Who Killed Jane Stanford?

Starred review from March 28, 2022
True crime doesn’t come more stranger than fiction than the unsolved murder of Jane Stanford (1828–1905), the widow of robber baron Leland Stanford, who died in Hawaii of strychnine poisoning a month after a previous attempt to kill her the same way in San Francisco. Despite her wealth and power (among other things, she and her husband founded Stanford University), her murder was covered up; the true cause of death was concealed from the public for years; and it was reported that she’d died from heart failure. White (Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America), an emeritus professor of American history at Stanford who has taught an undergraduate seminar on the mystery, provides the fruits of decades of research and analysis, in what is likely to be the last word on the case, including a plausible solution. He examines multiple suspects, including Stanford’s private secretary, Bertha Berner, who was present during both poisoning episodes; a Chinese servant; and university president and noted member of the university’s science faculty, David Starr Jordan, who both had access to strychnine and motive, because Stanford threatened his position after a series of disputes about the direction of the academic institution. This is an instant genre classic.

April 1, 2022
Historical true-crime tale involving an unsolved murder and the tumultuous early years of a prestigious university. An award-winning historian and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, White became intrigued by the unsolved mystery of the death of Jane Stanford (1828-1905), who, with her husband, railroad magnate Leland Stanford, founded a university to memorialize their dead son. When Jane died suddenly in Honolulu, witness statements and an autopsy indicated poisoning, but by the time her body arrived in San Francisco, the notion of a crime had been quashed. White uses the coverup to create a lively detective story exposing "the politics, power struggles, and scandals of Gilded Age San Francisco," including those that roiled the Palo Alto campus. Jane was wealthy, impetuous, and domineering. The university, intellectually mediocre and struggling financially, "was for all practical purposes" whatever the Stanford family wanted it to be, and its faculty and administration were harassed by Jane's "whims, convictions, resentments," and her ardent belief in spiritualism. She was surrounded by bickering servants, duplicitous lawyers, and rivalrous family members, but university trustee George Crothers, Jane's confidant and legal adviser, worked assiduously to prevent her from undermining her own interests and the future of the university. He agreed with others that a murder trial "could reveal the controversies within the university, resurrect old scandals, and reveal new ones. All this would embarrass and threaten important people and institutions." Indeed, White believes that Stanford's death may have saved the university and certainly the job of its president, David Starr Jordan, whom Jane wanted to fire. "Jordan never mastered Jane Stanford while she lived," writes the author, "but death made her malleable." He eulogized her with praise. White identifies many individuals with a motive to poison Jane; advised by his brother, Stephen, a writer of crime fiction, he homes in on one culprit. Although at times White's impressive findings slow the pace, he fashions an engaging narrative. An entertaining tale of money, power, and malfeasance.

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May 1, 2022
Reading like a conversational history lecture in book form, Stanford professor emeritus White's (California Exposures, 2020) mostly captivating book chronicles the deception around the death of Jane Stanford, cofounder of Stanford University. More than 100 years after Stanford's death from strychnine poisoning, White seeks to uncover why the university, citing Stanford's death as "natural causes," covered up the details all those years ago. At the same time, he digs into the politics of the university's founding, and it's here that White at times gets bogged down in responding to all the questions presented by the mystery. Outside those chapters, though, this is an eminently clear, sharp, and readable account, featuring staccato sentences and breezy chapters. As he interrogates the past, White leaves the reader wondering if the truth is always in the answers.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.