February 28, 1905: Jane Stanford is murdered -- on the 2nd try.
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop was born on August 25, 1828 in Albany, New York. Like any other good little rich girl of her time, she was expected to have no ambitions, marry a rich man, have as many rich children as possible, and do nothing on her own.
Well, she certainly married a rich man: Leland Stanford, a lawyer from nearby Watervliet. He became one of the wealthiest lawyers in Wisconsin. But in 1852, a fire in his office cost him his law library, a vital thing for a lawyer to have. He took Jane west, opened a dry goods store with his brothers, took advantage of the Gold Rush, and built a fortune. In 1861, he was among the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was elected Governor of California, serving a single 2-year term.
As for the other thing, it didn't work out. For whatever reason, she didn't have a child until she was 39, and he would be the only one. On March 13, 1884, Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid fever, and there was nothing his parents and all their money could do.
What would now be called an urban legend spread, eventually being repeated on the radio show of broadcaster Paul Harvey. Supposedly, Leland and Jane Stanford went to Harvard University, offered to fund a big scholarship in their son's name, and were flat-out rejected, because old-money Harvard didn't want their nouveau riche money. So they took matters into their own hands, and founded their own university out of spite, choosing the color red like Harvard.
It wasn't true. They didn't go to Cambridge, Massachusetts to meet with Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard. He didn't turn them down. The plan, all along, was to found a university near San Francisco, then still far ahead of Los Angeles as the leading city not just in California, but in the American West. The location was Palo Alto, on "The Peninsula," 37 miles southeast of San Francisco, and 24 miles northwest of San Jose.
"The Leland Stanford Junior University" was founded in 1885, and opened on October 1, 1891, and it is officially named that to this day. Reading and hearing "Junior University" makes it sound like a "junior college," but it is, essentially, the Harvard of the West Coast, though its main color is a cardinal shade of red, rather than Harvard's crimson. And its rival isn't another old, fabulously wealthy Ivy League school, as Harvard has with Yale, but the main campus of the greatest State university system in the country, the University of California in Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay.
Leland Stanford was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1884, and was still serving California in that capacity when he died on June 21, 1893, from heart failure brought on by years of locomotor ataxia. Jane, then 74, subsequently effectively took control of the university. It was at her direction that Stanford University gained an early focus on the arts. She also advocated for the admission of women, and the University had been co-educational since its founding.
On January 14, 1905, at age 76, at her mansion in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco, Mrs. Stanford drank mineral water, and found it tasting bitter. She quickly forced herself to vomit the water, with prompting from and assistance by her maid, and when both the maid and her secretary agreed that the bottled water tasted strange, she sent it to a pharmacy to be analyzed. The findings, returned a few weeks later, showed that the water had been poisoned with a lethal dose of strychnine.
Mrs. Stanford moved out of her mansion, and vowed never to return. Elizabeth Richmond, the maid, fell under suspicion and was fired. Richmond had worked in Britain and had reportedly regaled Stanford's domestic staff with tales of English aristocrats being poisoned by their servants.
A private detective agency was hired, but despite coming up with enough subplots to stock a soap opera, it could not come up with evidence pointing to a culprit, or a motive for an attempted murder. Depressed by the conviction that an unknown party had tried to kill her, and suffering from a cold, Mrs. Stanford soon decided to sail to Hawaii, with plans to continue on to Japan.
At the Moana Hotel on the island of Oahu, on the evening of February 28, Mrs. Stanford asked for bicarbonate of soda to settle her stomach while in her room. Her personal secretary, Bertha Berner -- a trusted employee of 20 years' standing, and the only other person present who had also been at the scene of the previous incident -- prepared the solution, which Stanford drank.
Is this the face of a killer?
At 11:15 PM, she cried out for her servants and hotel staff to call for a physician, declared that she had lost control of her body, and believed that she had been poisoned again. This time, attempts to induce vomiting were unsuccessful, and her last words were, "This is a horrible death to die."
The news was telegraphed back to her adopted hometown, and, mere hours later, the March 1, 1905 edition of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin blared the headline: "MRS. STANFORD DIES, POISONED."
After 3 days of testimony, the coroner's jury concluded in less than two minutes that she had died of strychnine "introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown."
The testimony revealed that the bottle in question had been purchased in California -- after Elizabeth Richmond had been let go, which seemed to rule her out as a suspect this time -- had been accessible to anyone in Stanford's residence during the period when her party was packing, and had not been used until the night of her death.
Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, who wanted to avoid a controversy that could damage the University's reputation, sailed to Hawaii himself, and hired a local doctor to dispute poisoning as the cause of death. He then reported to the press that Stanford had in fact died of heart failure.
The coverup succeeded so well that the likelihood that she was murdered was largely overlooked by historians and commentators until the 1980s. At any rate, no one was ever charged with Mrs. Stanford's murder. Whoever did it got away with it.
Was it Bertha Berner? Mrs. Stanford left her $15,000 in her will -- about $500,000 in 2022 money. She continued to live comfortable life in her house in nearby Menlo Park, California. Her social life revolved around the University, which, in 1935, published her book Mrs. Leland Stanford: An Intimate Account. Tellingly, she did not point a finger at any other suspect. She lived until 1945.
UPDATE: In 2022, Stanford University historian Richard White concluded that Stanford was likely poisoned by Bertha Berner, who was the only person present at both poisonings. White concludes that the first poisoning may have been intended to be non fatal and that Jordan and the San Francisco Police likely suspected Berner, but covered up the murder to suit their own interests.
It's a little interesting (to me, anyway) that the historian's name was White: A "Stanford White." Because, the following year, the architect Stanford White was murdered, and his case quickly replaced that of Jane Stanford as "The Murder of the Century."
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February 28, 1905 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. Basketball and hockey were still nearly all-amateur. So there were no scores on this historic day.
