The Mary Celeste Syndrome Read online

  the

  MARY CELESTE

  SYNDROME

  SHIPS from which all human life has vanished

  PLUS 18 other tantalizing mysteries

  John Pinkney

  Cover illustration and design by Anne Spudvilas

  • SECRET

  • STRANGE

  • UNKNOWN

  The 21st century confronts us with mysteries neither logic nor science can explain. In this compelling book John Pinkney investigates the most tantalizing of these true stories.

  UNCANNY VANISHINGS A long roll-call of ships found adrift from 1840 to 2003, their captains, crews and passengers lost without trace - and with no sign of struggle. After years spent investigating this phenomenon, Pinkney gave it a fitting name: The Mary Celeste Syndrome.

  FUTURES FORETOLD An obscure novel, published in 1980, describes in stunning detail the disastrous marriage that would make Diana Spencer a princess -and predicts her subsequent death in an automobile accident... A Scottish artist paints precognitive pictures of the 9/11 attack on New York, five years ahead in time... NASA's 2004 photos of a Saturn moon prove identical to a special-effects model used in Star Wars a decade earlier.

  ‘CURSE’ OF THE ICEMAN In 1990 scientists exhume the withered corpse of an ancient hunter, frozen in an Alpine glacier for 53 centuries. Soon afterward the researchers begin to die, in a mysterious chain of accidents and illnesses.

  UNEARTHLY INCIDENTS Three days after his funeral, a British sailor's face appears in an official photo... Soon after they are buried at sea, two American seamen are photographed, swimming in their ship’s wake... Victims of a 1902 massacre haunt a Queensland sheep farm.

  MYSTIFYING MURDERS The serial killer whose cryptic codes still puzzle police... The Duke of Windsor's extraordinary role in an infamous homicide investigation.

  John Pinkney’s enthralling ebooks include Haunted, Australia's Strangest Mysteries and Alien Airships Over Old America. In this compelling narrative he offers insights into profound puzzles that perplex our world.

  Other eBooks by John Pinkney

  Australia's Strangest Mysteries

  HAUNTED: The Ghosts that share our world

  ALIEN AIRSHIPS - Over Old America

  A Paranormal File

  THIRST: An Inheritance of Evil

  The Girl Who Touched Infinity

  The Key and the Fountain

  * * *

  Copyright © John Pinkney 2011

  All rights reserved

  Cover painting and design by ANNE SPUDVILAS

  ISBN 978-0-9870935-6-1

  INKYPEN EDITIONS

  johnpinkneybooks

  Contents

  Preface

  The Corpse, the Duke and the Nazi Spy

  Murder in the Bahamas

  ‘Don’t Disturb the Dead’

  Enigma of the Iceman’s Curse

  The Man Who Vanished from the Sky

  Strange Disappearances, Deaths

  The Book that Foretold Diana’s Doom

  Premonitions in Print and Film

  Did a White Lie Avert World War III?

  Nightmare in the Garden

  Reports from Reality’s Edge

  The Mary Celeste Syndrome

  Ships Stripped of all Human Life

  The Secret Agent and the Uncanny Cloud

  Wartime Mysteries

  Seashells in the Trees

  Skyfalls and Other Riddles

  Insane Egotist

  The Multi-Murderer Who Adored Publicity

  The Dead Sailor Who Invaded a Photo

  Ghost Mysteries

  Did Amelia Die, or Did the Government Lie?

  Pilot Puzzle

  Triangular Evidence

  The Geometrical Markings on UFO Victims’ Skin

  The Woman Who Slept for 32 Years

  Hell from Within

  The Flames that Killed Jacqueline

  Did James Leininger Live Before?

  Riddle of the ‘Reborns’

  Jewels from Jupiter

  Forest Search for a Space Treasure

  Strange Case of the Separated Sisters

  Astonishing Coincidences

  The Dream that Proved a ‘Dead’ Man Was Alive

  Sleep and the Seventh Sense

  * * *

  Preface

  * * *

  I am too much a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything.

  T.H. Huxley 1825-1895

  The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

  Pliny the Elder 23-79 AD

  ON JANUARY 9, 2003 the Australian Navy vessel HMAS Stuart came upon a 150-tonne craft, High Aim 6, drifting, deserted in the Indian Ocean.

  The captain's reading glasses lay in the wheelhouse. Toothbrushes hung neatly from a rack. In lockers, clothes lay neatly folded. Nothing had been stolen. And yet the captain and his 10 crewmen had vanished without trace.

  After fruitlessly searching the vessel for clues, the baffled Australian sailors nicknamed her ‘Mary Celeste.’ It was a black joke, but apt. Despite massive sea-and-air searches, the captain and his men were never found [at least at the time of this book's publication.]

  The ‘Mary Celeste’ had created international puzzlement in 1872, when she was discovered adrift with nobody aboard. If contemporary newspaper reports were to be believed, the mystery was a one-off. Nothing like it had ever happened before. But that belief remains as erroneous today as it was then.

  As any painstaking researcher can ascertain, Mary Celeste and High Aim 6 are part of a pattern which has repeated itself through the centuries. A pattern whose meaning, at this time, defies our understanding.

  ...As do the well-documented and photographed events aboard the SS Watertown on her voyage from New York to the Panama Canal. Two sailors, who had died while working in a fume-laden cargo hold, and were buried at sea, suddenly reappeared - apparently swimming energetically in the ship's wake.

  Over three morale-sapping days everyone aboard took turns to gather at the stern and stare down at the dead men’s faces, which occasionally tended to vanish and reappear at roughly 10-second intervals. The captain, hopeful that the spectres might prove to be a mass hallucination, leaned over the rail and took photographs.

  But the watery ghosts were no mirage. On one of the negatives their faces can clearly be seen. The picture - pronounced genuine by a New York photographic laboratory - became famous around the world.

  The haunting of the Watertown’s wake is merely one of a multitude of profound mysteries chronicled in these pages. Among other cases:

  THE PUZZLING FATE in 1985 of English teenager Jacqueline Simmons, who exploded into flames in a school corridor. Although she died of internal injuries caused by intense heat, her outer clothing remained uncharred and intact.

  THE SIX-YEAR-OLD American boy who in 2005 stunned investigators with his deeply circumstantial ‘memories’ of dying, 60 years earlier, as a fighter pilot over Iwo Jima.

  THE ANCIENT HUNTER, torn from his frozen Alpine grave after 5300 years - and the ‘curse’ that proceeded to kill scientists who had handled his body.

  I have devoted much of my professional life to the study of our world’s more tantalising mysteries, and have seen relatively few of them solved. But there’s little harm, I feel, in loose ends and a lack of answers. Insoluble enigmas have a value of their own - expanding our perception of the possibilities in the rich, strange universe around us.

  John Pinkney

  * * *

  The Corpse, the Duke

  and the Nazi Spy

  Murder in the Bahamas

  * * *

  The death in 2005 of thrice-divorced heiress Nancy Oakes went largely unnoticed. Only a dwindling number of people
recalled the scandalously sensational murder trial in which she had played a crucial role: a trial so explosive it occasionally elbowed World War II off the front page. At centre-stage lay the corpse of Nancy’s multi-millionaire father Sir Harry Oakes, whose burned, bludgeoned body had been found in his Bahamas mansion. The accused was Nancy’s handsome young husband Count Alfred de Marigny, whom she ferociously defended. Lurking enigmatically in the background was the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated his throne to wed Wallis Simpson - and whose intervention in the murder case was considered strange beyond belief. Also in the cast were a shadowy assortment of Mafia dons, and a suspected Nazi spy. The accused count was acquitted, and the true killer never found - prompting crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner to describe the case as ‘the greatest murder mystery of all time…’

  THE TINY PITEOUS CORPSE of Sir Harry Oakes had been subjected to indignities that one witness described as ‘demonic’. Not content with savagely fracturing the diminutive baronet’s skull, the frenzied killer had turned his bed into a funeral pyre by dousing the body in gasoline and setting it alight.

  The murderer also started spotfires in corridors and adjoining rooms, obviously hoping the inferno would destroy Sir Harry’s vast Nassau mansion and any forensic evidence that might remain. However, the plan failed when a thunderstorm exploded over the Bahamas islands. Rain, driving through open windows, doused the flames and saved the house.

  A friend and business associate, Harold Christie, discovered the body - or so he claimed. He told investigating detectives that having slept relatively soundly and undisturbed in a guestroom at the mansion, he had risen to eat an early breakfast, then gone up to Sir Harry’s bedroom. During the later court proceedings he said:

  Going up the stairs I noticed marks of charring. There was an odd pungent smell around. I suspected there had been a fire of some kind…when I reached the bedroom smoke was curling around the door. I went in and said good morning. Then I noticed that the mosquito net around the bed was burned. I rushed over to the bed and saw him lying at an angle. He was blackened. The fire had turned him black. I could see how the heat had raised big blisters on his skin - and his upper half was covered with feathers. His pillow was torn open and the feathers were stuck to blood from his head.

  I had no idea he was dead. I lifted his head and tried to give him water from a bottle beside the bed…but he wasn’t moving. I went to the porch and screamed for help. But the servants were off that day. Then I went down to the telephone.

  Sir Harry, an extraordinarily generous philanthropist, was loved by the Bahamian people, whose lives he had improved in numerous ways. Few believed he could have had any enemies at all - let alone the fiend who had intruded into his room. When the initially suppressed news of the murder leaked out the general expectation was that Nassau’s police force, working with the Bahamas Criminal Investigation Department, would quickly track down the assassin.

  But it didn’t happen like that.

  The Bahamas was a British colony, comprising more than 3000 islands and reefs scattered across the Atlantic Ocean, about 80 kilometres from Florida’s eastern coast. It was an important strategic staging post in the struggle against Hitler - and enemy submarines often invaded its balmy waters at night to drop agents and saboteurs ashore.

  The governor of the beleaguered islands was the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. Even before Sir Harry’s corpse was cold, the duke began to behave puzzlingly. He placed himself in charge of the investigation, telling the local police and Bahamas CID that they would be acting as assistants only. His first order was that the murder be kept secret - an impossible demand in a community as tightly knit and talkative as Nassau. And his second decision was even odder. He entrusted the principal task of finding the killer to two detectives, Captains Ed Melchen and James Barker from the Miami police department. Public (and police) concern grew, as it became apparent that neither of these imported investigators knew much at all about Nassau or its people. The pair quickly proved to be bunglers whose flounderings would ultimately deprive the baronet and his family of justice. But the duke, an imperial satrap with unchecked powers, would not be talked into ditching his ill-chosen detectives. This bizarre behaviour was a principle element in what crime novelist Erle Stanley would call ‘the greatest murder mystery of all time’.

  * * *

  HARRY OAKES WAS BORN in Sangerville, Maine, to a lawyer and a teacher. He enjoyed a relatively privileged and affectionate childhood. But at the onset of puberty his world darkened. Short, slight and slow to develop, he was increasingly dwarfed by his friends. Convinced that no girl would want anything to do with him, he became depressive and introverted, devoting much of his time to daydreaming about the riches that (somehow) would be his one day.

  At 16 he even predicted famously to classmates that he would become a millionaire and die violently: a forecast that was to prove accurate on both counts.

  Parents William and Edith refused to take their son’s flights of fancy seriously. They insisted that he qualify himself to make a ‘solid’ income. Obediently, 22-year-old Harry enrolled as a medical student at Syracuse University. He drudged at his studies for two years - but then was distracted by what he perceived to be his destiny. Suddenly the newspapers crackled with reports of a gold strike in the Yukon. Harry had no trouble convincing himself that he would find his fortune there - and his doting parents astonished him by agreeing that he should try.

  Everyone in the loving Oakes family contributed to the enterprise - little realising that their loans would one day be returned to them a thousandfold. Harry’s mother gave him most of her savings…his brother pledged to send him $75 a month from his lumber business…and even his sister said she would send what she could from her secretarial salary. As a biographer later remarked, it was easy to see where Harry’s kindly nature and immense generosity came from.

  The Yukon venture failed. The young prospector spent months chipping rock at temperatures which sometimes plunged to 60 degrees below zero, but found nothing. He was equally unsuccessful in the Belgian Congo. Even Ontario, where many miners had struck fabled fortunes, was unyielding.

  But then he drifted to the violent northern town of Swastika where he stayed at a miners’ boarding house run by Roza Brown. As he acknowledged later, ‘With a few words, she transformed my life.’ Historians have described Mrs Brown as being a strikingly ugly and smelly female who was followed everywhere by snarling dogs. She was notorious for lashing tenants with her tongue - and sometimes even her fists - but the little American inspired a softer response. She shared with Harry Oakes - and nobody else - the gist of a circumstantial rumour she had heard about a remote stretch of water known as Kirkland Lake. Harry listened with growing excitement, the scholar in him recognising the ring of truth in his landlady’s story.

  Sir Harry Oakes: the investigation into his murder was muddied by the Duke of Windsor.

  With only $2.65 left in his pocket, Harry knew he needed financial and working partners to help him stake and dig the claim. He offered the chance to four brothers, Tom, Hugh, Harold and George Tough, whom he had met only hours earlier. The five men shook hands on the deal, then set out on foot for Kirkland Lake.

  The temperature fell to 52 degrees below zero as they trudged eleven kilometres through lightly falling snow. On a shore of the icebound lake they drove in their stakes,

  then toasted what they christened the Tough Oakes Mine. This was only the first of several mines Harry Oakes would open in the area. One of them, Lake Shore, became the second-largest gold producer in the western hemisphere. Within eight years Oakes was the richest man in Canada, pocketing more than $60,000 daily - and he made sure that Roza Brown was lavishly rewarded for her help.

  At 50, Harry invested a fraction of his daily earnings in a world cruise. During what had been intended as a brief stop-off in Australia he met Eunice MacIntyre, the quiet, reserved daughter
of a government official. She was 26 years his junior and 15 centimetres taller, but he was so entranced by her that he cancelled the remainder of his voyage. He proposed, and they were married in Sydney, a week later.

  The multi-millionaire returned to live in New York with his bride. Between 1924 and 1932 she bore him five children: Nancy, Sydney, Shirley, William and Harry. But by the time his new baby arrived, Harry Oakes was angry and disillusioned - the principal reason being that the Canadian government was levying his companies $17,500 per day in taxes. In 1934 he decided to move with his family and his business interests to the Bahamas.

  In Nassau’s balmy climate, Harry Oakes thrived. Knighted by King George VI for his prodigious works of charity, he grew to love the islands with their sweeping beaches and vividly blue tropical waters. He often vowed that he would retire here. Instead, he would be beaten savagely to death.

  * * *

  The Duke of Windsor’s imported detectives conducted the case casually from the start. After Sir Harry’s body had been removed, the investigators allowed several of Nassau’s most prominent citizens to inspect the room in which he had perished. Nobody was discouraged from handling the bloodied objects around the bed.

  Unworried by this contamination of the crime scene, Captain Barker ostensibly lifted a fingerprint from a Chinese screen: a clue that would become central to the looming murder trial.

  Captains Barker and Melchen established that no member of the Oakes family had been in the house when Sir Harry died. His wife Eunice was visiting her family in Sydney; eldest daughter Nancy was in Vermont - and the other offspring were with relatives or friends.

  The policemen quickly became privy to one of the island’s choicest items of gossip. On her 18th birthday Nancy had defied her father by eloping with a man he despised: Count Alfred (Freddie) de Marigny, a playboy and minor business entrepreneur who had been married twice before. Eavesdroppers described bitter, shouted arguments between the young aristocrat and his father-in-law, several witnesses suggesting that the count was a desperado, whose chief motivation in making Nancy his wife was his hope of benefiting from Sir Harry’s will.