Revisiting an ivory tower's edification
Book on death of a founder afflicts Stanford
LOS ANGELES -- Who murdered Jane Stanford?
According to the Stanford University archives, nobody. For now, the official version says the sturdy matron who cofounded the university with her husband died of heart failure after a picnic in Honolulu in 1905.
That, a retired Stanford physician says, is a cover-up.
Jane, Dr. Robert Cutler concludes in a volume just published by Stanford's own press, was poisoned with strychnine in the second such attempt on her life in as many months. But someone saw to it that the truth was buried.
Another Stanford professor, writing recently in an academic journal, raises a tantalizing possibility: Could the murderer have been Stanford's own revered first president, David Starr Jordan?
The two professors are turning the university's carefully tended mythology upside down.
"A lot of people inherently think Stanford represents something good and great and almost beyond any imaginable reproach," said Stephen Requa, a Stanford alumnus and distant relative of Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and US senator who founded the university with his wife, Jane.
"Now comes a great evil at the heart of the myth," Requa said. "It's a blemish on the university. It can't just be brushed off."
Tall and lean, and with a shock of white hair, Cutler is tethered to an oxygen line in a rustic ranch home that overlooks the oak-stubbled Livermore Hills; emphysema forced him from the rigors of teaching.
It was while researching his second book -- on the controversies of magnesite mining -- that Cutler came across his first clue.
Harry Morse, a gun-slinging Alameda County sheriff turned private eye, battled the mining companies with verve in the early 1900s. Morse's gumshoe agency, Cutler found, had also investigated a poisoning attempt on Jane -- six weeks before she fell dead.
Why, he wondered, was this tale not widely known? He offered to prepare a talk on the subject for other medical school retirees who gather regularly to ponder Stanford's past.
His draft met resistance. The friend who had planned to present it said "it was just too controversial," Cutler said. "I took that as a bit of a challenge."
Cutler waded through newspaper accounts. He dissected a century-old autopsy and a coroner's inquest. He pored over dozens of letters written by Jordan in the wake of the death. Archivists and other helpers from Hawaii to Britain helped him pull off his sleuth, and his wife, Maggie, made dozens of trips to retrieve documents from Stanford's many libraries.
In August, the Stanford University Press published Cutler's "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford," a graceful book that many say lays out the facts of the poisoning. The drama begins on the night of Jan. 14, 1905, at Stanford's Nob Hill mansion, from which Jane had steered the university since her husband's death in 1893.
She had guided the institution through near financial collapse when the federal government successfully sued her husband's estate to recover $15 million in railroad loans. She had weathered a faculty walkout after she compelled Jordan to fire a professor whose ideas she disdained. And she clashed with Jordan, the ichthyologist whom she and her husband had recruited.
Jordan was the youngest US college president when he took the helm of Indiana University in 1885 at age 34. When he accepted the Stanfords' mandate six years later, he had a single concern: that Leland and Jane wielded too much influence.
Tensions between the physically imposing young Jordan and the aging Jane are well documented. But the university seemed to be entering a period of peace when Jane Stanford took her customary drink of Poland Mineral Spring Water at her home that January night.
She immediately noted its bitterness, Cutler recounts, and forced herself to vomit. Her maid, Elizabeth Richmond, and personal secretary, Bertha Berner, sampled the tonic and noticed a "queer taste." Laboratory tests confirmed the presence of strychnine.
Richmond fell under suspicion and was fired. A former butler was interrogated. So was a Chinese manservant lambasted by a racist press as shifty. But, unable to nail down a motive, Morse's detective agency, retained by the university, deduced the poison was added after Stanford took a sip, in a ploy by one servant to implicate another. The case was closed.
Depressed and distraught, Jane set sail for Hawaii. On Feb. 28, she swallowed a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and a cascara capsule to aid her digestion and went to bed in Honolulu's Moana Hotel. She soon cried out in distress.
A resident physician -- Francis Howard Humphris -- arrived while Jane was still lucid, he would later testify at a coroner's inquest. As her jaws stiffened, he administered mustard water. But her spasm was in full force. "This is a horrible death to die," Stanford was said to have exclaimed. Then, Cutler recounts, "her jaws clamped shut . . . Finally, her respiration ceased."
A second doctor arrived just before Stanford died, a third minutes after. A coroner's jury was assembled to view the body. At an autopsy, all the physicians agreed: The body's rigid posture screamed of strychnine. The autopsy found no other likely cause of death.
Jurors convened for the three-day inquest deliberated only two minutes before deciding: Jane Lathrop Stanford, age 76, had been poisoned with strychnine.
But the next day, Jordan disembarked from the SS Alameda in Honolulu -- and the spin began.
The university president retained his own expert -- a surgeon named Ernest Coniston Waterhouse. Without viewing the body, Waterhouse issued a four-page report that concluded that Stanford had died of heart failure.
In the coming weeks, Jordan would vacillate in an effort to dismiss all evidence to the contrary.
Yet he later ventured that there was no strychnine at all. Berner had ingested the bicarbonate too, and tasted nothing unusual, he cabled Associated Press. He later retracted the statement. There was strychnine present, he conceded, but it was only medicinal. 