Who Killed Jane Stanford?
Stanford University’s Founder Poisoned in Hawaii
Stanford University defines 21st century American entrepreneurialism and frontier thinking. But who would of thought the institution's origin story involved a mourning widow who was murdered after the second attempt? Jane Stanford had fled to Hawaii after the first poisoning scare, but was not able to survive the second. Instead of a full investigation, the case was mysteriously covered up and the culprit walked free. Was it one person or a conspiracy? And was the killer from her inner circle? A new book by Stanford history professor Richard White pieces together archive materials in a page-turning tale of Gilded Age San Francisco and reveals why many might have been quite relieved to see Jane go off to another world.
"In 1885, Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university's lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked.
Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford's murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city's machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White's search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford's imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means." - From Publisher
