The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (49 page)

How had bloodstains got on to Christie’s towel? The estate agent explained that when he found Sir Harry’s body he poured water in his mouth, wet a towel and wiped his face with it. He believed that the towel came from his own bathroom. There were certain bloodstains on the glass door and screen door of Christie’s bedroom, and he said that these were probably from his own hands, after he had found Sir Harry.

A strange story was told by Captain Sears, the Assistant Superintendent of Police. Driving in Nassau on the fatal night Captain Sears had seen a station wagon with Christie sitting in the front seat, and somebody else driving. Sears, however, must have been mistaken, for Christie said positively that he did not leave Westbourne on that night.

The severest blow struck at the prosecution came with the evidence of Captain James Barker. It was evidence which at times turned the tragedy into something like a farce. It was also evidence of historical importance about the methods of obtaining fingerprints.

The first step in taking fingerprint evidence is usually to photograph the prints. This fingerprint expert, however, had left his fingerprint camera behind. Perhaps Pemberton might have one? Well, yes, he had, but it was out of commission.

Without bothering to make any further inquiries about cameras or to send for his own camera, Barker proceeded to take prints by “lifting” them on to Scotch tape. This is a recognized method. When he ran out of tape he “lifted” them on to rubber, a procedure which has the effect of destroying the original print. Having done this, he forgot all about the print on the screen for ten days when, he said, he examined it and found that it was Marigny’s.

Judge Daly called Barker’s conduct “quite incomprehensible”, and his forgetfulness was really extraordinary. In court he identified the place on the screen where the print had been found—and it turned out to be the wrong place. He said that certain lines on the screen were not made by him—and they turned out to be marked with his initials. Looking at the lifted print, this expert was unable even to say which way the finger was pointing.

There was worse to come. It was obvious that, for the fingerprint evidence to be effective, Marigny must have had no possible access to the screen before it was fingerprinted. Now, Marigny had been taken upstairs at Westbourne to be interviewed on the day Barker took the prints. Had he gone before or after the work was done? In the Magistrates’ Court all the police officers agreed that it was after.

Pemberton said the screen was under constant police guard. Two other police witnesses said that Marigny, on strict instructions, had not gone upstairs in the morning, while the screen was being fingerprinted. Melchen confirmed that he had taken Marigny upstairs between three and four in the afternoon.

At the trial, however, Mrs Clark and Mrs Ainslie said that they had been summoned to Westbourne that morning, and that Marigny had been taken upstairs between eleven o’clock and noon. Now, quite suddenly, the prosecution evidence on this point collapsed. The police guards admitted that they had been mistaken about the time, and so did Melchen. It was just a mistake, he said.

“What a mistake,” defence counsel commented ironically. “What a coincidence that you and the constables should make the same mistake.”

In his final speech for the defence Higgs plainly accused these winesses of perjury. While Melchen was examining Marigny upstairs Barker had come to the door and asked if everything was OK. The defence suggested that Marigny had been taken upstairs deliberately, to get his print on to the screen.

By the time that Marigny went into the witness box, the incompetence or corruption of the police had made his acquittal almost inevitable. He explained that the burnt hair on his beard and forearms had been caused when he lit a cigar over a candle in a hurricane shade. He was a confident witness, laughing, joking occasionally, winking at his wife.

The jury voted nine to three for acquittal. They unanimously recommended Marigny’s deportation.

Talking to reporters afterwards Marigny told them to keep out of prison. “It’s a hard life,” he said. “I could see that I had a good foreman to guide the jury. By the way, did you notice that he was the only one who was awake all the time?” Asked if he would try to solve the mystery he said, “I’ll leave that to Erle Stanley Gardner.”

Echoes of the case can be heard occasionally through the years. In 1950 a Finnish seaman said he had been told the name of the Oakes murderer by an American landscape artist, and a search was made for a blonde model named Betty Roberts, who gave evidence in the case. When found, Miss Roberts, now happily married, proved to have nothing to say. In this same year Betty Ellen Renner, who came to the Bahamas to investigate the case, was murdered and put into a well. At this time, also, Marigny was heard of, working as a part-time French translator in New York. His marriage to Nancy Oakes had been annulled. In 1953 Barker was shot dead by his son, after a quarrel. But these are mere sidelights on some of the characters. Neither Erle Stanley Gardner (who was there as a reporter) nor anyone else has ever solved the problem: who killed Sir Harry Oakes?

Any investigation of the Oakes case is bound to leave one with the feeling that much less than the whole truth has been told. But in the welter of contradictory evidence, and the evasions of police officials (the jury expressed their regret that no evidence had been obtained from Lieutenant-Colonel Erskine-Lindop, Commissioner of Bahamas Police, who left to take up another appointment between the Magistrates’ hearing and the trial), some questions stand out. They are questions that seem, strangely enough, never to have been asked:

There are other questions too, which it is not possible to ask publicly, even fifteen years after Marigny’s trial. But the Oakes case is one on which the file is not completely closed. It is possible, at least, that one day an answer will be provided to one of the most remarkable murder mysteries of the twentieth century.

(Nan Patterson, 1904)

Alexander Woollcott

On 4 June 1904 an wealthy gambler called Francis Thomas Young (known as Caesar) was riding along Broadway in a New York City hansom cab. Sitting alongside him was his mistress, a twenty-two-year-old showgirl called Nan Patterson. A shot rang out, and bystanders heard Miss Patterson exclaim:
“Look at me Frank. Why did you do it?” She directed the cab to a nearby drugstore and then on to a hospital, where Young was pronounced dead on arrival. The couple had been quarrelling over a proposed elopement; Young had agreed to go to Europe, but with his wife. The unhappy Miss Patterson had told him (falsely or mistakenly) that she was pregnant. She claimed Young had committed suicide when she upbraided him for agreeing to his wife’s request for a connubial holiday. This was at odds with the ballistics evidence over the position of the bullet entry wound in Young’s head, which suggested that he could not have shot himself. However the comely Miss Patterson managed to convince not one but two juries of her innocence. In fact, to the delight of thousands of excited New Yorkers, there were three trials. The first was aborted when a juror suddenly died. The second ended in deadlock when the jury failed to agree on a verdict. When the jury in the third trial also became confused and finally confounded, the judge ordered Nan Patterson’s release. It was a hugely popular outcome, and Miss Patterson (who’d been a member of the chorus in the musical
Florodora
) went on to scale new heights in her musical and theatrical career. The case is included not for its forensic complexities but for its treatment by one of America’s most original writers on murderous matters, the journalist and critic Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943). Fat, owlish, lazy, acid-tongued, Woollcott was, in the words of one contemporary,
“first, last and always a reporter . . . distinctly a one-man show”. He was fascinated by murder, and often included a note on a current or historical case in his Shouts And Murmurs column in the
New Yorker
. Woollcott’s homosexual inclinations were thwarted by the singular fact that he was to all intents and purposes a eunuch, born with a hormonal imbalance, a shortage of testosterone. There was a certain wistfulness about the way in which Woollcott related a story about Lord Reading’s marriage to a woman some forty years younger than himself. Woollcott quoted the London
Times
account which ended with the unfortunate tidings:
“The bridegroom’s gift to the bride was an antique pendant.” Alexander Woollcott recalled the case of Nan Patterson (“the handsome alumna of the
Florodora
sextette
”) in a 1934 anthology of his journalism that became his first bestseller,
While Rome Burns
.

It was in 1905 on 3 May, my dears, that, for the second and last time, the case of the People of the State of New York (ever a naïve litigant) against Nan Randolph Patterson was entrusted to the deliberations of an infatuated jury. After being locked up all night, they tottered from the jury room to report that they, like the susceptible twelve who had meditated on the same case six months before, were unable to decide whether or not this handsome wench was guilty of having murdered Caesar Young. At that report the exhausted People of the State of New York threw up their hands and, to the cheers of a multitude which choked the streets for blocks, Nan Patterson walked out of the Criminal Courts Building into American legend.

It was in the preceding June that the killing had been done. Caesar Young—that was a
nom
de
guerre
, his real name was Frank Thomas Young—was a gay blade of the racetracks, a bookmaker, gambler, and horseman, personable, rich, generous, jovial, English. For some two years he was enchained by the loveliness of this Nan Patterson, a brunette, pompadoured, well-rounded show-girl from the sextette of a
Florodora
road company. He had picked her up on a train bound for California where, according to testimony, which later put all manner of ideas into Eastern heads, they spent several days together in what must have been a singularly liberal-minded Turkish Bath. But by the spring of 1904 he had returned penitent to the bosom of his wife and, for a healing voyage of reconciliation, the Youngs booked passage on the
Germanic
, due to sail from her pier at the foot of West Fulton Street at nine-thirty on the morning of 4 June.

On the night before, they had come in from Sheepshead Bay after the fifth race and taken lodgings for the night with Mrs Young’s sister in West 140th Street. Indeed that last evening, Young’s life was fairly swarming with in-laws, all bent, I suspect, on seeing that this, their Caesar, should not change his mind at the last moment and run back to that dreadful Patterson woman. At seven next morning Young jumped out of bed, dressed, and sallied forth, explaining to his wife that he needed a shave and a new hat and would meet her on the pier not later than nine o’clock. He never kept that appointment and, too late to get her heavy luggage off the boat, poor Mrs Young decided to let it go on without her.

Young never reached the pier because, at ten minutes before nine, just as the hansom he had picked up in Columbus Circle was rattling along West Broadway near Franklin Street, he was shot through the chest. The cabman, although subsequently disinclined to recall having noticed anything at all that morning, was at the time sufficiently alert to draw up in front of a drug store. Passers-by who hurried forward found within the cab a dying man. Oddly enough the pistol which had killed him lay hot in the pocket of his own coat and he had fallen forward across the knees of the fair creature who was sharing the cab with him. Nan, for it was she, was extremely emotional and clasping her hands in supplication to the Deity, exclaimed (with admirable presence of mind, the State afterwards contended), “Caesar, Caesar, why did you do this?”

In the following November, the American people settled back to enjoy a real good murder trial, with Nan’s face pale in the shade of a vast black picture hat, with her aged father, a patriarch superbly caparisoned with white mutton-chop whiskers, sitting beside her and kissing her in benediction at the end of every session. For the State appeared the late William Rand, who looked rather like Richard Harding Davis in those days. He was a brilliant advocate, although in talking to a jury, the tobacco-chewing members of the bar would tell you, he did rather suggest an English squire addressing the tenantry. For the defence the humbler Abraham Levy had been retained – the mighty Abe Levy who looked like a happy blend of cherub and pawnbroker and who, as the most adroit and zestful practitioner of the criminal law in this country, was called for the defence in more than three hundred homicide cases. The foreman of the first jury was the late Elwood Hendrick, eventually Professor Hendrick of Columbia, if you please, but—marvellous in this restless city—still living in 1930 in the East Fortieth Street house which he gave as his address on that day when Nan, after looking him sternly in the eye, nodded to her counsel as a sign that he would do as a juror for her.