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Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University
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About This Book
In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university's lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford's murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city's machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White's search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford's imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.
Reviews
"The conclusion is anticlimactic given that the signs have been pointing in this direction all along — although White does come up with the name of a plausible accomplice."
"The depth of [Bremmer's] research into Jane's death as well as 'the politics, power struggles, and scandals of Gilded Age San Francisco' is extraordinary—especially since relevant police and private detective documents were lost to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire ..."
"White's book might as well have been 'Why she deserved what she got.' The result is that the narrative largely relegates its subject to the role of victim—rather than to her rightful place as the forceful woman who kept the university alive in its early years."
"Readers unfamiliar with climate change will encounter an excellent introduction to the science and tactics to combat it ..."
"White writes with clarity, precision and a bone-dry sense of humor."
"True crime doesn't come more stranger than fiction than the unsolved murder of Jane Stanford ..."
"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."
"He digs deep into papers from Stanford's archives...for context and clues ..."
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