Her Father Was Canada's Richest Man. Her Husband Was Charged With His Murder. She Chose Her Husband.

In the early hours of July 8, 1943, a tropical storm broke over the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. Inside a beachfront mansion called Westbourne, the richest man in Canada lay dead in his bed. Sir Harry Oakes was struck four times in the skull, doused with a flammable liquid, and set on fire. A pillow above him lay torn open, and feathers were still drifting through the room when his body was found. Within 36 hours, the island's governor had steered the investigation toward a single suspect, a French count who had married Oakes's 18-year-old daughter in secret the year before. The daughter was 19 now, away at college in Vermont, and she came home to a choice no child should ever have to make. Her murdered father lay in one grave, her husband sat in a cell awaiting the gallows, and the island had already decided which of the two she ought to abandon. She looked at the reporters waiting for her and said, "Freddy could not have done this. I am the only person who can help him." In this documentary, we explore the life of Nancy Oakes de Marigny — the eldest daughter of the Maine-born prospector who spent 15 years chasing gold across Alaska, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Mexico, West Africa, the Belgian Congo, California, Nevada, and Colorado before he struck the richest gold ore in the Western Hemisphere on the south shore of Kirkland Lake in June 1911, and the 19-year-old Bennington freshman who returned to Nassau in the summer of 1943 to spend three months disassembling the murder case against her own husband in front of the world's press. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyallure ------------------- We open on Sangerville, Maine in 1874 — the birth of Harry Oakes, the Foxcroft Academy preparation, the Bowdoin degree of 1896, the two years at Syracuse Medical School abandoned for a rumor from the Klondike, and the shy 22-year-old who turned north in 1896 with his mother's savings, his brother's promised $75 a month, and no realistic prospect of becoming a doctor after all. We follow Oakes through 15 years of unrewarded persistence — the failed Klondike arrival in 1899, the frostbite medicine that kept him alive through the first winter, the wandering circuits through Alaska, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Mexico, West Africa, the Belgian Congo, California, Nevada, and Colorado, and the two lessons the Western Australian goldfields and the Colorado porphyry country embedded in his geological eye. We reconstruct the June 1911 arrival at Kirkland Lake — the porphyry threaded with telluride grains that every other prospector in Ontario had walked past, the one-man mine, the Tough brothers' grubstake, the first 101-ton shipment that returned more than $46,000 from the smelter, and the Lake Shore Main Break struck 1,500 feet underground in 1918 that would eventually yield more than 8 million ounces of gold as the single largest producer in the Western Hemisphere. We trace the Oakes fortune — the $28 million in dividends paid by 1927, the roughly $3 million per year that followed, the $200 million net worth by the early 1940s that made him the wealthiest man in Canada, the 37-room Tudor mansion above Niagara Falls, the 1923 marriage to Eunice McIntyre, and the five children of whom the eldest was Nancy, born in 1924. We follow the family's exile — the Conservative-era Canadian taxes that Oakes calculated cost him $17,500 per day, the passed-over Senate seat, the 1934 relocation to England, the 1935 move to Nassau where his tax on the same income fell to five percent, the philanthropy that built out the Nassau airport and the largest hotel on the island, the property partnership with the developer Harold Christie, and the June 1939 baronetcy conferred after a £50,000 gift to a London hospital. We meet the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1940 — the abdicated king assigned to the governorship of the Bahamas as a wartime diplomatic parking arrangement, the intimate social access the Windsors were granted at Westbourne, and the position from which the Duke would personally direct every subsequent decision the case against his hosts' son-in-law required. We meet Alfred de Marigny — the 1910 Mauritian French Creole with a self-awarded courtesy title, the six-foot-five yachtsman whose boat was provocatively named the Concubine, the two prior marriages to wealthy women that had ended on financial terms unfavorable to the wives, the Alsatian dowry that never came back, and the Nassau reputation as an unscrupulous adventurer that the Duke of Windsor had privately confirmed months before the murder.