Sir Harry Oakes, 1st Baronet (23 December 1874 – 7 July 1943) was a British gold mine owner, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.

No further legal proceedings have taken place on the matter, the cause of death and the details surrounding it have never been entirely determined (though are thought to be unusually grisly) and the case has been the subject of several books and four films.

Harry Oakes graduated from Foxcroft Academy and went on to Bowdoin College in 1896,[1] and he spent two years at the Syracuse University Medical School.

[3] In 1898, Oakes left medical school before graduation and made his way to Alaska, at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, in hopes of making his fortune as a prospector.

He was invited to the British colony by Sir Harold Christie, a prominent Bahamian real estate developer and legislator, who became a close business associate and friend.

In 1939, Oakes was created a baronet by King George VI as a reward for his philanthropic endeavours in the Bahamas, Canada and Britain.

[17] The Bahamas’ governor, the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom), who had become a close friend of Oakes during the previous three years, took charge of the investigation from the outset.

The Duke first attempted to enforce press censorship, but this was unsuccessful since the Bahamas Tribune newspaper broke the story to the world within a few hours.

[18] Oakes' vast wealth, fame and British title, combined with the nature of the crime, generated worldwide interest in the case.

Etienne Dupuch, the colony's foremost newspaper publisher and a close friend of Oakes, ensured constant coverage of the case for the several months which followed.

[20] The two American detectives were, in theory, called upon to assist Bahamian law enforcement, but to the dismay of the local police, they completely took over the investigation.

De Marigny had eloped with and married Oakes' daughter Nancy in New York City (where she was studying), without her parents' knowledge, two days after her 18th birthday, in 1942.

[20] When Nancy was informed of her father's death and her husband's arrest, she was in Miami on her way for the summer to study dance with Martha Graham at Bennington, Vermont.

Nancy spent heavily to hire a leading American private investigator, Raymond Schindler, to dig deeply into the case, and a prominent British-trained Bahamian lawyer, Godfrey W. Higgs, to defend her husband.

[4] Immediately after Oakes' funeral had been held in Bar Harbor, Maine (the family's summer home), Captain Barker, visiting by invitation, told Nancy and Lady Oakes that he had already positively identified de Marigny's fingerprints on the Chinese screen, justifying de Marigny's status as the main suspect.

Very detailed and thorough cross-examination at the trial, several months later, by de Marigny's lawyer showed that Barker had not in fact positively identified the single fingerprint as belonging to de Marigny until several days later than he had originally claimed - after he had returned to Miami - and that Barker had taken several dozen other fingerprints from Oakes' bedroom, many of which were still unprocessed weeks later.

An American fingerprint expert witness, testifying for the defence, called into question the professionalism of the techniques used by Captain Barker in the investigation.

The first full-length book on the case -- The Murder of Sir Harry Oakes, was published by the Bahamas Tribune newspaper in 1959; the paper was edited at the time by Etienne Dupuch.

De Marigny was deported to Cuba after a recommendation by the murder trial's jury, because of his supposedly unsavoury character and frequent advances towards young girls in the Bahamas.

Foxcroft Academy, a private school in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, has its football field named after Harry Oakes.

He was portrayed by Scott Hylands in "Rex v De Marigny", a 1993 dramatization of the murder trial for the Canadian drama anthology series Scales of Justice.

The landscape architecture was done by Howard and Lorrie Dunington-Grubb,[27] the building's architect was William Lyon Somerville with sculptures by Florence Wyle, Frances Loring and Elizabeth Wyn Wood.

[29] He constructed a 37-room Tudor- style mansion (by Findlay and Foulis in 1929 and later gatehouse and stables in 1931),[30] where he and his wife lived from 1928 to 1935, known as Oak Hall.

In 1938 Oakes and his family purchased a summer home called "The Willows" in Bar Harbor, Maine, designed by the firm of Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul in 1913.