Former Tribune editor in TV probe of Oakes murder

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John Marquis

A NEW TV documentary about the Oakes murder is due for release this autumn.

Among those featured is John Marquis, former managing editor of The Tribune, whose book Blood and Fire threw new light on the 75-year-old mystery when it was published 13 years ago.

Sir Harry Oakes, then the British Empire's richest man, was murdered in his Nassau home in July, 1943. His son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, was tried and acquitted at the Supreme Court in Nassau later that year. The murder has never been solved.

Mr Marquis's book, which claimed Sir Harry was the victim of a local conspiracy, was acclaimed in the Wall Street Journal as one of the top five books in its genre.

Former Harvard professor Edward Jay Epstein described it as "brilliant" and said it would make a superb James Bond style movie.

Critic Sir Christopher Ondaatje described it as the most "accusatory" of all seven books written about the case, and Canadian lawyer Bill Selnes said he felt it got closest to the truth.

The new documentary, by London-based Like A Shot Entertainment, will be screened in Britain in November and is expected to be shown throughout Europe and via the Discovery Channel in North America. It is one of six documentaries in a series about Second World War murder mysteries.

Mr Marquis, 76, was The Tribune's managing editor for ten years until 2009.

He had shown a keen interest in the Oakes murder since his first spell in The Bahamas during the 1960s, when he was a political reporter at The Nassau Guardian and later The Tribune.

At the time, a top-level tip-off about a passport found lying among rubble in a Nassau side street threw suspicion on several leading Bahamian figures.

During a book-signing session after Blood and Fire's release in 2005, Mr Marquis was berated by the widow of a leading Bahamian politician who told him he should not resurrect speculation about the case. She yelled: "Why don't you leave it alone?"

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Sir Harry Oakes and his wife Eunice in Toronto in the 1930s.

He said: "Reaction to the book convinced me even more that my conclusions were correct."

His involvement in the documentary has inspired him to write an updated version of Blood and Fire, which will include information passed on to him by two sources in the Bahamas shortly before his retirement from full-time journalism nine years ago. It will be published next year.

"These sources were unrelated, but gave me information which led to the same conclusion about the case," Mr Marquis said.

"I feel my new book gets even closer to the solution to the great Oakes conundrum, which is still rated the most compelling murder mystery of the 20th century."

Mr Marquis, who lives in Cornwall, England, has written several other books, including a "portrait" of the Haitian tyrant François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and a study of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the mother-and-son crime team who lived in Nassau during the 1990s.

In his earlier career, he was a prize-winning investigative reporter and international sports writer with Lord Thomson of Fleet's newspapers, then Britain's biggest newspaper chain, and editor of a West Country newspaper group.

In 1974, he won a British Press Award, known as the 'Oscars' of British journalism, for a series on child deaths at two London hospitals.