WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD?
A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University
By Richard White
On the evening of Jan. 14, 1905, Mrs. Leland Stanford was at home in her 50-room San Francisco mansion when she took a sip of the bottled water presumably left at her bedside by a member of her staff. She began vomiting and complained that the drink tasted bitter. Although she soon recovered, she requested a chemical analysis and received a shocking report: Strychnine had been found in the Poland Spring bottle. Rather than call the police, she confided in her brother. He contacted the family lawyer, who hired a private investigator.
Fearful that someone was trying to murder her, Jane Stanford, a 76-year-old widow, sailed for Honolulu several weeks later with two trusted employees. At the Moana Hotel, on the night of Feb. 28, she drank bicarbonate mixed with water and became violently ill again. The hotel’s doctor arrived within minutes, but Stanford could not be saved and suffered an agonizing death. The physicians who conducted the autopsy agreed on the cause: strychnine poisoning.
It’s daunting to try to solve a murder that occurred more than a century ago: Witnesses are long gone, and research can take place only in databases and archives. But the circumstances surrounding the death of Jane Stanford, who with her wealthy railroad titan husband, Leland, founded the namesake California university, are so bizarre and tantalizing that it’s no wonder several books have been devoted to the case.
Not least because it remains officially mysterious. Despite investigations in both Honolulu and San Francisco, no one was ever charged with Stanford’s murder. Instead, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford, and others staged an elaborate cover-up to cast doubt on the medical evidence and convince both the authorities and the public that her death was due to natural causes. For the beneficiaries of her multimillion-dollar estate — Stanford University, her relatives and two employees — a murder trial was to be avoided at all costs, since it could have resulted in a challenge to her will.
Robert W.P. Cutler, in 2003’s “The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford,” focused on the medical reports and conflicting witness accounts. He concluded that Jane Stanford was, indeed, poisoned and that the Stanford University president’s conduct was egregious. Roland de Wolk, in his 2021 biography, “American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford,” pointed out that Jane Stanford’s personal secretary had direct access to both poisoned bottles. Now comes Richard White, a Stanford University professor emeritus, Pulitzer finalist and author of numerous books about the American West, who has taken a panoramic approach.
White offers up a rollicking account of Jane Stanford’s final years and violent death, all set against the seamy San Francisco carnival culture of the era: corrupt policemen; warring Chinatown gang lords; racial prejudice; rival newspaper editors slugging it out in screaming headlines; conniving railroad titans and double-dealing lawyers. To this, add secret romances, feuds and pervasive theft in Jane Stanford’s fraught servants’ quarters.
At the fledgling Leland Stanford Junior University, things were chaotic. Laboring under the burdens of shaky finances and a convoluted state charter, the poorly paid faculty and administrators fought bitterly over everything, whether it was academic freedom, sexual escapades or spending priorities.
At the center of all this was Jane Stanford, an imperious, lonely and eccentric Gilded Age figure searching in séances and dreams for guidance from the spirit world. Married at 22 to the young lawyer Leland Stanford, she had been by his side during his improbable rise from grocer and saloon owner to one of the wealthiest men in America. Elected governor of California while simultaneously serving as president of the Central Pacific Railroad, he was a robber baron who used his political clout to enhance his business. Subsequently elected to the Senate, he indulged in buying wineries and breeding horses at his three ranches.
Jane Stanford had been 39 when she gave birth to the couple’s only child, Leland Stanford Jr. Devoted to the education of their precocious son, his parents underwrote his every whim and took him to Europe frequently. When he died in Florence, Italy, of typhoid fever at 15, his devastated father vowed to create a university in his honor on their Palo Alto estate.
The founding documents gave the Stanfords full authority in operating the university. Jane insisted the school be coeducational, an unusual and progressive stance. After several venerated scholars turned down the presidency, the couple hired Jordan, an Indiana professor who had made is name in ichthyology (the study of fish) and was also a strong believer in eugenics. When Leland Stanford died in 1893, his widow had to untangle his complicated finances. (The federal government sued the estate for $15 million and froze its assets but eventually lost the court case.) She kept the university afloat during this period using her own money while trying to shape its identity.
For all her accomplishments, in White’s portrayal Jane Stanford is a remarkably unpleasant woman, vicious to family members and staff, controlling and devious, easily swayed by advice she thought her late husband and son were trying to share. “Ghosts ran the university,” White writes. Wielding her money as a cudgel, she fired faculty members whose opinions she disliked and tried to inject religion into the curriculum. Although she is the story’s central character, White does not make much effort to understand Stanford’s behavior, the dynamics of her marriage or what drove her cruelty. Had she been embittered by loss? After decades in which she was unable to wield any power of her own, was she now reveling in her ability to bend others to her will? Did the sexism of her era color how contemporaries characterized the actions of a woman defying the wishes of patronizing men?
By the time White details all the people she wronged by word or deed, the list of potential suspects for her murder is long even by Agatha Christie standards. Jane Stanford had made it known, for starters, that she planned to fire President Jordan upon her return from Hawaii — but she never made it home. Many people had motive; but means and opportunity narrow the field significantly.
There’s pleasure in watching an author revel in his material. White has taken a deep dive into the archives, and he gleefully analyzes the conflicting testimony, newspaper accounts, Stanford documents, old city directories and memoirs written by the key players. As he observes, “Memoirs may seem to be built on the accumulation of actions, relationships, thoughts and words over the course of a life, but they are really built from the elimination of everything that would complicate, or falsify, the morals and meanings the author wishes to impart.”
In the last chapter, White reviews the evidence a final time and, in conjunction with his crime-fiction-writer brother, Stephen, points a finger at the likely culprit. The conclusion is anticlimactic given that the signs have been pointing in this direction all along — although White does come up with the name of a plausible accomplice. Despite the catchy title, solving the murder isn’t really the point of this book. Instead, it’s an intriguing look at the sordid Gilded Age history of a respected and storied academic institution.
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