Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder

FOR YEARS a visit to Stanford University has involved crossing paths with tours led by undergraduates who, walking backward, face a trailing audience of prospective students and their families. Those in the tours crave admission to one of the wealthiest and most exclusive universities in the world.

The tour guides convey an origin story of the university: a beloved child of a rich couple dies tragically; the grieving parents vow to devote their fortune to the creation of a college for the children of California, and Leland Stanford Junior University opens in 1891. The story is true as far as it goes, but it leaves out critical details that change the story’s meaning. The full story involves a dubious and insecure fortune laundered into a monument to the founding family, and a school rejuvenated through the blood of one of its founders.

It is a Gilded Age story, and this book tells that story.

Who Killed Jane Stanford? originated from another tour, one I gave for years as part of a class I taught on the nineteenth century. I walked my students back into the past—into the Gilded Age—to get them to decipher what was hidden in front of their eyes. My tour covered the oldest parts of Stanford— the Quad, the Memorial Church, the museum, the mausoleum, and remnants of the Memorial Arch—that date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their original form, these monuments to the Stanfords were so grandiose and brazen—so lacking in subtlety—that the immediate instinct was to accept them at face value and never consider what they might conceal.

But Leland Stanford Junior University was never what it seemed. Stanford was “inward”—a common expression of the late nineteenth century used to describe things that were not as they appeared on the surface. Stanford appeared to be simply another of the new research universities funded by rich people during the Gilded Age: the University of Chicago, Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and Carnegie Mellon University. But Stanford University became much stranger and much darker.

It was more fitting than I originally knew to begin my tour at the mausoleum because it was Jane Stanford’s death that saved the university created by the death of Leland Jr. Both, along with Leland Stanford Sr., rest inside. Initially and obtusely, I focused on Leland Stanford Sr., whose fortune derived from the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. I recognized soon enough that without the dead child—Leland Stanford Jr.—the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.

But the key figure was Jane Stanford. After the death of her husband and cofounder Leland Stanford in 1893, she wielded power over the university. For a dozen years the dead son and the dead father rested alone in the mausoleum while Jane Stanford kept the university alive during the hard times of the 1890s. She shaped it until her death in 1905. During those years, an empty sarcophagus awaited her inside the family mausoleum. The inscription engraved on its marble surface stopped, incomplete: “Jane L. Stanford. Born in Mortality, August 2, 1828. Passed to Immortality . . .” On March 16, 1905, a workman chiseled in the missing date: February 28, 1905. What Jane Stanford called her earthly life was complete.¹

Leland Stanford Junior University was not like other universities because Jane Stanford was convinced that not only was she doing God’s work, she was also his agent in promoting the education of the soul as well as the mind. In 1900, taking a cure in Bavaria, she imagined the scene at the university, with “carriages rushing up the main drive up to the Arch. . . . I can see the artists at work on the carving bringing out the story of the civilization of the world and prevading [sic] my entire being such a sense of gratitude fills me . . . that I, so unworthy of God’s special care, should have been chosen as a humble instrument to do the will of the loved ones gone on to their reward for lives well spent.”²

Contrary to the selfless image created of her after her death, Jane Stanford always deflected attention back to herself, even as she celebrated her son, her husband, God, and civilization. She commissioned the statue of her family; she built the arch and the church. She dedicated the church to Leland Stanford—“my husband”; she was the instrument of God’s and her deceased family’s will. The Reverend David Charles Gardner proved a spectacularly poor prophet but correct enough in discerning the church’s purpose when he said at its dedication, “This cathedral like church will stand forever a monument to the piety of a woman.”³

Jane made her Christian devotion, her identity as a mother and wife, and her service to civilization visible, but they also masked what she sought to keep out of public notice: her spiritualism. Spiritualism was both common and controversial in Gilded Age America and, for that matter, in Victorian England. Queen Victoria was a spiritualist; so too were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Lincoln, President Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife Louisa. Spiritualism had numerous variations, but essentially it involved communication with the dead.⁴ Death was so thin a barrier that spiritualists often refused to use the word, instead resorting to euphemisms like birth into a higher life. In a world full of early deaths, this was comforting.

Jane Stanford did not advertise her spiritualism, but neither did she hide it from those who knew where to look. The nondenominational Memorial Church was Jane Stanford’s great solace. She described it as “soul-satisfying,” “a work of love.” But the church was deeply inward.⁵

The cacophony of creeds and symbols in the ecumenical Memorial Church allowed the voices of spiritualists to babble inconspicuously among the others. Jane Stanford personally gathered the spiritual quotations that covered the lower walls of the east and west sides of the church. She sought to strip Christianity of dogma and make it nonsectarian, but the result spoke mainly to a sect of one: Jane Stanford. The church of Jane rested on two key texts. The first read: “The best form of religion is, trust in God and a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, life everlasting.” This she attributed to a letter from her husband. So too the second: “An eternal existence in prospect converts the whole of your present state into a mere vestibule of the grand court of life; a beginning, an introduction to what is to follow; the entrance into that immeasurable extent of being which is the true life of man. The best thoughts, affections and aspirations of a great soul are fixed on the infinitude of eternity. Destined as such a soul is for immortality, it finds all that is not eternal too short, all that is not infinite too small.”⁶

I wanted the students on my tour to see the physical signs of these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century beliefs in the edifices built during Stanford’s “Stone Age,” as David Starr Jordan, the original president of the university, sardonically referred to it. I also wanted them to recognize absences and exiles, to draw meaning from what has vanished and been displaced, and what remains. The bronze statue of the Stanford family originally located just beyond the arch eventually became an embarrassment and was banished to a spot beside the Stanford family mausoleum, a place now rarely visited except by spiritualists who sometimes light candles and leave them on the tomb’s steps.

Jane Stanford longed to join her departed husband and son, but things did not end as she expected. She died of strychnine poisoning in Hawaii, in the words of the coroner’s jury, “at the hands of person or persons unknown.” In 2003 Robert Cutler, a physician at Stanford, published The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford, a book that reexamined the circumstances of her death. Cutler undermined the university’s position, which it has held since 1905, that she died a natural death. My initial interest in her death was pedagogical. I used Cutler’s book as a source for a class on historical research. I sent undergraduates into the archives to see what they could find out about Jane Stanford’s poisoning. They found a lot, but as proud as I was of their work, these were ten-week classes, and they could only scratch the surface.⁷

Historians and detectives both know that the answer is always in the past. Dashiell Hammett might as well be a historian when he opens The Maltese Falcon with Sam Spade instructing his client, “Suppose you tell me about it, from the beginning, and then we’ll know what needs doing. Better begin as far back as you can.”⁸

Sam Spade had living witnesses. Like most historians, I only have the long dead. I can’t interrogate them—“sweat them” in the police argot of the early twentieth century. I am left with whatever they left, willingly or unwillingly, behind.

Among the things Jane Stanford left behind was a plaster cast of her face: a death mask made two days after she died. It is in the Stanford University Archives, and the first time I taught the class on her demise, the archivist pulled it from its box and showed it to the students, who reacted with audible gasps as if her corpse had walked in the room. At that moment Jane Stanford leaped across the century and came among us like an apparition at one of her séances. She then disappeared.

So too have many of the sources concerning her life and her death. Preservation of historical records is always imperfect, but rarely have I encountered more documents that have vanished and more collections and reports that have gone missing than in this research. Jane apparently destroyed most of Leland’s records, and many of Jane’s have also disappeared. Except for a memoir, most of her secretary Bertha Berner’s papers are gone without a trace. These vanished records test my belief that the past cannot be erased, but my faith remains intact. An original letter can go missing, but a response remains. A report can disappear, but accounts of the report survive. Participants in events lie, but it is virtually impossible to find and destroy all the materials that undermine the lie.

I wish I could say that seeing the mask of Jane Stanford’s face, only a little more than a day dead, sparked a desire in me to see justice done. It didn’t. I saw an aged woman and I initially wondered not who killed her, but why? Why hasten those last few steps to the grave? Someone must have had something at stake.

I was not surprised that in the Gilded Age—a time of breathtaking inequality—the many murders of poor people went unsolved, but why would the investigation of the death of the richest woman in San Francisco be shut down in less than a month? Why would her family, the administrators of the university she cofounded, the police department, the political establishment of San Francisco, and private detectives hired to find the murderer not only give up on finding her killer, but, despite the evidence that she was poisoned, go to all the trouble of denying it and crafting a narrative of a natural death? This was not how I imagined Gilded Age San Francisco worked.

I always intended this book as a history that used Jane Stanford’s death to reveal the politics, power struggles, and scandals of Gilded Age San Francisco. And it is. Her life and death were inseparable from Leland Stanford Junior University, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco, Chinatown, the urban underworld, nineteenth-century spiritualism, and the people—upstairs and downstairs—of the Stanford mansions.

But the book surprised me in several ways. As a story of Gilded Age privilege, inequality, corruption, politics, and the press, it resonates with the present. In an age of surreal conspiracy theories, it is a reminder that conspiracies can be quite real. In an age of staggering inequality, it is set in another age of staggering inequality. Its main characters are rich people who created monuments to themselves, and whose lives are reminders that the problem with philanthropy is very often philanthropists. We live in a world where murderers walk free, and powerful people go to great lengths to preserve secrets. Such things are not unique to our time.

The second surprise is that while I started out to write a history—which this is—I also ended up writing a detective story that could fit in the true-crime genre. Like a detective, I was sifting through scattered sources to determine not only who killed Jane Stanford but how and why. Finishing the book, confined by the Covid pandemic, I kept going back over the sources, looking for details that I might have ignored. That search produced my final surprise. I had wondered why the police and detectives gave up their pursuit of the suspects. I ended up thinking they did not give up. They found what they were looking for.