Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University
In a quiet corner of the Stanford campus, a weeping angel and a pair of sphinxes stand guard over the Stanford family mausoleum. Here lie two Lelands and one Jane. Here’s where the bodies are buried… literally and figuratively.
Although both male Stanfords died natural deaths, Jane was murdered in 1905, and for over a century the crime was covered up. In this masterly marriage of true crime and scholarship, acclaimed historian Richard White resurrects Jane Stanford’s very cold case and thoroughly examines the surviving documents and pictures, all the while maintaining the suspense of a good thriller. White’s subtitle sums the book up: “A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University.” Something is missing from that lineup, however: “Money.”
White introduces a large cast of characters and suspects. In short order we meet the richest, most powerful, and possibly most disagreeable woman in San Francisco. Also, there is the English butler, the Chinese factotum, the unhappy companion, the lady’s maid, the pharmacist, the lawyers, the greedy relatives, the corrupt police, the yellow journalists, the bickering professors, the Jesuits, and the dishonest, desperate college president. Oh, and hordes of spirits. Skillfully, White lays out a complicated narrative and finishes by offering a solution to the mystery.
Novelists! Screenwriters! Do something with this fabulous material! It’s a miniseries pleading to be made. Leland Stanford, Sr. was a shady robber baron. The nouveau riche setting begs for great costumes and sets. Mrs. Stanford died in Honolulu. The story’s got sex, power, conflict, religion, politics, ghosts, corruption, poison, murder, and money – and terror and pity. Unpleasant or not, Jane Stanford didn’t deserve to die in agony, poisoned by pure strychnine, which someone (who?) sneaked into her medication.
