THE BAHAMAS: The Ruffled Sheet

In his red robe and white, horsehair wig, Sir Oscar Bedford Daly looked like Oliver Cromwell. The Chief Justice of His Majesty’s Supreme Court for the Bahamas was taking testimony in longhand. Before him, at two curved tables, the inner and the outer bar, sat the wigged Crown Counsel and the Defense Attorneys. Their robes were black. Beyond them lolled a dozen U.S. newsgatherers and the 105 black & white citizens of Nassau who had come early enough to get seats. At one side of the shabby, formal room sat the prisoner at the bar, Count Marie Alfred de Fouguereaux de Marigny, in his mahogany cage. Opposite were the jurors, alternately intent and bored.

Count “Freddy” was standing trial for the murder of his father-in-law. Sir Harry Oakes, 200 times a millionaire, who lost his life in a swirl of head blows, flames, lightning flashes, blood and burning feathers the night of July 7 at his luxurious villa, Westbourne, outside Nassau. Freddy, who had pleaded not guilty, asked that reporters call him Mister, not Count.

Outside, on the sunbathed square and under the balconies of Bay Street, Bahaman blacks shuffled through their work or rested in the warm sun. The bars at the Prince George and the Rozelda waited for recess and brisk trade. Beyond the town and the deep blue water of the Gulf Stream there was a world at war, but in Nassau this week interest was focused on the legal battle for Freddy’s life.

Sir Oscar interrupted his reading back of testimony when he came to a statement that the sheets on Harold Christie’s bed were ruffled and the pillow dented. “Ruffled?” mused the Justice. “I think ‘rumpled’ is a better word. However, we shall leave it ‘ruffled’ as it means nearly the same thing.”

Where Were You on . . .? Harold George Christie, 47, Bahama born & reared, wealthy, unmarried and a close friend and real-estate associate of Sir Harry Oakes, spent the night at Westbourne, in a room 18 feet away from the murder. No servants slept in. He testified that a storm awakened him, but that he knew nothing of the tragedy until he went to call his friend for breakfast. Police Captain Edward Sears stated that he saw Christie downtown in a station wagon after the time dinner guests Dulcibel Effie Heneage and Charles Hubbard left and Sir Harry and his friend retired. When Defense Counsel Godfrey Higgs pressed him on his movements that night and his actions after discovering the crumpled body, Christie began to shout. De Marigny stopped picking his teeth, listened intently. Christie’s friends said that he was just absentminded.

A brown dog wandered into court, sniffed Sir Oscar’s feet and went out. A plane roared low overhead and the Court Crier, an elderly Negro, seated on the step below the Bench to keep mosquitoes off His Honor’s ankles, woke with a start, began to fan.

Where Was Grisou? The first week witnesses were offered by the prosecutors, Attorney General Eric Hallinan and Special Crown Counsel Alfred Francis Adderley, Negro member of London’s Middle Temple. Evidence collected at preliminary hearings last summer was presented again: the singed hairs on De Marigny’s hands, arms, face and chest; the mark of his little finger on the smoke-smudged white screen that stood by Sir Harry’s bed; the light that Neighbor Howard Lightbourne saw burning in the Count’s bedroom that night; the fact that the shirt Freddy wore has never turned up and the wild things various police officers heard Freddy say in the days following the crime.

But the evidence did not go unchallenged. Godfrey Higgs, his associate, W. E. A. Callender, the unseen but active Private Detective Raymond Schindler, from New York, and the unwavering support of Nancy Oakes de Marigny, 19-year-old wife of the accused, made themselves felt. Doubt was cast on the cause of the singed hairs; the possibility was opened up that De Marigny might have touched the screen two days after the struggle in Sir Harry’s bedroom, and the name of Grisou, an ash-grey Maltese cat, was introduced to explain away the light in Freddy’s bedroom.

Grisou is really Guimbeau’s cat. The Marquis Georges de Visdelou-Guimbeau is Freddy’s boyhood friend from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The night of the murder Freddy and Guimbeau gave a party for friends (Nancy was in Maine with her mother). Afterwards Freddy drove two wives of R.A.F. pilots home and, he says, went to bed. This was just after 1. At 3 Guimbeau drove his friend Betty Roberts home, returning 15 minutes later to find Freddy having trouble with Grisou, who would not let him sleep. Guimbeau put Grisou out and went to bed.

It remained to be seen whether all this would be capped with a conviction and a noose.