even afterward. To try to hang an innocent man, it wasn’t cricket, even for a corrupt no-good cop. By eerie coincidence, he was succeeded as Miami Chief of Detectives by his discredited buddy. James Barker. But not for long.

  James Barker, the other compromised detective, whose false evidence sabotaged the prosecution case against de Marigny, went back to Miami. Word reached me that he and his equally corrupt buddy Melchen were suspected of being stoolies in the pay of Meyer Lansky, the sunshine state godfather. Suspected? That was the word being used. It made me laugh. Everyone knew that the Miami police force was the most corrupt in the United States, mainly because of the powerful Mafia presence on Miami Beach and the willingness of bulls like Barker to accept Mob money. Most corrupt? That took some doing after Chicago, New York and New Orleans.

  One story reached me that Barker had even tried enlisting police colleagues to fall in with Lansky and his henchmen.

  Then it became academic, at least for Barker. On December 26, 1952, the holiday went off the rails for the nasty old ex-cop. He was shot dead by his own son, James Duane Barker, also a Miami cop with the service revolver Barker had used during his police days, the same piece of artillery that he waved at me in Nassau. Call it professional courtesy. The story had it that there was a family brawl and Barker senior had been making passes at his son’s wife. Ka-BOOM! A coroner’s jury later concluded justifiable homicide. Public opinion called it a civic improvement.

  The lofty local mouthpiece, Alfred Adderley, whose legal skills in the prosecution team were rightly feared by de Marigny, was a man who must have known a lot of the inside skivvy. The Royal family needed some black faces from the colonies to give a light salt and pepper effect to Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. So, Adderley flew from Nassau to London in 1953. He dropped dead on the return flight.

  The Chief Justice, Sir Oscar Daly, returned to Ireland when his days as a colonial judge were over. He must have had some private opinions as to what had happened at Westbourne that night. He died quickly and quietly. Meanwhile, that other fine product of the Hibernian bar, Sir Eric Hallinan, who led the prosecution case against de Marigny, achieved the promotion he desired and ended his colonial service career as Chief Justice of the old West Indies Federation. When questioned about the Oakes case after the fact, Hallinan always was reluctant to discuss it. He even told one reporter in 1949 that he had already forgotten most of the details. I never bought that. The case was the biggest trial of Hallinan’s career. It had also been a humiliation. The de Marigny affair had been an embarrassing failure for him, made more irksome by his unshakeable belief in the Mauritian count’s guilt and his determination to see him hang.

  He and the Duke appeared to share that view—but no one else, apart from the distraught Lady Oakes, believed it for a second, and nor do I. Hallinan lived to be eighty-four, dying in County Cork, Ireland.

  As for Lieutenant Colonel Erskine-Lindop, whose rapid transfer to Trinidad in the early days of the investigation raised many eyebrows, especially as he was never called to give evidence at de Marigny’s trial, he did okay. He was probably the only man who knew for sure who killed Sir Harry Oakes, but said he would never discuss it. It was during a conversation in Trinidad some time afterwards that Erskine-Lindop revealed that he had a suspect on the verge of a tearful confession at the time of his transfer and expressed dismay that the killer was still mixing in Nassau society.

  One of Sir Harry’s three guests on the night of his murder, Charles Hubbard, didn’t hang around long. Road crash, wouldn’t you know it? Single car, late at night. He ran smack into a casuarina tree on West Bay Street. The tree must have jumped out in the middle of the road to get him, as there didn’t seem to be any reason for the accident. But it killed him instantly.

  There was no proof of foul play, or none reported, anyway. The Nassau police took care of it. But inevitably there was talk. Jinxes. Coincidences.

  There was also a cloud hanging over the earthly demise of Assistant Superintendent Bernard J. Nottage, the senior detective in the de Marigny affair. He died relatively young from massive bleeding after having his teeth pulled by a Nassau dentist. It was always thought that Superintendent Nottage knew far more than he let on, and that he was among the select few who knew the whole truth about the Oakes murder.

  Superintendent Nottage was a remarkable man, the first black to reach such heights in the Bahamas force and well-regarded by colleagues of all shades. His appointment with the dentist should have been a routine matter. He was a healthy, active man and his death shook the Nassau community. It came at a time when suspicion was growing about Oakes-related conspiracies, and it was inevitable th
at his demise was one more example of evil scheming. The feeling was that he fell victim to powerful forces in Nassau at the time, and that his death was no accident.

  All those deaths. All those people dropping like flies on a hot August afternoon on Paradise Island. They put a charley horse in the long arm of coincidence. Even two of Nancy Oakes’ two siblings died suspiciously young:

  Sir Sydney Oakes, Second Baronet of Nassau, inherited his title from his father. He died in a single-car accident in Nassau in 1966 when a utility pole jumped out into the middle of the street one dark night, just like the casuarina tree that had killed Charles Hubbard, and ran into his sports car. He was thirty-nine years old.

  Another brother, William Pitt Oakes, got himself hooked on heroin and went stark raving nuts. For some months, he ran around his home behaving like a canine, urinating on the rug and the furniture and barking—Arf! Arf!—like a dog. He was visiting New York City on business and staying at the Westbury Hotel when he fell ill to coronary thrombosis complicated by liver failure. He was taken to a Bronx nursing home where he died shortly after arrival. He was buried with his father, Sir Harry Oakes. It was 1956 and he was twenty-eight.

  A sister, Shirley Oakes, seemed for a while to escape the contagious misfortune. But only for a while. She went to Vassar and Yale Law, then later also had a vehicular accident that left crippled and in a coma for the remaining years of her life. If any loudmouth ever tries to tell you that money buys happiness, tell him to pipe down so you can tell him about Eunice Oakes, Harry’s widow.

  She was once married to the wealthiest man in the British Empire. And what did it buy her? Not only did her husband get murdered, but two of her three children predeceased her.

  But let’s get back to Sir Harry.

  I’ll come right out and say it. I ended up liking the man and liking his family. Maybe more than anything, that was what drove me onward in the case and prevented me from ever letting the case drop.

  I had started out at best indifferent to Sir Harry, or even not liking him, seeing him as a bit of a parvenu bore: an intense crude man with a questionable moral compass. Then I began to understand him, particularly when I assembled the facts on his life, through the early failures in Maine and Australia. He had his quirks, his blemishes, his demons.