July 24, 2023 • 45 mins
In 1905, many people seemed to have a reason to kill one of the richest women in America and Stanford University’s co-founder, Jane Stanford. Author and Stanford Professor Dr. Richard White tells us about the wealthy eccentric’s troubled legacy and mysterious death.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
James Stanford, she embarrasses the university a great deal because
the university is trying to be a respectable new research university,
and at the same time, the founder of the university
and the person for all practical purposes in charge of
his finances is consulting with mediums, as she attracted a
lot of mediums.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:55):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Stanford University's co founder, Jane Stanford, was
(01:16):
a mess. Her husband and beloved son were dead. Stanford's
officials despised her Jane abused her servants, and then she
was murdered. Author and Stanford professor doctor Richard White tells
us about the wealthy eccentric's troubled legacy and her mysterious death.
(01:37):
One review that just popped out at me said simply
that Jane Stanford was a mess. And that seems like
a really apt way to start this conversation. As the
person that we're talking about, let's start from her beginning
wherever you think it makes senses, At her as a child,
how she grew up.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
She grew up in upstate New York. She was not
boy wealthy, She's from middle class circumstances. She marries Leland
Stanford Senior, and Leland Stafford Senior is at the time
a lawyer. He comes to California. He's in the gold Rush.
He's not successful in the gold Rush. He's not successful
at much of anything until he falls in with Colline P.
(02:18):
Huntington and Collins P. Huntington brings Leland Stanford along with
him and for shopkeepers become the associates. What they do
is they have no money, so they're operating on borrowed money.
I mean many ways, it's a silicon Valley store. These
guys don't have the money, but they are very good
at getting subsidies, and they are very good at getting
(02:38):
investors initially, and so more and more often. This is
a paper enterprise that put very little money into it,
but on paper it becomes worth more and more. It's
the Central Pacific Railroad, so it's always on the edge
of breaking up and falling apart, but on paper it's
always worth a lot of money. The goal is is
(02:58):
somebody else who could collapse will be left holding the bag,
not these guys. So they begin to get a paper fortune,
but it is a paper Fortune's the kind of fortunes
that we've seen all the time. Now they're very rich
one day, the next day the whole thing can collapse
on them.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So Leland and Jane meet. What was their dynamic as
a couple when they first got together, maybe even before
they had Leland junior.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Leland is in California by himself for three years, so
there's a three year separation in their marriage. Then Jane
comes out. Their dynamic is, you know, they're upstate New York,
lower middle class Protestants. They are not exciting people, but
they are ambitious. Jane herself will become more and more
of a feminist. But these people are full of contradictions.
(03:44):
Jane Stanford is a feminist who wants women in the university,
and by the end of her life she's trying to
purge women from the university. Leland Stanford thinks of himself
as a self made man, but all his money comes
from being able to get loans from the federal government
and be able to achieat stockholders. So everything you look
(04:04):
at with them, the way they make their money, their ideals,
they're full of contradictions, which makes them really quite interesting
people in some ways. So by this time they're living
in a mansion in knob Hill, that's where Leland Stanford
Junior grows up. They have another house in Palo Alto.
These are Gilded Age mansions, the kind of things that
you'd see in New York City, the kinds of things
(04:24):
you'd see in Rhode Island. They are ostentatious in their
displays of wealth. They are clearly among the richest people
in San Francisco, and they are also increasingly widely hated.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Why just because of the amount of money that they're
spreading around. Because this is what late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
At this point, it's the late eighteen hundreds is they're
hated largely because their wealth is seen as coming into
the expensive California's growth that they see as being exploit
In California, Leland is seen as a monopolist along with
his associates, and what's good for Leland Stanford is not
necessarily good for California. So he becomes more and more
(05:02):
a figure who is scorned, particularly by working class people.
But at the same time he corrupts San Francisco politics
and he corrupts California politics. He becomes a political boss,
he becomes governor of California, so he's somebody who shows
the power of money to corrupt.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
So late eighteen hundreds is his main enterprise, the Central
Pacific Railroad. At this point he is the.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
President of the Southern Pacific. He's a figurehead. And the
same row the Southern Pacific gones to Central Pacific. So
all of this becomes quite complicated because college be Huntington,
who lives in New York, who's the money man, is
the real figure behind it, but the figurehead is Leland Stamford,
and Leland Stafford lives in California, lives in San Francisco,
lives in the knob Hill Mansion.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So in the late eighteen hundreds, when Jane and Leland
Junior and Leland Senior in knob Hill, what is Jane doing?
Is she a household manager or is she doing anything
that's altruistic volunteering.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Jane Stamford is busy being rich.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Was spending money.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Okay, she spends a lot of money, and she dotes
on her son, and they treat their son more as
a companion than as a child. James Stamford will take
him to Europe. Jane Stanford during this time, it's you know,
it's hard to see. I don't want to psychoanalyze somebody
who I haven't ever known personally, and there's no record
of what she was like. But I do know at
this period she comes almost immobile. She seems like she
(06:28):
would be depressed. She seems to be confined in a
narrow or a narrower life. And even if she becomes
richer and richer, and much of her life is going
to be live vicariously through her son, she has huge
ambitions through her son. He's a precocious child, he's a
spoiled child, and he quite literally will get anything that
he wants. So to understand Jane Stamford, you have to
(06:51):
understand her devotion to Leland Stamford Junior, and that's what's
going to make her so vulnerable when he dies. An
only child, but more than just an only child, this
is a child she has invested her whole life in.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
When does he die and how does he die? At
age fourteen, he.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Dies of typhoid in the early eighteen eighties in Florence.
He dies with his parents. His father is sitting by
the bedside and they both have a nervous breakdown. Jane
is going to have a nervous breakdown. Then Leland is
going to have a nervous breakdown. And this is where
it gets a little creepy. They can't bear to bury him.
They carry his body with him first to Paris, then
to New York City, then all the way across the country.
(07:29):
So there's going to be these long trips with the
dead Leland Junior accompanying the parents on this long funeral
trip which will end up back at Palo Alto on
the Palo Alto estate with the memorial service in San Francisco,
so it's a long, very very sad and in some
ways a little creepy story even for the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
So Leland Junior has died in the early eighteen eighties,
and now Leland Senior is sick.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
He's sick, he's a sick and they go back to Europe.
They go back even around the places where they've been
with Leland Junior. Now they go back on a trip
where they visit places they'd known when he was alive.
And meanwhile Leland Senior is getting sicker and sicker the
whole time. And Leland Senior had a dream about Leland
Junior who had told him to found a university so
(08:20):
that the children of California to get the same advantages
that he'd had. And around this they begin to decide
that they're going to found Stanford University. At the same time,
when they're back in the United States, Ulysses S. Grant,
who's now an ex president, and his wife, they're both spiritualists.
They're consulting spiritualists in New York. The line between spiritualism
(08:42):
and the Protestant ministry can be a thin one. They're
considering ministers, and so while they're doing all of these
things before Leland's death. They're preparing to found the university,
and Leland Senior will set this in motion. But he's
the university has only been open about a year. When
he will die.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Let me ask a very naive question. He's still rich
on paper, right, How are we founding a university when
there's this sort of house of cards where he has
no actual money to build an institution, higher faculty. How
was that even possible?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You borrow it?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Nope, Welcome to the early nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Essentially, what Leland Stanford did was he took three estates
and donated them to the university. One of them is
going to be the estate in which it's founded. The
problem with those estates is they have absolutely no income.
As one of the early trustees said, all that he
gave us was the taxes. So they owe taxes on
these things, but they're not producing income to produce the buildings.
(09:42):
He goes into what's a slush fund from the Pacific
Improvement Company, which is a slush fund of the associates
where they drain money out of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
and he borrows from that and he uses that borrowed
money to begin setting up the buildings and to build
the faculty. So when David starred Jordan the first present
and comes, he thinks he's getting this huge fortune. And
(10:03):
he arrives there and he finds out he has barred
money to pay the faculty. He has a lot of
land which cannot be sold in which really is draining
out taxes. He has a giant horse farm which raised
the successful trotting horses, but which doesn't make a lot
of money. But he has the promise that at a
certain point the entire Stanford fortune will be left to
(10:24):
the university. So Stanford University is founded on promises.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
A money pit. That's what it sounds like. It sounds
like a big money pit.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
That's a good enough analogy.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Okay, So you are contending that Leland has done all
of this essentially on his deathbed, based on a dream.
I know that's what started it. But did he anticipate
this being a legacy or this was really connected to
his son more than anything both.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's connected with his son. But as Charles Elliott, the
president of Harvard says, and he's not alone in saying this,
that he considered Stanford University the personal monument for an
ill gotten fortune. It's a way of using money, essentially,
it's been stolen to commemorate the family. It's not that
dissimilar to a lot of donations to a lot of
(11:12):
institutions which you don't want to look really closely at
where this money came from. And what is setting up
is a personal monument in Stanford University in his early
days is a personal monument to the Stanford family. All
the big buildings, many of which came down in the earthquake,
were monuments to the Stanfords.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So they're spending their time between San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Do they move down there permanently before he dies down
to where Stanford is.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
They still alternate between both houses. After Leland dies, Jane
will travel more and more because both houses remind her
too much of her dead husband and her dead son.
But at the same time she wants to get her
dead husband and her dead son to communicate with them,
so they will spend more time at the Palo altoa
state founding the university. But they still have this immense mansion.
(11:59):
It looks like a all village up on knob Hill.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Does Jane really feel strongly about higher education. This just
seems so contradictory to her personality. Was she just going
along with Leland or they were in united fronts with
all of this. They felt like they were going to
leave behind something good.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They're a united front. They believe in education of a
certain kind. I mean, Jane Stanford despises elite education. She
despises Harvard, Yale, Princeton, in part because they tried to
hire presidents of these places, Cornell to be head of
Stamford and they'd failed to do it. They say, this
is going to be a different kind of university. There's
gonna be a hands on university. This is going to
(12:41):
be a university for the betterment of humankind. It's going
to be a university whi's going to teach practical skills
and that's where their fortune is going to go. And
she sort of believes in this, but if she gets
more and more interested in spiritualism, she begins and this
is after her husband's death, shifts the focus of the university,
thinking that they really should be the education of the soul.
(13:03):
What they believe is the soul is eternal and it's
educated even after your death. So when you're getting soul education,
it begins when you're a human, but after you die,
your soul will continue to grow, and so the education
should just be a small part of what's going to
be a long standing education. And she just says that
the faculty doesn't seem to recognize the importance of educating
(13:27):
the soul. And she is right. The faculty does not
recognize the importance of educating the soul. They think they're
just giving a normal education for humanity sciences and social sciences.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So Leland dies in what year? When does he die?
And it's just of poor health in general, pneumonia or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Eighteen ninety three, and it's going to be this heart
will give out, that a lot of things are giving out.
He has gout. I mean, he's a very sick man.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay. So if I were Jane and my husband, who
was incredibly wealthy and the only source of income in
the family, had done I'm not sure I would be
that enthusiastic about then turning over more money that could
be limited to a university. What is her thinking here?
Is she not panicked or is there just so much
money left behind that it's okay?
Speaker 2 (14:13):
She does not know at this stage what the fortune
consists of. What she knows is that she owns a
one quarter share in one of the most powerful corporations
in America, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and that he is
also siphoned off and has a lot of other money.
But she has no knowledge of the details of this.
She is somebody who on paper, she can look at
(14:34):
it and say, oh, Southern Pacific stock, My share of
that is going to be forty million dollars, which is
a huge amount of money at the time, But it's
only forty million dollars if you can sell it for
forty million dollars. And in fact that it's not sure
at all what that stock is going to be worth.
And after his death there's going to be the Panic
of eighteen ninety six, the depression of eighteen ninety six,
(14:55):
and the Southern Pacific Railroad nearly goes bankrupt. It appears
that not only is Stanford University going to have to
close down, but the Jane Stanford is going to lose
her entire fortune. And on top of that, the federal
government says, wait a minute, a lot of this money
in the Southern Pacific Railroad came from our subsidies to
the Central Pacific Railroad, which was alone. You're supposed to
pay back. You have not paid it back. We want
(15:17):
our money back, so they sue for that money. So
she suddenly realized that she thought she was an immensely
rich woman, but in eighteen ninety six she realizes she
might be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Now Huntington, who was his business partner before he died, right, right,
does he come into play at all? Is he coming
back into her life now that her husband's gone.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yes, because Huntington is panicked that, in fact, the Southern
Pacific is going to go under. Yeah, you will pay
Jane a backhanded compliment. He says that she is smarter
and manages money better than her husband, but he's not
so little of her husband. It's hard to say what
that actually means. Gosh, And what he's trying to do
is bully or into seating control of the Southern Pacific
to him, and he wants to afford university shut down.
(16:01):
He says, it's simply going to be a drain on
the company's assets. We need every dollar we can get
to keep this from going under. You have no idea,
how how bad the situation we're in. So he really
tries to bully Jane Stamford take control of the board
of the Southern Pacific hansel out her vote, stop her
from draining any more money out of it. So it
turns into a battle between her and Collins P. Huntington,
(16:24):
and she turns out to be fairly shrewd, pretty tough,
and does not give in to him. But it still
looks in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven as if
they're both going to go down together. They are just
passengers on a sinking ship.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Tell me about the panic of eighteen ninety six, just
so that we can have some context. Is this a
Wall Street panic or what ends up happening?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
It's the kind of panic which afflicts the United States
repeatedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Essentially,
what happens is there's boom periods where people borrow a
lot of money, invest a lot of money. Values, paper
values shoot up, and then there's going to be a
point where it reaches the top, and suddenly people start
reneging on loans. And once this goes, you begin to
(17:07):
get bank runs. Banks start collapsing, they start calling in
their loans. As everybody begins calling in their loans, this
whole paper pyramid begins to collapse, and that people find
that their assets are very often not going to be
anything they can make liquid, and so they begin to
go bankrupt too. That's the kind of panic you get.
And in eighteen ninety six, until the Great Depression was
(17:29):
the worst one the United States has ever seen. It
throws the United States into a deep recession, a deep depression,
and railroads are at the head of it. The major things.
Railroads tend to overinvest, over expand, and then when the
traffic begins to go down, they can't pay back their
loans because they're all operating on borrowed money, and they
begin to go under. And that's what's happening in eighteen
(17:50):
ninety six.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Okay, So in eighteen ninety six, does Jane's Stanford get
over this hump? How does she fare ultimately from the panic?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Stanford University and Jane Stanford will have a hard few years.
And what they will do is this is the legend
of Stanford University. Jane Stanford os her jewels, uses the
personal allowance she's allowed by the bankruptcy courts to pay
the faculty. The faculty takes deep cuts. A lot of
people are urging her to shut the university down. She
(18:21):
reviewses to do so, and when she comes out of it,
the way she comes out of it is the depression
will begin to end, and then other people will buy
the Southern Pacific Railroad to make even larger railroads out
of it. And the suddenly the stock market money she
had becomes real money. She can cash it in she
(18:42):
gets out. And so by the early nineteen hundreds, Jane
Stanford finds this paper wealth she's made it through it's
now turned into real liquid wealth which she either invests elsewhere,
keeps the Southern Pacific bonds, or has in cash, and
so now it is liquid. Stanford University has real money
to get from Jane Stanford.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So by nineteen oh five, Stanford is established as a university,
a well thought of university on the same echelon as
a Harvard or a Yale or no.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
No, it's a university which is involved in the Edward
Ross affair, which is one of the great free speech
academic freedom scandals of the twentieth century, where Jane Stanford
tries to fire a professor for his political views, and
does fire a professor for his political views. And he
is a formidable professor who makes this a national scandal
that James Stamford is being seen as more and more erratic,
(19:36):
somebody who wants to turn the university into a college
devoted to teaching the spiritualist truths. Jane Stanford, who is
going to convert to Catholicism and give the whole university
over to the Jesuits. Jane Stamford, who has been a
pioneer and admitting women into Stanford, now wants to get
rid of all the women in Stanford because they're corrupting
what she calls her boys. Stanford University becomes a running
(19:59):
joke much of academia by the early twentieth century. A
rich running joke, but at running joke.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Well, let's talk about the turn from what you said.
She had some feminist ideals at first, and then what changed.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
The best explanation I can give is James Stanford begins
to have a sexual panic in the early twentieth century.
I mean quite literally sex just she sees sex everywhere.
She sees young women flirting with male students, young female students,
flirting with male students. She is alarmed by any hint
(20:32):
of sex taking place on campus. She thinks that decorum
is breaking down. She thinks Victorian's standards are breaking down.
She thinks there's a breakdown of morality, and that's why
she wants women out. She wants people on horseback, armed
guards on horseback to be riding around campus monitoring the
contact between male and female students. She wants to make
(20:55):
them age at which women's students will be admitted much
higher than male students, so that you will have seven
teen year old boys and twenty one year old women.
She just wants reform after reform after reform, and that's
the kind of thing which alarms David Starr Jordan. He
begins to see that if these reforms go through, the
university is not going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
So as we approach nineteen oh five, when something very
bad happens to Jane Stanford, is there a lead up
to all of this? Is there some sort of like
a trigger or tensions or something that shifts in her
world that has her ending up dead.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
She begins to see David star Jordan's opposition to her
reforms and David Star Jordan's refusal to take the blame
or failure to take the blame for the firing of
Ross and the Ross scandal, there's a threat to her,
so she's desired to fire David star Jordan, and Stanford
is such a small place it's impossible to believe that
(21:53):
David Star Jordan doesn't need so by December, the gossip
is on the street that David Star Jordan is going
to be picked out at the Board of Trustees meetings
early in nineteen oh five. So first thing that happens
is that, and the second thing that happens is around
her relationship with her servants, who are pretty much her
closest companions by this time, along with her family. And
(22:18):
let's say her servants have plenty of reason to hate
her too, So tensions are building in both the mansion
and the downstairs with the servants, and tensions are building
with the university, where David Starr Jordan thinks he is
going to lose his job, a job he desperately wants
to keep. But he also thinks if he goes, the
university is going to go with him, at least the university,
(22:39):
as he knows.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Well. We have a near miss and then a direct
hit right with Jane Stanford. Let's talk about the near
miss first. What are the circumstances around that.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
The near miss is that James Stamford is doing what
she often did. She's going to bed early on a
Saturday night. She's planning the next morning to go to
Palo Alto to attend church services at the Memorial Church.
And she goes to bed early, and she always has
a bottle of Poland Spring bottled water. And what she
does is take the water and she taste funny. She's
(23:25):
going to bed and it tastes funny, and she's a
maid Elizabeth Richmond in the next room, and she spits
it out. She says it tastes bitter, and brings Elizabeth
Richmond in, and Elizabeth Richmond dips her finger in and says, yes,
it does taste funny. And Jane Stamford then begins to vomit.
She sticks her finger down her throat and is throwing
up in a portable sink, and she's Elizabeth Richmond bring
(23:47):
down her companion and her secretary of Bertha Berner, who's
sleeping upstairs. And Bertha Burner also takes a taste of it,
and it's very very bitter, and they hold it up
to the light and when they hold it up to
the light they see things floating in it. And the
outcome of this is going to be that Jans Stamford
Purges herself is very, very sick. But they send the
(24:07):
bottle out to a chemist at the bottom of knob
Hill Pharmacy to have it tested, and the pharmacy will
then send it out to somebody else, to another chemist
to have it tested. So they think there's been something
put in the water, and something has been put in
the water, but they don't know what it is, and
so for that period they will go about their normal tests.
(24:28):
James Stanford will set up having a dinner. There's going
to be a dinner coming in. It's the height of
the social season. So for a week she has tasted
bitter water. Something has happened, she doesn't know what it is,
and her life goes forward.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
You know, if I'm a detective, I'm thinking who has
access to the Poland springs? How many servants are we
talking about?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
First of all, we're talking about six or seven servants.
Some of them have easier access than others. I mean
Bert the Berner is access to her bedroom. Elizabeth Richmond
has asked us to her bedroom. Ah Wing, who's the
chief of the Chinese servan, says access to her bedroom.
And there are other servants, other maids and other subordinate
cooks who might be able to get in, but of
(25:08):
less access than these people. So they're the major people
who have access to the bedroom. But the problem is
that somebody might have put the poison in the bottles
someplace else, that might have put it in the kitchen
and brought it in right, So at this point they
don't have it. But at this point, nobody even knows
it's poison. They're not going to know it's poison until
it comes back from the chemists. And the chemist report
is very very clear, and the chemist report says there
(25:28):
is Stryc nine in the water, and it's not just
stryc nine, it's rat poison. You know that that indicates
to me because whatever was doing this, it's not that
skilled that poisoning people. You just rat poisoning it.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Well, we talk about that a lot on my other
show with Buried Bones with pol Holes. We talk about
that you have to be skilled as a poisoner because
If you don't put in enough, you don't kill the person.
If you put in too much, it's detectable, and it's
a passive way to murder someone. But boy, you really
have to know what you're doing. So it sounds like
this person wants to try again. Whoever the suspect is
(26:02):
how much time elapses before we find out more information.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Once they find out the poisons in it, they hire detectives,
but the private detectives are going to be Jules Collindon,
and his job is to make sure that nobody finds
out about the poisoning and also to find out who
put the poison in. So for the first three or
four weeks there is an investigation, but it's not by
the police. Nothing's reported to the police. It's going to
be by a private detective agency. And their job is
(26:28):
both to discover the poisoner and to keep this out
of the papers. And they do keep it out of
the papers for three weeks, but then they make a
mistake of antagonizing Elizabeth Richmond, who's friends with an ex butler,
Alfred Beverly, And what they're going to do is go
to the papers at the end of January. They're afraid
that they are going to be set up. And so
Albert Beverly, who's a butler who had left Jane Stamford's
(26:52):
service that summer, he realizes that he can be implicated
because he has been stealing from Jane's. He wants to
keep that out of the papers. He's friends with Elizabeth Richmond.
He thinks she's being unjustly accused, and he thinks that
if his friendship with her is going to get him implicated.
So they don't want this going on. They think they're
(27:13):
safer spilling it to the papers and telling their side
of the story.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So are the papers on their side? When they do
reveal all of this? How do they frame it?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
They frame it as the service did it? I mean?
This actually does enter into an Agatha Christie plot the
first Agatha Christie novel. The plot is very much like
the Poisoning of Jane Stamford. Wow. But the problem I
found is once the servants go to the papers, they're
all lying. Everybody's lying. The detectives are lying. Jane Stamford
when they doesn't say much, what she says is lies.
All the servants are lying. So my first problem in
(27:42):
looking at all this is everybody's lying.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yeah, it's hard when you have unreliable sources. It so
what does Jane say? Regardless of if it's a lie
or not, she has to be scared.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
She's terrified, but she doesn't say that she's terrified. She
just says that she is the flu, which she catches
the flues. She goes down to San Jose, she stays there,
but by the time she comes back up to San Francisco,
she is ready to leave the country. She is afraid.
That's afraid to go back into the house. She's afraid
whoever did it is going to try again. And she's
(28:15):
decided to go to Asia. And she's writing letters since
she writes letters to Charles Brothers, who's a confidant, who's
the youngest of the trustees, have been a Stanford undergraduate.
And again this stuff gets really creepy because he looks
exactly like her dead son, which is why she trusts them.
So she writes them a letter which won't be disclosed
(28:35):
until nineteen thirty five, which says, you know why I'm
going I have no idea why people would be trying
to kill me. This is not the way I expected
to end my life. I have to get out of here.
I have to leave because I'm afraid that, in fact,
an attempt is going to be made again, and I
have no way of protecting myself. So she clearly is terrified.
(28:55):
When she's in the hotel, she doesn't register under her
own name, she won't stay in the mansion, and she
brings Bertha Berner, her private secretary, with her to taste
dollar water and to taste dollar food.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Is she paying birth a lot of money? I'm trying
to think of suspects for being a medium, and I
know she's her companion.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Also, they have a tricky relationship because the sexual panic
that goes to the undergraduate women goes to Bertha Burner.
Bertha Berner is constantly quitting her job with Jane Stamford,
very often because Jane Stamford is interfering in Bertha Berner's
personal life. Bertha Berner will leave, go out, but she's
the only person apparently who can manage Jane Stamford, and
(29:35):
so the Stamford family, the Lathrop family, her brother, pay
Bertha to come back again and be a traveling companion.
But Bertha meanwhile has a mother who is very sick
and she is also having an affair with Albert.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Beverly, the former butler, right, former.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Butler, and the former butler is embezzling money and so
is Bertha Berners. Wow, so she is in bezzling money. Also,
Jane Stanford is putting increasing pressure on Bertha Berner to
travel with her on this trip to Hawaii, a trip
to Japan, and another trip she had planned for Europe,
even though her Bertha Berner's own mother is sick, is dying,
(30:15):
and she even needs to stay with her mother. So
Jane Stanford is essentially telling Bertha Berner choose do you
come with me or do you stay with your dying mother.
So she's putting Bertha Berner in an impossible position.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Now, this also must distract her from what's happening at
Stanford University. Does this mean that David Starr Jordan is
kind of off the hook? I mean, has she forgotten
about him and you know what's happening at the school?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
No? No, she wants blood, she wants David star Jordan.
But what does help David star Jordan is since she's
gone and the board of Stanford's Trustees is sort of
like the modern US Senate they are really quite old.
It's hard to get them all together in one place,
and so David start Jordan gets some breathing room. Because
(31:01):
Jane Stanford is leaving the country. She won't be there
to convene the Board of Trustees, and many of the
boarder trustees are old and sick. We're traveling themselves. So
he begins to escape. But eventually there's going to be
a quorum, and Jane Stafford is making it very clear
to the Board of Trustees what she wants done when
she can get that quorum.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So then there is the incident that ends her life.
How many years elapse between the first attempt and the
one that works.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, not many years elapse, not many weeks elapse at
it's about six it's about six weeks later. Six weeks later,
she and Berta Berner and another maid are on a
ship go to Hawaii, check in at the Milana Hotel.
Jane Stafford tells people repeatedly that somebody tried to poison her.
That's why she has left San Francisco. She begins to
(31:51):
relax a little. She's a tourists. She travels with Bertha Berner.
She comes back after a day with her gone on
a picnic. She's tired to her room. She and Bertha
Berner have a light supper out on a veranda. Jane
Stamford wants to retire early, and Jane Stamford says, because
she said she'd eaten a lot of food at the
picnic lunch. She said she wants some by carbonate of soda,
(32:14):
which she hadn't been taking but now she takes them
by cardon Minnesota, and she asks Bertha Berner to give
her a by cardinate of soda and also a digestive pill,
the kind that contains a tiny amount of strychnine. They
actually use strychnine medicinally in the early twentieth century, and
Bertha Berner scoops it out. Jane Stafford says, why don't
you take some by carbonate too, since you were there,
and Berth Burner says, no, I don't need it, and
(32:36):
Jane Stamford says, well, I'll go to bed. I'll take
this before I retire, So she retires, goes to bed.
She wakes up the maid a little later because she
has trouble locking the door. The maid shows her how
to lock the door. She goes to bed, she falls asleep.
She apparently forgot to take the by carbon of soda.
She wakes up in a couple of hours, takes the
by gardener of Minnesota, and at that point she begins
(32:57):
to feel that she's been poisoned. Because she has been poisoned,
staggers to the door. She alerts the guy next door.
She wakes up Bertha Burner in the maid that bring
down a doctor or resident doctor in the hotel who
eventually will call for a stomach pump. Jane Stanford is
telling people, I have been poisoned. Berth to tell them
what happened in San Francisco, and Bertha Burner says, yes,
She's been poisoned in San Francisco. The doctor meanwhile, first
(33:19):
he's skeptical, but then it begins to look an awful
lot like STRYC nine poisoning. Jane Stafford's having the usual
symptoms of strictine poisoning. She's having trouble opening her jaws,
she's having spasms. One of the things strictin poisoning does
is make you aware that you are really dying. And
Jane Stanford, who is a spiritualist to imagine death, was
not a big deal for spiritualist, it was a passing over.
(33:42):
You just gently pass over into a second life. And
Jane Stanford at that point dumps all of the illusions
of dying of stryctine poisoning is a gentle passing over.
She says that her last words are, this is a
terrible death to die, and she dies. She has been
poisoned by strych nine, but this time it is not
rat poison. It is pure strict nine, which is not
(34:03):
easy to obtain, and it has been put in her
bicarbonate of soda. The only person present at both poisonings
besides James Stamford is birtha birth.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
So is this not an open and shut case.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
No, it's.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
I don't believe you. How is that possible?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Because the problem is there's the bicarbonate of soda problem.
She had not taken any bicarbonate of soda during the
whole Hawaiian voyage. The bicarbinate of soda had been packed
away in her truck and then unpacked in Hawaii, So
one possibility, it's pretty far fetched. Does somebody put the
poison in the bicarbonate of soda before it left San Francisco?
(34:45):
Figuring whenever she uses it, this is going to take
place far away from us. Smart there's still the potential
that she had been poisoned in San Francisco, but it
only died in Hawaii.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
And of course there's no way to know how long
this had been present in the soda or how old
it was for them to know whether or not this
was something that had been done a week earlier or
a couple of weeks earlier.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Well, there's one thing that turns out. It turns out
the detectives get to work, and the detectives get to
work trying to find out who had purchased by carbonate
of soda, and Bertha Bernard denies she knew anything about
by carbonate of soda, anything about Strych nine. Bertha Berner says,
we always said by carbonate of soda in San Francisco.
I presume this is by carbon of soda from San Francisco.
(35:30):
And then it turns out that just before they departed,
Bertha Bernard stopped into a pharmacy in Palo Alto and
purchased brand new bicarbonate of soda. So the bicarbonate of
soda could very well have been the bicarbonate of Minnesota
that had been purchased by Bertha Berner and had been
been taken into a y. So that begins to undercut
the theory that the bicarbonate of soda was really going
(35:52):
to be coming from San Francisco. It doesn't eliminate it,
but it creates the question of why did Bertha Berner
lie about purchasing the bike carent of soda? So if
a carpenter of soda becomes yet another aspect of the mystery,
it's not necessarily open and shut. It still leaves where
the Stryck nine came from, because the hardest thing to
find is a Stryc nine five Pierce Stryc nine. You
(36:14):
have to sign for it in San Francisco pharmacies, and
there's ways you can get around that, but in fact
it is still a lot more difficult than getting rat
poison that's going to leave a trail. But they can
find nobody who has purchased Strycht nine at all associated
with the Stanford household, and the police and the detectives
are both on it by now.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
So they bring her back. There's the autopsy, Is there
a large service for her, Is there something at Stanford,
and does she leave them all the money or not.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
This is why things get dicey. This is where, OK, yeah,
it's dicey already. It gets diicier. Nothing is simple about
James Stanford's death. She's going to have the autopsy, so
they bring her back. They bring back her body, but
her body the way they do these autopsies in the
nine nineteenth centuries, they basically take out your insides, churn
them up and test them for stricma. So Jane Stanfford's
corpse comes back, but it's the corpse is largely been
(37:04):
emptied of internal organs, and she is going to be
buried at a huge ceremony at Stanford University. The student
body's there, the faculty is there. Five or six thousand
people show up. The march her to the grave to
the mausoleum where she is going to join her dead
husband and her dead son. And the people who are
marching behind her on the way to the grave are
(37:26):
all the people who were suspects in her death. They're
David Starr, Jordan, their Bertha Berner, and it's her service.
They're all coming behind her. So she goes to the
grave with the people who might actually have killed her
marching behind it. But Stanford University does get the money.
George Crothers, who has gone out of his way. He's
(37:47):
had to start early. He's had to change the California
constitution to do this. He has avoided the kind of
usual legal procedures to make sure the trust and wills
go through. He has rushed all of these things through.
He's taken personal responsibility. He's made sure that Jane Stamper's
brother gets enough money that it makes sure this is
going to be worth his while to cooperate in shutting
(38:10):
down any challenge to the wills. The wills will not
be challenged. They will be challenged later, but it's going
to be too late. The trust go through, Stanford University
gets the money. Meanwhile, the police department has decided not
to do further investigation.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
How is that possible?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
She didn't die strict nine presenting she died a natural death,
but David start Jordan had done. He had gone into Hawaii,
hired a doctor who had never seen the body, who
had never knew anything much.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
About the autopsy, and he said she had died of
eating too much food at the picnic lunch, which had
given her gas which are put pressure on her heart,
which had given her a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
There's no evidence of a heart attack in the actual autopsy.
I mean, essentially, too much gas kills her. David Starr
Jordan says he's going to bring this back, give it
to the San Francisco Police. He gets off the ship.
The San Francisco Police says there's going to be a
full investigation within twenty four hours. The San Francisco Police says,
good enough for us, and they say she died in
(39:13):
natural death. Wow, And the whole thing begins to disappear.
So some of the newspapers press on it. But the
next year there's going to be the San Francisco earthquake.
San Francisco's other things to worry about, and the case disappears.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Now are we thinking that David Starr Jordan did that
as a way to simplify things. Let's say he's not
the suspect here? Is it so that things could move
forward quickly with Stanford or what would be the motive
if he weren't the suspect.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
David Star Jordan doesn't want a murder, Yeah, because a
murder is going to bring out all of the things
that have gone into the funding that she's a spiritualist.
It's going to open up challenges to her wills and
her trust. He doesn't want that testimony. He certainly doesn't
want Bertha Burner, who knows everything, testifying. He also doesn't
want a suicide, which is the other theory at the time,
because the suicide means, in the legal theories at the
(39:59):
time that she wasn't mentally competent to have made the
trust in the will. So that's not yea and he
wants to save his job. So for David Starr Jordan,
the best of all possible worlds is a natural death,
and David Star Jordan gets a natural death.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Is Bertha Berner paid off?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
You know, Bertha Berner is there and I don't know
what conversations are. I can imagine Bertha Burner has already
testified that she was poisoned by strychnin. She reverses all
of her testimony when she talks to this other doctor.
If I were David star Jordan, you know what you
tell Bertha Berner is, you know things don't look that
(40:34):
good for you. You're both murders. You have a reason
for wanting to kill her and if there is no murder,
there can be no murderer. And that's pretty convinced thing.
So Bertha Berner reverses everything, she recants all her testimony,
but she's not under oath the second time, and the
police accept that.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
How much money are we talking about in the end
when Jane Stanford died? How much did the university get?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
The university? Again? It's always hard to say, because a
lot of it is going to be and what the
bonds are worth, how are you going to sell it?
But I would say the university probably gets, you know,
between the old trusts and the new things, fifteen to
twenty million dollars, maybe a little more than that.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
It's a lot of money, and it's enough to sustain them.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Obviously, it makes it the best in dowed university in
the country. I think briefly at the.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Time, what is Jane Stanford's whitewashed history at Stanford University?
If you take out the spiritualism, just as a founder
who was out of the goodness of her heart and
wanted higher education inspired by her son? Is that sort
of the narrative, that's.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The narrative Leland is engaged in too much sketchy financial stuff.
Leland is roundly denounced as robber baron. Jane seems to
be cleaner, and so they erase the spiritualism. That stuff
just goes away. They erase the murder. She is a
mother whose grief over her son leads her to donate
her entire fortune to literally the children of California. She's
(41:56):
this beloved figure who found Stanford Universe. She's a pioneering
feminist who brings in women into the university and assists
on their being there. They pretty much erased the complicated
Jane Stamford, and more than that, they erased the university's
long role in denying that there had ever been any
murder and that Jane Stamford herself would have probably closed
(42:21):
the university down. And they will continue to do this
into the nineteen nineties, early twentieth century. And now they
don't say that she's murdered. They just don't say anything
at all.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
So this is not on the new Freshman orientation tour.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
What do you think now, as I'm talking to Professor White,
the historian, Why does it matter what the narrative is
if you've got this incredible school, Because of this woman. Absolutely,
Why does it matter that this is not the true
narrative that has been put forward by the school for
all of these years.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
That's a very good question. It's what I thought about
a lot. And because to make sure that Stanford's money
went to something that would later turn into a major
research university, which doesn't happen for years later, first you
had to kill Jane Stanford. The real theme of this
book is the problem with philanthropy is philanthropists. If Jane
(43:16):
Stanford got what she wanted, Stanford University would not be
a major research university. Stanford University would be a peculiar
small college with some esoteric spiritualist beliefs that might have
faded in time. What seems to me, this bizarre case
in the early twentieth century, like bizarre cases everywhere, they
really open up something quite deeper, and they really open
(43:38):
up the problem with private fortunes, great wealth philanthropy getting
to dictate the directions of institutions, which sometimes go way
off track and end up as they do here with
the murder of Jane Stanford. And you know, we haven't
told the old story anyway, because there still is the
question of where the pure strychnine came from.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
And what do you think with out giving away too much?
Speaker 2 (44:02):
I have a suspicion and I think the police knew
who killed Janmes Stafford, and the police decided that that
person would disappear and that aspect of the case would
be dropped. At first, I thought the San Francisco police
were incredibly corrupt and incredibly incompetent. Now I just think
they were incredibly corrupt.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis mme Rosi. Our
associate producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
(44:53):
Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More and if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at tenfoldmore wicked dot Com. We'll also take your
(45:14):
suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
James Stanford, she embarrasses the university a great deal because
the university is trying to be a respectable new research university,
and at the same time, the founder of the university
and the person for all practical purposes in charge of
his finances is consulting with mediums, as she attracted a
lot of mediums.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:55):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Stanford University's co founder, Jane Stanford, was
(01:16):
a mess. Her husband and beloved son were dead. Stanford's
officials despised her Jane abused her servants, and then she
was murdered. Author and Stanford professor doctor Richard White tells
us about the wealthy eccentric's troubled legacy and her mysterious death.
(01:37):
One review that just popped out at me said simply
that Jane Stanford was a mess. And that seems like
a really apt way to start this conversation. As the
person that we're talking about, let's start from her beginning
wherever you think it makes senses, At her as a child,
how she grew up.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
She grew up in upstate New York. She was not
boy wealthy, She's from middle class circumstances. She marries Leland
Stanford Senior, and Leland Stafford Senior is at the time
a lawyer. He comes to California. He's in the gold Rush.
He's not successful in the gold Rush. He's not successful
at much of anything until he falls in with Colline P.
(02:18):
Huntington and Collins P. Huntington brings Leland Stanford along with
him and for shopkeepers become the associates. What they do
is they have no money, so they're operating on borrowed money.
I mean many ways, it's a silicon Valley store. These
guys don't have the money, but they are very good
at getting subsidies, and they are very good at getting
(02:38):
investors initially, and so more and more often. This is
a paper enterprise that put very little money into it,
but on paper it becomes worth more and more. It's
the Central Pacific Railroad, so it's always on the edge
of breaking up and falling apart, but on paper it's
always worth a lot of money. The goal is is
(02:58):
somebody else who could collapse will be left holding the bag,
not these guys. So they begin to get a paper fortune,
but it is a paper Fortune's the kind of fortunes
that we've seen all the time. Now they're very rich
one day, the next day the whole thing can collapse
on them.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So Leland and Jane meet. What was their dynamic as
a couple when they first got together, maybe even before
they had Leland junior.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Leland is in California by himself for three years, so
there's a three year separation in their marriage. Then Jane
comes out. Their dynamic is, you know, they're upstate New York,
lower middle class Protestants. They are not exciting people, but
they are ambitious. Jane herself will become more and more
of a feminist. But these people are full of contradictions.
(03:44):
Jane Stanford is a feminist who wants women in the university,
and by the end of her life she's trying to
purge women from the university. Leland Stanford thinks of himself
as a self made man, but all his money comes
from being able to get loans from the federal government
and be able to achieat stockholders. So everything you look
(04:04):
at with them, the way they make their money, their ideals,
they're full of contradictions, which makes them really quite interesting
people in some ways. So by this time they're living
in a mansion in knob Hill, that's where Leland Stanford
Junior grows up. They have another house in Palo Alto.
These are Gilded Age mansions, the kind of things that
you'd see in New York City, the kinds of things
(04:24):
you'd see in Rhode Island. They are ostentatious in their
displays of wealth. They are clearly among the richest people
in San Francisco, and they are also increasingly widely hated.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Why just because of the amount of money that they're
spreading around. Because this is what late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
At this point, it's the late eighteen hundreds is they're
hated largely because their wealth is seen as coming into
the expensive California's growth that they see as being exploit
In California, Leland is seen as a monopolist along with
his associates, and what's good for Leland Stanford is not
necessarily good for California. So he becomes more and more
(05:02):
a figure who is scorned, particularly by working class people.
But at the same time he corrupts San Francisco politics
and he corrupts California politics. He becomes a political boss,
he becomes governor of California, so he's somebody who shows
the power of money to corrupt.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
So late eighteen hundreds is his main enterprise, the Central
Pacific Railroad. At this point he is the.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
President of the Southern Pacific. He's a figurehead. And the
same row the Southern Pacific gones to Central Pacific. So
all of this becomes quite complicated because college be Huntington,
who lives in New York, who's the money man, is
the real figure behind it, but the figurehead is Leland Stamford,
and Leland Stafford lives in California, lives in San Francisco,
lives in the knob Hill Mansion.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So in the late eighteen hundreds, when Jane and Leland
Junior and Leland Senior in knob Hill, what is Jane doing?
Is she a household manager or is she doing anything
that's altruistic volunteering.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Jane Stamford is busy being rich.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Was spending money.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Okay, she spends a lot of money, and she dotes
on her son, and they treat their son more as
a companion than as a child. James Stamford will take
him to Europe. Jane Stanford during this time, it's you know,
it's hard to see. I don't want to psychoanalyze somebody
who I haven't ever known personally, and there's no record
of what she was like. But I do know at
this period she comes almost immobile. She seems like she
(06:28):
would be depressed. She seems to be confined in a
narrow or a narrower life. And even if she becomes
richer and richer, and much of her life is going
to be live vicariously through her son, she has huge
ambitions through her son. He's a precocious child, he's a
spoiled child, and he quite literally will get anything that
he wants. So to understand Jane Stamford, you have to
(06:51):
understand her devotion to Leland Stamford Junior, and that's what's
going to make her so vulnerable when he dies. An
only child, but more than just an only child, this
is a child she has invested her whole life in.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
When does he die and how does he die? At
age fourteen, he.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Dies of typhoid in the early eighteen eighties in Florence.
He dies with his parents. His father is sitting by
the bedside and they both have a nervous breakdown. Jane
is going to have a nervous breakdown. Then Leland is
going to have a nervous breakdown. And this is where
it gets a little creepy. They can't bear to bury him.
They carry his body with him first to Paris, then
to New York City, then all the way across the country.
(07:29):
So there's going to be these long trips with the
dead Leland Junior accompanying the parents on this long funeral
trip which will end up back at Palo Alto on
the Palo Alto estate with the memorial service in San Francisco,
so it's a long, very very sad and in some
ways a little creepy story even for the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
So Leland Junior has died in the early eighteen eighties,
and now Leland Senior is sick.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
He's sick, he's a sick and they go back to Europe.
They go back even around the places where they've been
with Leland Junior. Now they go back on a trip
where they visit places they'd known when he was alive.
And meanwhile Leland Senior is getting sicker and sicker the
whole time. And Leland Senior had a dream about Leland
Junior who had told him to found a university so
(08:20):
that the children of California to get the same advantages
that he'd had. And around this they begin to decide
that they're going to found Stanford University. At the same time,
when they're back in the United States, Ulysses S. Grant,
who's now an ex president, and his wife, they're both spiritualists.
They're consulting spiritualists in New York. The line between spiritualism
(08:42):
and the Protestant ministry can be a thin one. They're
considering ministers, and so while they're doing all of these
things before Leland's death. They're preparing to found the university,
and Leland Senior will set this in motion. But he's
the university has only been open about a year. When
he will die.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Let me ask a very naive question. He's still rich
on paper, right, How are we founding a university when
there's this sort of house of cards where he has
no actual money to build an institution, higher faculty. How
was that even possible?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You borrow it?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Nope, Welcome to the early nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Essentially, what Leland Stanford did was he took three estates
and donated them to the university. One of them is
going to be the estate in which it's founded. The
problem with those estates is they have absolutely no income.
As one of the early trustees said, all that he
gave us was the taxes. So they owe taxes on
these things, but they're not producing income to produce the buildings.
(09:42):
He goes into what's a slush fund from the Pacific
Improvement Company, which is a slush fund of the associates
where they drain money out of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
and he borrows from that and he uses that borrowed
money to begin setting up the buildings and to build
the faculty. So when David starred Jordan the first present
and comes, he thinks he's getting this huge fortune. And
(10:03):
he arrives there and he finds out he has barred
money to pay the faculty. He has a lot of
land which cannot be sold in which really is draining
out taxes. He has a giant horse farm which raised
the successful trotting horses, but which doesn't make a lot
of money. But he has the promise that at a
certain point the entire Stanford fortune will be left to
(10:24):
the university. So Stanford University is founded on promises.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
A money pit. That's what it sounds like. It sounds
like a big money pit.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
That's a good enough analogy.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Okay, So you are contending that Leland has done all
of this essentially on his deathbed, based on a dream.
I know that's what started it. But did he anticipate
this being a legacy or this was really connected to
his son more than anything both.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's connected with his son. But as Charles Elliott, the
president of Harvard says, and he's not alone in saying this,
that he considered Stanford University the personal monument for an
ill gotten fortune. It's a way of using money, essentially,
it's been stolen to commemorate the family. It's not that
dissimilar to a lot of donations to a lot of
(11:12):
institutions which you don't want to look really closely at
where this money came from. And what is setting up
is a personal monument in Stanford University in his early
days is a personal monument to the Stanford family. All
the big buildings, many of which came down in the earthquake,
were monuments to the Stanfords.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So they're spending their time between San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Do they move down there permanently before he dies down
to where Stanford is.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
They still alternate between both houses. After Leland dies, Jane
will travel more and more because both houses remind her
too much of her dead husband and her dead son.
But at the same time she wants to get her
dead husband and her dead son to communicate with them,
so they will spend more time at the Palo altoa
state founding the university. But they still have this immense mansion.
(11:59):
It looks like a all village up on knob Hill.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Does Jane really feel strongly about higher education. This just
seems so contradictory to her personality. Was she just going
along with Leland or they were in united fronts with
all of this. They felt like they were going to
leave behind something good.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They're a united front. They believe in education of a
certain kind. I mean, Jane Stanford despises elite education. She
despises Harvard, Yale, Princeton, in part because they tried to
hire presidents of these places, Cornell to be head of
Stamford and they'd failed to do it. They say, this
is going to be a different kind of university. There's
gonna be a hands on university. This is going to
(12:41):
be a university for the betterment of humankind. It's going
to be a university whi's going to teach practical skills
and that's where their fortune is going to go. And
she sort of believes in this, but if she gets
more and more interested in spiritualism, she begins and this
is after her husband's death, shifts the focus of the university,
thinking that they really should be the education of the soul.
(13:03):
What they believe is the soul is eternal and it's
educated even after your death. So when you're getting soul education,
it begins when you're a human, but after you die,
your soul will continue to grow, and so the education
should just be a small part of what's going to
be a long standing education. And she just says that
the faculty doesn't seem to recognize the importance of educating
(13:27):
the soul. And she is right. The faculty does not
recognize the importance of educating the soul. They think they're
just giving a normal education for humanity sciences and social sciences.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So Leland dies in what year? When does he die?
And it's just of poor health in general, pneumonia or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Eighteen ninety three, and it's going to be this heart
will give out, that a lot of things are giving out.
He has gout. I mean, he's a very sick man.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay. So if I were Jane and my husband, who
was incredibly wealthy and the only source of income in
the family, had done I'm not sure I would be
that enthusiastic about then turning over more money that could
be limited to a university. What is her thinking here?
Is she not panicked or is there just so much
money left behind that it's okay?
Speaker 2 (14:13):
She does not know at this stage what the fortune
consists of. What she knows is that she owns a
one quarter share in one of the most powerful corporations
in America, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and that he is
also siphoned off and has a lot of other money.
But she has no knowledge of the details of this.
She is somebody who on paper, she can look at
(14:34):
it and say, oh, Southern Pacific stock, My share of
that is going to be forty million dollars, which is
a huge amount of money at the time, But it's
only forty million dollars if you can sell it for
forty million dollars. And in fact that it's not sure
at all what that stock is going to be worth.
And after his death there's going to be the Panic
of eighteen ninety six, the depression of eighteen ninety six,
(14:55):
and the Southern Pacific Railroad nearly goes bankrupt. It appears
that not only is Stanford University going to have to
close down, but the Jane Stanford is going to lose
her entire fortune. And on top of that, the federal
government says, wait a minute, a lot of this money
in the Southern Pacific Railroad came from our subsidies to
the Central Pacific Railroad, which was alone. You're supposed to
pay back. You have not paid it back. We want
(15:17):
our money back, so they sue for that money. So
she suddenly realized that she thought she was an immensely
rich woman, but in eighteen ninety six she realizes she
might be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Now Huntington, who was his business partner before he died, right, right,
does he come into play at all? Is he coming
back into her life now that her husband's gone.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yes, because Huntington is panicked that, in fact, the Southern
Pacific is going to go under. Yeah, you will pay
Jane a backhanded compliment. He says that she is smarter
and manages money better than her husband, but he's not
so little of her husband. It's hard to say what
that actually means. Gosh, And what he's trying to do
is bully or into seating control of the Southern Pacific
to him, and he wants to afford university shut down.
(16:01):
He says, it's simply going to be a drain on
the company's assets. We need every dollar we can get
to keep this from going under. You have no idea,
how how bad the situation we're in. So he really
tries to bully Jane Stamford take control of the board
of the Southern Pacific hansel out her vote, stop her
from draining any more money out of it. So it
turns into a battle between her and Collins P. Huntington,
(16:24):
and she turns out to be fairly shrewd, pretty tough,
and does not give in to him. But it still
looks in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven as if
they're both going to go down together. They are just
passengers on a sinking ship.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Tell me about the panic of eighteen ninety six, just
so that we can have some context. Is this a
Wall Street panic or what ends up happening?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
It's the kind of panic which afflicts the United States
repeatedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Essentially,
what happens is there's boom periods where people borrow a
lot of money, invest a lot of money. Values, paper
values shoot up, and then there's going to be a
point where it reaches the top, and suddenly people start
reneging on loans. And once this goes, you begin to
(17:07):
get bank runs. Banks start collapsing, they start calling in
their loans. As everybody begins calling in their loans, this
whole paper pyramid begins to collapse, and that people find
that their assets are very often not going to be
anything they can make liquid, and so they begin to
go bankrupt too. That's the kind of panic you get.
And in eighteen ninety six, until the Great Depression was
(17:29):
the worst one the United States has ever seen. It
throws the United States into a deep recession, a deep depression,
and railroads are at the head of it. The major things.
Railroads tend to overinvest, over expand, and then when the
traffic begins to go down, they can't pay back their
loans because they're all operating on borrowed money, and they
begin to go under. And that's what's happening in eighteen
(17:50):
ninety six.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Okay, So in eighteen ninety six, does Jane's Stanford get
over this hump? How does she fare ultimately from the panic?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Stanford University and Jane Stanford will have a hard few years.
And what they will do is this is the legend
of Stanford University. Jane Stanford os her jewels, uses the
personal allowance she's allowed by the bankruptcy courts to pay
the faculty. The faculty takes deep cuts. A lot of
people are urging her to shut the university down. She
(18:21):
reviewses to do so, and when she comes out of it,
the way she comes out of it is the depression
will begin to end, and then other people will buy
the Southern Pacific Railroad to make even larger railroads out
of it. And the suddenly the stock market money she
had becomes real money. She can cash it in she
(18:42):
gets out. And so by the early nineteen hundreds, Jane
Stanford finds this paper wealth she's made it through it's
now turned into real liquid wealth which she either invests elsewhere,
keeps the Southern Pacific bonds, or has in cash, and
so now it is liquid. Stanford University has real money
to get from Jane Stanford.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So by nineteen oh five, Stanford is established as a university,
a well thought of university on the same echelon as
a Harvard or a Yale or no.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
No, it's a university which is involved in the Edward
Ross affair, which is one of the great free speech
academic freedom scandals of the twentieth century, where Jane Stanford
tries to fire a professor for his political views, and
does fire a professor for his political views. And he
is a formidable professor who makes this a national scandal
that James Stamford is being seen as more and more erratic,
(19:36):
somebody who wants to turn the university into a college
devoted to teaching the spiritualist truths. Jane Stanford, who is
going to convert to Catholicism and give the whole university
over to the Jesuits. Jane Stamford, who has been a
pioneer and admitting women into Stanford, now wants to get
rid of all the women in Stanford because they're corrupting
what she calls her boys. Stanford University becomes a running
(19:59):
joke much of academia by the early twentieth century. A
rich running joke, but at running joke.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Well, let's talk about the turn from what you said.
She had some feminist ideals at first, and then what changed.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
The best explanation I can give is James Stanford begins
to have a sexual panic in the early twentieth century.
I mean quite literally sex just she sees sex everywhere.
She sees young women flirting with male students, young female students,
flirting with male students. She is alarmed by any hint
(20:32):
of sex taking place on campus. She thinks that decorum
is breaking down. She thinks Victorian's standards are breaking down.
She thinks there's a breakdown of morality, and that's why
she wants women out. She wants people on horseback, armed
guards on horseback to be riding around campus monitoring the
contact between male and female students. She wants to make
(20:55):
them age at which women's students will be admitted much
higher than male students, so that you will have seven
teen year old boys and twenty one year old women.
She just wants reform after reform after reform, and that's
the kind of thing which alarms David Starr Jordan. He
begins to see that if these reforms go through, the
university is not going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
So as we approach nineteen oh five, when something very
bad happens to Jane Stanford, is there a lead up
to all of this? Is there some sort of like
a trigger or tensions or something that shifts in her
world that has her ending up dead.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
She begins to see David star Jordan's opposition to her
reforms and David Star Jordan's refusal to take the blame
or failure to take the blame for the firing of
Ross and the Ross scandal, there's a threat to her,
so she's desired to fire David star Jordan, and Stanford
is such a small place it's impossible to believe that
(21:53):
David Star Jordan doesn't need so by December, the gossip
is on the street that David Star Jordan is going
to be picked out at the Board of Trustees meetings
early in nineteen oh five. So first thing that happens
is that, and the second thing that happens is around
her relationship with her servants, who are pretty much her
closest companions by this time, along with her family. And
(22:18):
let's say her servants have plenty of reason to hate
her too, So tensions are building in both the mansion
and the downstairs with the servants, and tensions are building
with the university, where David Starr Jordan thinks he is
going to lose his job, a job he desperately wants
to keep. But he also thinks if he goes, the
university is going to go with him, at least the university,
(22:39):
as he knows.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Well. We have a near miss and then a direct
hit right with Jane Stanford. Let's talk about the near
miss first. What are the circumstances around that.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
The near miss is that James Stamford is doing what
she often did. She's going to bed early on a
Saturday night. She's planning the next morning to go to
Palo Alto to attend church services at the Memorial Church.
And she goes to bed early, and she always has
a bottle of Poland Spring bottled water. And what she
does is take the water and she taste funny. She's
(23:25):
going to bed and it tastes funny, and she's a
maid Elizabeth Richmond in the next room, and she spits
it out. She says it tastes bitter, and brings Elizabeth
Richmond in, and Elizabeth Richmond dips her finger in and says, yes,
it does taste funny. And Jane Stamford then begins to vomit.
She sticks her finger down her throat and is throwing
up in a portable sink, and she's Elizabeth Richmond bring
(23:47):
down her companion and her secretary of Bertha Berner, who's
sleeping upstairs. And Bertha Burner also takes a taste of it,
and it's very very bitter, and they hold it up
to the light and when they hold it up to
the light they see things floating in it. And the
outcome of this is going to be that Jans Stamford
Purges herself is very, very sick. But they send the
(24:07):
bottle out to a chemist at the bottom of knob
Hill Pharmacy to have it tested, and the pharmacy will
then send it out to somebody else, to another chemist
to have it tested. So they think there's been something
put in the water, and something has been put in
the water, but they don't know what it is, and
so for that period they will go about their normal tests.
(24:28):
James Stanford will set up having a dinner. There's going
to be a dinner coming in. It's the height of
the social season. So for a week she has tasted
bitter water. Something has happened, she doesn't know what it is,
and her life goes forward.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
You know, if I'm a detective, I'm thinking who has
access to the Poland springs? How many servants are we
talking about?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
First of all, we're talking about six or seven servants.
Some of them have easier access than others. I mean
Bert the Berner is access to her bedroom. Elizabeth Richmond
has asked us to her bedroom. Ah Wing, who's the
chief of the Chinese servan, says access to her bedroom.
And there are other servants, other maids and other subordinate
cooks who might be able to get in, but of
(25:08):
less access than these people. So they're the major people
who have access to the bedroom. But the problem is
that somebody might have put the poison in the bottles
someplace else, that might have put it in the kitchen
and brought it in right, So at this point they
don't have it. But at this point, nobody even knows
it's poison. They're not going to know it's poison until
it comes back from the chemists. And the chemist report
is very very clear, and the chemist report says there
(25:28):
is Stryc nine in the water, and it's not just
stryc nine, it's rat poison. You know that that indicates
to me because whatever was doing this, it's not that
skilled that poisoning people. You just rat poisoning it.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Well, we talk about that a lot on my other
show with Buried Bones with pol Holes. We talk about
that you have to be skilled as a poisoner because
If you don't put in enough, you don't kill the person.
If you put in too much, it's detectable, and it's
a passive way to murder someone. But boy, you really
have to know what you're doing. So it sounds like
this person wants to try again. Whoever the suspect is
(26:02):
how much time elapses before we find out more information.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Once they find out the poisons in it, they hire detectives,
but the private detectives are going to be Jules Collindon,
and his job is to make sure that nobody finds
out about the poisoning and also to find out who
put the poison in. So for the first three or
four weeks there is an investigation, but it's not by
the police. Nothing's reported to the police. It's going to
be by a private detective agency. And their job is
(26:28):
both to discover the poisoner and to keep this out
of the papers. And they do keep it out of
the papers for three weeks, but then they make a
mistake of antagonizing Elizabeth Richmond, who's friends with an ex butler,
Alfred Beverly, And what they're going to do is go
to the papers at the end of January. They're afraid
that they are going to be set up. And so
Albert Beverly, who's a butler who had left Jane Stamford's
(26:52):
service that summer, he realizes that he can be implicated
because he has been stealing from Jane's. He wants to
keep that out of the papers. He's friends with Elizabeth Richmond.
He thinks she's being unjustly accused, and he thinks that
if his friendship with her is going to get him implicated.
So they don't want this going on. They think they're
(27:13):
safer spilling it to the papers and telling their side
of the story.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So are the papers on their side? When they do
reveal all of this? How do they frame it?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
They frame it as the service did it? I mean?
This actually does enter into an Agatha Christie plot the
first Agatha Christie novel. The plot is very much like
the Poisoning of Jane Stamford. Wow. But the problem I
found is once the servants go to the papers, they're
all lying. Everybody's lying. The detectives are lying. Jane Stamford
when they doesn't say much, what she says is lies.
All the servants are lying. So my first problem in
(27:42):
looking at all this is everybody's lying.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yeah, it's hard when you have unreliable sources. It so
what does Jane say? Regardless of if it's a lie
or not, she has to be scared.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
She's terrified, but she doesn't say that she's terrified. She
just says that she is the flu, which she catches
the flues. She goes down to San Jose, she stays there,
but by the time she comes back up to San Francisco,
she is ready to leave the country. She is afraid.
That's afraid to go back into the house. She's afraid
whoever did it is going to try again. And she's
(28:15):
decided to go to Asia. And she's writing letters since
she writes letters to Charles Brothers, who's a confidant, who's
the youngest of the trustees, have been a Stanford undergraduate.
And again this stuff gets really creepy because he looks
exactly like her dead son, which is why she trusts them.
So she writes them a letter which won't be disclosed
(28:35):
until nineteen thirty five, which says, you know why I'm
going I have no idea why people would be trying
to kill me. This is not the way I expected
to end my life. I have to get out of here.
I have to leave because I'm afraid that, in fact,
an attempt is going to be made again, and I
have no way of protecting myself. So she clearly is terrified.
(28:55):
When she's in the hotel, she doesn't register under her
own name, she won't stay in the mansion, and she
brings Bertha Berner, her private secretary, with her to taste
dollar water and to taste dollar food.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Is she paying birth a lot of money? I'm trying
to think of suspects for being a medium, and I
know she's her companion.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Also, they have a tricky relationship because the sexual panic
that goes to the undergraduate women goes to Bertha Burner.
Bertha Berner is constantly quitting her job with Jane Stamford,
very often because Jane Stamford is interfering in Bertha Berner's
personal life. Bertha Berner will leave, go out, but she's
the only person apparently who can manage Jane Stamford, and
(29:35):
so the Stamford family, the Lathrop family, her brother, pay
Bertha to come back again and be a traveling companion.
But Bertha meanwhile has a mother who is very sick
and she is also having an affair with Albert.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Beverly, the former butler, right, former.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Butler, and the former butler is embezzling money and so
is Bertha Berners. Wow, so she is in bezzling money. Also,
Jane Stanford is putting increasing pressure on Bertha Berner to
travel with her on this trip to Hawaii, a trip
to Japan, and another trip she had planned for Europe,
even though her Bertha Berner's own mother is sick, is dying,
(30:15):
and she even needs to stay with her mother. So
Jane Stanford is essentially telling Bertha Berner choose do you
come with me or do you stay with your dying mother.
So she's putting Bertha Berner in an impossible position.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Now, this also must distract her from what's happening at
Stanford University. Does this mean that David Starr Jordan is
kind of off the hook? I mean, has she forgotten
about him and you know what's happening at the school?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
No? No, she wants blood, she wants David star Jordan.
But what does help David star Jordan is since she's
gone and the board of Stanford's Trustees is sort of
like the modern US Senate they are really quite old.
It's hard to get them all together in one place,
and so David start Jordan gets some breathing room. Because
(31:01):
Jane Stanford is leaving the country. She won't be there
to convene the Board of Trustees, and many of the
boarder trustees are old and sick. We're traveling themselves. So
he begins to escape. But eventually there's going to be
a quorum, and Jane Stafford is making it very clear
to the Board of Trustees what she wants done when
she can get that quorum.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So then there is the incident that ends her life.
How many years elapse between the first attempt and the
one that works.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, not many years elapse, not many weeks elapse at
it's about six it's about six weeks later. Six weeks later,
she and Berta Berner and another maid are on a
ship go to Hawaii, check in at the Milana Hotel.
Jane Stafford tells people repeatedly that somebody tried to poison her.
That's why she has left San Francisco. She begins to
(31:51):
relax a little. She's a tourists. She travels with Bertha Berner.
She comes back after a day with her gone on
a picnic. She's tired to her room. She and Bertha
Berner have a light supper out on a veranda. Jane
Stamford wants to retire early, and Jane Stamford says, because
she said she'd eaten a lot of food at the
picnic lunch. She said she wants some by carbonate of soda,
(32:14):
which she hadn't been taking but now she takes them
by cardon Minnesota, and she asks Bertha Berner to give
her a by cardinate of soda and also a digestive pill,
the kind that contains a tiny amount of strychnine. They
actually use strychnine medicinally in the early twentieth century, and
Bertha Berner scoops it out. Jane Stafford says, why don't
you take some by carbonate too, since you were there,
and Berth Burner says, no, I don't need it, and
(32:36):
Jane Stamford says, well, I'll go to bed. I'll take
this before I retire, So she retires, goes to bed.
She wakes up the maid a little later because she
has trouble locking the door. The maid shows her how
to lock the door. She goes to bed, she falls asleep.
She apparently forgot to take the by carbon of soda.
She wakes up in a couple of hours, takes the
by gardener of Minnesota, and at that point she begins
(32:57):
to feel that she's been poisoned. Because she has been poisoned,
staggers to the door. She alerts the guy next door.
She wakes up Bertha Burner in the maid that bring
down a doctor or resident doctor in the hotel who
eventually will call for a stomach pump. Jane Stanford is
telling people, I have been poisoned. Berth to tell them
what happened in San Francisco, and Bertha Burner says, yes,
She's been poisoned in San Francisco. The doctor meanwhile, first
(33:19):
he's skeptical, but then it begins to look an awful
lot like STRYC nine poisoning. Jane Stafford's having the usual
symptoms of strictine poisoning. She's having trouble opening her jaws,
she's having spasms. One of the things strictin poisoning does
is make you aware that you are really dying. And
Jane Stanford, who is a spiritualist to imagine death, was
not a big deal for spiritualist, it was a passing over.
(33:42):
You just gently pass over into a second life. And
Jane Stanford at that point dumps all of the illusions
of dying of stryctine poisoning is a gentle passing over.
She says that her last words are, this is a
terrible death to die, and she dies. She has been
poisoned by strych nine, but this time it is not
rat poison. It is pure strict nine, which is not
(34:03):
easy to obtain, and it has been put in her
bicarbonate of soda. The only person present at both poisonings
besides James Stamford is birtha birth.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
So is this not an open and shut case.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
No, it's.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
I don't believe you. How is that possible?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Because the problem is there's the bicarbonate of soda problem.
She had not taken any bicarbonate of soda during the
whole Hawaiian voyage. The bicarbinate of soda had been packed
away in her truck and then unpacked in Hawaii, So
one possibility, it's pretty far fetched. Does somebody put the
poison in the bicarbonate of soda before it left San Francisco?
(34:45):
Figuring whenever she uses it, this is going to take
place far away from us. Smart there's still the potential
that she had been poisoned in San Francisco, but it
only died in Hawaii.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
And of course there's no way to know how long
this had been present in the soda or how old
it was for them to know whether or not this
was something that had been done a week earlier or
a couple of weeks earlier.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Well, there's one thing that turns out. It turns out
the detectives get to work, and the detectives get to
work trying to find out who had purchased by carbonate
of soda, and Bertha Bernard denies she knew anything about
by carbonate of soda, anything about Strych nine. Bertha Berner says,
we always said by carbonate of soda in San Francisco.
I presume this is by carbon of soda from San Francisco.
(35:30):
And then it turns out that just before they departed,
Bertha Bernard stopped into a pharmacy in Palo Alto and
purchased brand new bicarbonate of soda. So the bicarbonate of
soda could very well have been the bicarbonate of Minnesota
that had been purchased by Bertha Berner and had been
been taken into a y. So that begins to undercut
the theory that the bicarbonate of soda was really going
(35:52):
to be coming from San Francisco. It doesn't eliminate it,
but it creates the question of why did Bertha Berner
lie about purchasing the bike carent of soda? So if
a carpenter of soda becomes yet another aspect of the mystery,
it's not necessarily open and shut. It still leaves where
the Stryck nine came from, because the hardest thing to
find is a Stryc nine five Pierce Stryc nine. You
(36:14):
have to sign for it in San Francisco pharmacies, and
there's ways you can get around that, but in fact
it is still a lot more difficult than getting rat
poison that's going to leave a trail. But they can
find nobody who has purchased Strycht nine at all associated
with the Stanford household, and the police and the detectives
are both on it by now.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
So they bring her back. There's the autopsy, Is there
a large service for her, Is there something at Stanford,
and does she leave them all the money or not.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
This is why things get dicey. This is where, OK, yeah,
it's dicey already. It gets diicier. Nothing is simple about
James Stanford's death. She's going to have the autopsy, so
they bring her back. They bring back her body, but
her body the way they do these autopsies in the
nine nineteenth centuries, they basically take out your insides, churn
them up and test them for stricma. So Jane Stanfford's
corpse comes back, but it's the corpse is largely been
(37:04):
emptied of internal organs, and she is going to be
buried at a huge ceremony at Stanford University. The student
body's there, the faculty is there. Five or six thousand
people show up. The march her to the grave to
the mausoleum where she is going to join her dead
husband and her dead son. And the people who are
marching behind her on the way to the grave are
(37:26):
all the people who were suspects in her death. They're
David Starr, Jordan, their Bertha Berner, and it's her service.
They're all coming behind her. So she goes to the
grave with the people who might actually have killed her
marching behind it. But Stanford University does get the money.
George Crothers, who has gone out of his way. He's
(37:47):
had to start early. He's had to change the California
constitution to do this. He has avoided the kind of
usual legal procedures to make sure the trust and wills
go through. He has rushed all of these things through.
He's taken personal responsibility. He's made sure that Jane Stamper's
brother gets enough money that it makes sure this is
going to be worth his while to cooperate in shutting
(38:10):
down any challenge to the wills. The wills will not
be challenged. They will be challenged later, but it's going
to be too late. The trust go through, Stanford University
gets the money. Meanwhile, the police department has decided not
to do further investigation.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
How is that possible?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
She didn't die strict nine presenting she died a natural death,
but David start Jordan had done. He had gone into Hawaii,
hired a doctor who had never seen the body, who
had never knew anything much.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
About the autopsy, and he said she had died of
eating too much food at the picnic lunch, which had
given her gas which are put pressure on her heart,
which had given her a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
There's no evidence of a heart attack in the actual autopsy.
I mean, essentially, too much gas kills her. David Starr
Jordan says he's going to bring this back, give it
to the San Francisco Police. He gets off the ship.
The San Francisco Police says there's going to be a
full investigation within twenty four hours. The San Francisco Police says,
good enough for us, and they say she died in
(39:13):
natural death. Wow, And the whole thing begins to disappear.
So some of the newspapers press on it. But the
next year there's going to be the San Francisco earthquake.
San Francisco's other things to worry about, and the case disappears.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Now are we thinking that David Starr Jordan did that
as a way to simplify things. Let's say he's not
the suspect here? Is it so that things could move
forward quickly with Stanford or what would be the motive
if he weren't the suspect.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
David Star Jordan doesn't want a murder, Yeah, because a
murder is going to bring out all of the things
that have gone into the funding that she's a spiritualist.
It's going to open up challenges to her wills and
her trust. He doesn't want that testimony. He certainly doesn't
want Bertha Burner, who knows everything, testifying. He also doesn't
want a suicide, which is the other theory at the time,
because the suicide means, in the legal theories at the
(39:59):
time that she wasn't mentally competent to have made the
trust in the will. So that's not yea and he
wants to save his job. So for David Starr Jordan,
the best of all possible worlds is a natural death,
and David Star Jordan gets a natural death.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Is Bertha Berner paid off?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
You know, Bertha Berner is there and I don't know
what conversations are. I can imagine Bertha Burner has already
testified that she was poisoned by strychnin. She reverses all
of her testimony when she talks to this other doctor.
If I were David star Jordan, you know what you
tell Bertha Berner is, you know things don't look that
(40:34):
good for you. You're both murders. You have a reason
for wanting to kill her and if there is no murder,
there can be no murderer. And that's pretty convinced thing.
So Bertha Berner reverses everything, she recants all her testimony,
but she's not under oath the second time, and the
police accept that.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
How much money are we talking about in the end
when Jane Stanford died? How much did the university get?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
The university? Again? It's always hard to say, because a
lot of it is going to be and what the
bonds are worth, how are you going to sell it?
But I would say the university probably gets, you know,
between the old trusts and the new things, fifteen to
twenty million dollars, maybe a little more than that.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
It's a lot of money, and it's enough to sustain them.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Obviously, it makes it the best in dowed university in
the country. I think briefly at the.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Time, what is Jane Stanford's whitewashed history at Stanford University?
If you take out the spiritualism, just as a founder
who was out of the goodness of her heart and
wanted higher education inspired by her son? Is that sort
of the narrative, that's.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The narrative Leland is engaged in too much sketchy financial stuff.
Leland is roundly denounced as robber baron. Jane seems to
be cleaner, and so they erase the spiritualism. That stuff
just goes away. They erase the murder. She is a
mother whose grief over her son leads her to donate
her entire fortune to literally the children of California. She's
(41:56):
this beloved figure who found Stanford Universe. She's a pioneering
feminist who brings in women into the university and assists
on their being there. They pretty much erased the complicated
Jane Stamford, and more than that, they erased the university's
long role in denying that there had ever been any
murder and that Jane Stamford herself would have probably closed
(42:21):
the university down. And they will continue to do this
into the nineteen nineties, early twentieth century. And now they
don't say that she's murdered. They just don't say anything
at all.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
So this is not on the new Freshman orientation tour.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
What do you think now, as I'm talking to Professor White,
the historian, Why does it matter what the narrative is
if you've got this incredible school, Because of this woman. Absolutely,
Why does it matter that this is not the true
narrative that has been put forward by the school for
all of these years.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
That's a very good question. It's what I thought about
a lot. And because to make sure that Stanford's money
went to something that would later turn into a major
research university, which doesn't happen for years later, first you
had to kill Jane Stanford. The real theme of this
book is the problem with philanthropy is philanthropists. If Jane
(43:16):
Stanford got what she wanted, Stanford University would not be
a major research university. Stanford University would be a peculiar
small college with some esoteric spiritualist beliefs that might have
faded in time. What seems to me, this bizarre case
in the early twentieth century, like bizarre cases everywhere, they
really open up something quite deeper, and they really open
(43:38):
up the problem with private fortunes, great wealth philanthropy getting
to dictate the directions of institutions, which sometimes go way
off track and end up as they do here with
the murder of Jane Stanford. And you know, we haven't
told the old story anyway, because there still is the
question of where the pure strychnine came from.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
And what do you think with out giving away too much?
Speaker 2 (44:02):
I have a suspicion and I think the police knew
who killed Janmes Stafford, and the police decided that that
person would disappear and that aspect of the case would
be dropped. At first, I thought the San Francisco police
were incredibly corrupt and incredibly incompetent. Now I just think
they were incredibly corrupt.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis mme Rosi. Our
associate producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
(44:53):
Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More and if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at tenfoldmore wicked dot Com. We'll also take your
(45:14):
suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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