The Murder of Jane Stanford

Stanford University was co-founded by Jane Stanford. Not long after she was murdered and it was covered up. We'll probably never know what really happened. Listen in today. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:43Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:52Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, true crime murder mystery edition, like in the purest form in that we do not know who did it, sorry, who done it.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  And we may never know. We probably will never know, even though we kind of know, it seems like.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we'll ever know. This was a listener suggestion.

• 2:18Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  And I actually, from, from a year ago, almost to the day.

• 2:24Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's creepy.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Sometimes we like to do that, you know?

• 2:28Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, great idea. We'll do it in one year.

• 2:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we're like, great idea.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  So this has been sitting in the kitty for a while. This is from Samuel Kroll. And Olivia helped us out and it's a, it's a real banger about the history of, in a way, the history of Stanford University.

• 2:47Josh Clark?

  It really is.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  And one of its co-founders and her pretty obvious murder.

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the Stanfords were very much intertwined with the early years of Stanford University. Cause after all, you can't spell Stanford without Stanford. And the reason that this is a murder mystery is because one of the Stanfords dies mysteriously. We're not going to say who. You'll figure it out toward the end.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I think you already did, but sure.

• 3:14Josh Clark?

  I say we jump in and just start talking about Jane Stanford, who is, for the most part, the star of our show.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  That's right, because she was murdered.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I had already said it.

• 3:26Josh Clark?

  That was the big twist.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Did you not hear me? Or are you just, is this all a bit?

• 3:32Josh Clark?

  Uh, it's a bit.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:36Josh Clark?

  I didn't hear you, but it is still a bit. What did you say that was so pivotal?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  I said that she was murdered. And then you said, we're not going to say he was murdered right afterward.

• 3:44Josh Clark?

  Oh, I didn't hear you say that. I see.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47Josh Clark?

  Well, we'll just edit all this out.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  No, we should leave it. So Jane Stanford was, you know, she was sort of the, the prototypical gilded age, wife at the time, supporting her husband. That was kind of a job and not kind of, it was like a real job. Sort of entertaining, keeping up with like large residences when you have tons of money, that kind of thing. But she would go on to be a, she was a very demanding person, it seems like, and would go on to be a very demanding,

• 4:19Speaker 02

  kind of lead trustee at, at Stanford University and some might even say a micromanager.

• 4:24Josh Clark?

  Oh yeah, I think she definitely fits that mold for sure.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  But as a micromanager, she would just say, I just want to make sure it's done right.

• 4:32Josh Clark?

  Right, right. She had some very distinct ideas that she wanted fulfilled with Stanford, and she had the money to back it up, basically.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. But she was born, a little background here, in upstate New York, in Albany in 1828. One of seven kids, she was born wealthy, her parents were shopkeepers, and she would eventually marry a guy named Leland Stanford. She was born Jane Lethrop, and then would be Jane Stanford, or Jane Lethrop Stanford. He was also from upstate New York, and he was an attorney practicing in Wisconsin. I keep wanting to say Win- Win- Wisconsin.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  You can say that, it's all right. People in Wisconsin don't care.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Well, we're going to Madison in April. I can't say that in front of them.

• 5:16Josh Clark?

  I think you can. I really think they'll support it.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  They are nice people.

• 5:21Josh Clark?

  Uh, yes, pretty much to a person, except for that one.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  She was, they knew who they are. Jane was 22 at the time, and they were apart for the beginning of their marriage, though, right? Geographically.

• 5:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Jane moved back to Albany after they got married and they were living in Wisconsin. She wanted to care for her father, which, put that just off to the side, it's not a huge thing, but she cared for her father until his death. After he died, she joined her husband Leland out west. He was a gold prospector. Well, actually, I don't think he ever got into prospecting. He was a goods, dry goods shop owner who outfitted prospectors. And he fulfilled like the quintessential golden rule of business. In a gold rush,

• 6:19Josh Clark?

  don't prospect, sell shovels. That's exactly what he did.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you know what? You may not find gold, but you can always sell a shovel to a gold miner.

• 6:29Josh Clark?

  That's precisely right. Well, I speculate when you can- I don't know, regulate.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  No, I was about to say, man, if you don't rhyme that thing.

• 6:37Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I don't even know who you are.

• 6:39Josh Clark?

  I still didn't do a very good job, but at least it rhymed.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  I thought it was pretty good. So he made some pretty good money doing that, but he really, really got rich when he became one of the big four robber barons that put their money forth to finance the Central Pacific Railroad.

• 6:55Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  In 1861. And all of a sudden, they had this big life as wealthy people. And he said, well, why not just get into politics as well?

• 7:06Josh Clark?

  Well, the big four basically got him into politics to represent their interests, basically. Like, they put up some of their money, but for the most part, they used Leland Stanford's run as the governor of California and then later on as a senator in the United States Senate to basically lean on the government, to get the government to underwrite the building of the railroad, to make connections so that you could bribe people more easily. Like, it was a swindle. That's how those dudes made that railroad. They ended up with the monopoly. They secretly bought the Southern Pacific Railroad and all of a sudden, Leland

• 7:45Josh Clark?

  Stanford's the president of that now, too. So just to just kind of like just paint it with a big brush. The Stanfords made their money in very questionable ways. So just, just remember that. Because this is like such a, it's such a great example of American mythmaking, where some guy just basically fails upward and becomes super, super wealthy. And then, you know, very shortly after that, he becomes lionized as like this great heroic builder of America. And that's just, I'm just so sick of that. It still goes on today.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  I mean, haven't most of the robber barons been kind of kneecapped?

• 8:23Josh Clark?

  Uh, yeah, I think so. But I think at least some of them were legitimately philanthropists. I don't think Leland Stanford was legitimately a philanthropist. I get the impression, or I've actually seen it written, that basically they laundered their ill-gotten gains through the university to leave a prestigious legacy for themselves instead.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  All right. Well, they were smart for the first 18 years of their marriage and did not have kids. And then they ruin that all kind of later in life for them. When little Leland Jr. Was born, Jane was 39 at the time, which is especially for the time.

• 9:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  A bit of an advanced age to give birth. Certainly, you know, not without risk. And Leland Senior was, like you said, he got involved in politics. They also, I mean, they had their fingers in a lot of pies. They ran a few wineries. They raised horses. This is just a little kind of fun side note that Livia dug up.

• 9:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  You know, the very famous Edward Moybridge. His early motion picture film, when he set up 24 cameras and showed like a horse running, which A said like, hey, we can have something called motion pictures. And also said, hey, look, that horse has all of its four feet off the ground at the same time. That was done on their property, the Palo Alto Stock Farm. So just a fun little thing. And that's where Stanford University eventually would be.

• 9:51Josh Clark?

  Did you ever see the Jordan Peele movie, Nope?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:56Josh Clark?

  I thought that was a cool little, just a little Lon Yap. Where the, oh, I don't remember his name, but he was also in Get Out 2, the main guy.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:07Josh Clark?

  Where he, he's, his character is descended from the jockey that rode that horse.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought that was cool too. Daniel something, right?

• 10:16Josh Clark?

  I don't remember. I feel like a total jerk, but.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you can't remember everything off the dome.

• 10:22Josh Clark?

  But it turns out in real life that jockey's name was Dom, D O M M. They think maybe Gilbert Dom.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  So you know his name.

• 10:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but I looked it up this morning, so.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 10:36Josh Clark?

  That's it, smart guy.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  I'm glad everybody knows that guy's name.

• 10:39Josh Clark?

  Here we go.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  So sadly, Leland Jr. would not live very long. He died at 15. He went to Europe with his mom. And it was a pretty sad thing, obviously a tragedy for the family. But a very interesting thing happened at the funeral when a young woman named Bertha Berner was there. And met Jane would later write her a letter and say, hey, I think you could use a person like me in your life. We'll call it personal secretary or whatever, but basically your right hand person to kind of help you with everything that you need.

• 11:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like you said, like the, just the classic gilded age wife, right?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:22Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Along with a little spiritualism thrown in.

• 11:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was a big one. And you know, that gets kind of tossed around quite a bit. That, that the Stanfords in particular, Jane, were really heavy into spiritualism. Well, a lot of people were heavy into spiritualism at this time. So it was generally looked down upon from the halls of academia. So in a way, it was a little awkward for the university, for their founders to have been into spiritualism. But it wasn't just completely out of left field.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  No, not, not, you know, among, especially among sort of wealthy elites. They were into that kind of thing.

• 11:56Josh Clark?

  And also, I mean, there was a, that the death of Edward, or the death of Leland Jr. Was a really huge turning point. Apparently they were kind of dabbling in it, but after that, she kind of devoted herself to getting a message from, or getting in contact, I guess, with Leland Jr. Again, and she tried for a long time. And then I think in the end she was, she was dissatisfied. She couldn't find anybody that she considered legitimate enough to actually do it. Even though she believed it was possible, she, she found that everyone she came in contact with was a fraud or huckster.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  So, and she's probably right. So Berner gets this job. You know, people from the outside were like, man, she really works hard for, for Jane Stanford. Like she doesn't seem to have any time off. She kinda is run by Jane Stanford, but they were very close and she would be with her until the day she died, put a pin in that, and in fact, would get quite rich from her death. I think she got 15 grand. The other household staff got $1,000 each in the will, but Burner got 15 grand, which is about half a million today. So, not too bad.

• 13:06Josh Clark?

  No, not bad at all. Also, I just want to say, before we move on, the actor's name is Daniel Kaluuya.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Great. So, it was Leland Junior's death that actually inspired the founding of Stanford University. There are a couple of stories about how that might have happened. I think Leland took maybe the more acceptable mainstream version, which is, hey, it came to me in a dream after my son's death. But there was a medium, Maude Lord Drake, who said, no, that actually happened in a séance with me. It was a visitation from the afterworld that I mediated, and he just doesn't want to say that out loud. So, he just called it a dream.

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Her famous quote was, who has two thumbs? And was the medium who got Leland Junior to tell his parents that he wanted them to found a university? And she said, me.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, Maude Lord Drake.

• 14:00Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, and you could actually make a case that if the university was true to form at the time, it's quite possible that Stanford's claim that it was from, you know, this séance, but the university just basically whitewashed that over and it became a dream instead.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 14:20Josh Clark?

  So, Chuck, regardless of how it came about, the Stanford's said that although they had lost their son, now the children of California would become their children. And to do that, they founded Stanford University. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's one of the most prestigious universities in the world, as far as I know, certainly in the US. It was the cradle for our current tech explosion. And it's just a really great university. Its official name is Leland Stanford Junior University, after Leland Stanford Junior. Still today, that's what it's called. And if you look at the details of how it

• 15:00Josh Clark?

  was founded and what its mission was when it was opened, it's like the Stanford's definitely did a good job of opening a public university.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty unique. Tuition was free, first of all, so that was fairly unique. So it, you know, they let in students that couldn't afford to go to college otherwise.

• 15:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Jane said, "I want to make it a coed school." There were just a handful of those in the, in the United States at the time.

• 15:28Josh Clark?

  And also, "I'm doing Sergio."

• 15:31Speaker 02

  You're what?

• 15:32Josh Clark?

  "I'm doing Sergio," Jane said.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Oh, I got you.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  The other sort of odd thing was that it was not associated with a church. It was a Christian university, but it wasn't like, you know, Jane, again, was dabbling in the occult, so she, she had sort of loose, sort of a loose association with particular denominations. So it was a non-denominational Christian school, very much kind of a liberal arts thing at first. It would later, and in fact, you know, it was part of the friction between Jane and the eventual president on what kind of school it would be.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  She wanted it more liberal arts and he wanted it more science and research, research-based.

• 16:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but even out of the gate, apparently it was for preparing students for personal success and direct usefulness in life. One of the things they did was they created an extension service for local farmers to find out the latest agricultural techniques. They accepted high school shop classes as credits. Like, they, they were, it wasn't just this, it wasn't an elite institution meant to create a new generation of elites, like, say Harvard was at the time, just at the time.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  By the way, in my defense, I didn't recognize your Jane's Addiction line, because I think that lyric is wrong. I think it's "I'm done with Sergio."

• 16:58Josh Clark?

  Oh, I think that's the second verse.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 17:02Josh Clark?

  I will say anything to make myself right.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Okay, I just when he said doing Sergio, I was like, who the hell is Sergio?

• 17:10Josh Clark?

  But she was doing Sergio. That's the point.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:15Josh Clark?

  He treated her like a rag doll.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Well, see, now you're getting back on the good side of history.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 17:23Josh Clark?

  Thanks.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  All right, so Stanford is opening up. It's October 1st, 1891. Leland gives a great speech, Leland Senior, of course. And Jane apparently had a real banger of a speech written and she said that she didn't have the courage to actually do it. But had she, it would have gone over pretty well, I think, because in it, there was a plea to the students like, hey, we're a new school. You know, got to work out the kinks here, maybe be a little patient and hey, if you're a young male student here, you know, you have girls around, please treat these young ladies with great deference and you might have some kids who don't come from wealthy backgrounds because it's a free school, it maybe treat them well as well. So, you know, she has this great letter written and never says it publicly, unfortunately.

• 18:08Josh Clark?

  No, but I mean, all of these points support our overall point, like we said, which is they did a pretty good job of founding a university. Like the mission was great, the details were pretty great.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Better than we've done.

• 18:20Josh Clark?

  For sure. Ours is still kind of getting off the ground. It's just basically a grift right now.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:27Josh Clark?

  But hopefully we'll be able to build it into something real.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:31Josh Clark?

  There is a an issue with finding a president. Apparently the presidents they were looking for were like, I'm good here. I don't feel like moving out west. I think that was a big part of it. Like California was not like California as it is now. The Stanford University helped make Northern California what it is now. So it was still rugged, you know? They couldn't get all any, just any eastern college president to hop from his college out to Stanford. They finally found a former president of Indiana University named David Starr Jordan, who's also an ichthyologist by training and trade.

• 19:09Josh Clark?

  He finally took them up on the offer.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  That's right. And he also had a lot of pretty gross views on things.

• 19:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like super.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  In retrospect, he was into eugenics. He thought scientific racism was pretty great in that if you're unfit, like if you're disabled or if you're in prison, maybe we should just sterilize you. And yeah, women should get educated, but just so they can like be smarter in the home as homemakers.

• 19:40Josh Clark?

  He was also like a vocal pacifist, which you're kind of like, oh, okay, that's not bad. The reason why he was a pacifist was because he felt war promoted racial degradation because you send the fittest young men off to die. That leaves the weak to stay home and procreate and it degenerates the race or society back home. That was the reason he was a pacifist and anti-war. Yeah, there was nothing he could do right, basically, with that set of views.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I think we should probably take a break. Set the stage for Stanford's founding.

• 20:14Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And we'll be right back with more on Jane Stanford.

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• 23:44Josh Clark?

  Okay, so we're whittling down the people who could possibly have been murdered because Leland Jr.'s dead now. Now Leland Senior dies. There are very few people left of the Stanfords to have been the murder victim. Now it's just Jane, if that gives anything away.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  That's right. So Jane was left as the, basically the only trustee of the early university. And she had a situation going on with the US government where they were like, it was a lawsuit, 15 million bucks and $1893. And the kind of central point of it was, they, the government was like, hey, because you were, or your husband and your family was part, you know, like founded and has ownership stairs of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, you should also be responsible for that company's debts. And we helped finance this thing, so like, you need to pay us back for these bonds that we sold.

• 24:39Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  And she actually won that case, which all of a sudden, you know, they kind of had frozen her assets, so all of a sudden, these assets were open. And she gave a huge chunk of $1899 to Stanford, to the tune of 10 million bucks.

• 24:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and we should say, to her credit, before that, so this went on for six years, from what I can tell, during that six-year time, the court gave her a 300, in today's dollars, about a $365,000 a month allowance. And she spent most of it, she gave most of it to Stanford, to run Stanford with. So she wasn't just like, well, I'm good, good luck, Stanford. So, and then, yeah, after her assets weren't frozen, she was like, hey, how about 10 million dollars? And everyone said, God, this is great, how wonderful. And she's like, wait a second, there's a couple of strings I'm going to attach to this. And they were strings that you would find hard to swallow, like the kind of strings

• 25:36Josh Clark?

  you would put down your nose and pull out your mouth at the same time, back and forth? They were those kind of strings.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, she, she basically had total and complete control of what happened there, including like, how many trustees there would even be, so she wouldn't get a lot of pushback. Uh, like I said, she was a micromanager, but not to her. To her, she just wanted things done right.

• 25:59Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And she basically had complete control over the university.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Said, you know, like who could get in, who could get out, what teachers they could hire as staff. She said that they capped, even though it was her idea to make it a coed school, which is great, she capped it at 500 women. Because she didn't want it, she thought after that, people may think it's a women's college and that men might stop applying. And that cap was in place for a while, even after she died, until they got rid of it.

• 26:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I read that she also had been told rumors that the men students were being distracted by the women students. And Susan B. Anthony wrote her and was just appalled and was like, what are you doing? She stuck with it. She was very adamant about that. And like you said, I don't think it was until the 30s where they finally were like, we can't just keep it at 500. So they lifted that.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Starr, the president, did not like this at all. He didn't like having someone sort of that much in the business. It seems like they had a pretty friction-riddled relationship.

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Especially, you know, she, she tried to get some of the spiritualism in there. I mentioned before that she wanted to focus on the liberal arts, but she also wanted to create an academic chair in psychic psychology. She also tried to hire this philosopher named William James, who was a guy who was very much involved in the paranormal as a visiting professor.

• 27:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he was also the father of psychology. So he would have been quite a catch, but I think just his association with the paranormal made Jordan kind of like dismiss everything else.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could see that. She finally got this guy named Julius Gerbl. Not Gerbl's. I don't know if he dropped that S or not.

• 27:51Josh Clark?

  I would have.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  But, or I guess this was pre-World War II, so he didn't even know yet. But he, it seems like he was hired basically to kind of look out over the shoulder of David Starr Jordan, which he certainly didn't appreciate.

• 28:06Josh Clark?

  No, and he reported back to Jane Stanford that Jordan was basically a patron of the science department and anti-liberal arts departments, and that he was basically running the university like that. He was, he was going behind Jane Stanford's back to win that argument over whether it should be a science or a liberal arts college. And then one thing that really kind of made huge waves as far as her micromanagement went, you said that she wanted to have control over who was hired. She also felt like she was totally within her rights to say, "Fire that guy," for whatever reason. And there was a professor named Edward A. Ross, who was a social scientist, and he was very

• 28:49Josh Clark?

  much vocal in his support for William Jennings Bryan, who was a Democrat, and she did not like that. She was not in favor of William Jennings Bryan, so she told Jordan to fire him. And Jordan eventually buckled under pressure, and this became like a national scandal about whether there was academic freedom at all at Stanford. It was a huge deal.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think everyone sees where this is headed. And this, I guess we'll just classify as murder attempt number one. In January of 1905, there was a servant that put some water on her nightstand before Jane Stanford was going to bed in there in San Francisco. She drank some of it, said, "This doesn't taste quite right." So she went and gagged herself and made herself throw up, and then gave it to her secretary and said, "Here, you try this." She tried it and was like, "Nah, this doesn't taste right." So they sent it to a pharmacy and found that it in fact was poison. It was, it was rat poison, not, not full strychnine, but just sort of over the counter rat poison.

• 29:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is bad enough. I mean, it can kill you for sure. So this was, I mean, I can't imagine that, like if if somebody had put rat poison in your water. So she was like, I'm I'm getting out of here. I guess after the the report came back a few weeks later that it was rat poison. She went to Hawaii. I read that she was ultimately on her way to Japan and that Hawaii was just a stop. I also read that she was trying to get out of Dodge and get away from having been poisoned. And so news of this poisoning started to spread. And Jordan, president of Stanford, was like, nope, no scandals, please. We just had that huge deal with firing Edward A. Ross.

• 30:34Josh Clark?

  There was no poisoning. Jane Stanford doesn't think she was poisoned. It's all just some, you know, misunderstanding. So nothing to see here, everybody.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Right. So the media is not fully buying this, at least the local media. They they continue to kind of speculate and write about it. And investigate, you know, people that were on the scene, notably the servants that were in the house at the time. For a little while, they kind of cooked up a case because it seems like fully about anti-Chinese prejudice going on in California at the time of her Chinese cook. But there was no motive, no evidence at all. So that kind of went away. And then the police did come in. They questioned some of the servants. But everybody was exonerated by the cops in the end.

• 31:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, every single one. So Stanford also hired, Stanford, the university, I guess, through Jordan hired a private detective. And he did a, he did an investigation and basically was like, okay, sure, there was rat poison in the water. It was added after the fact for one servant to frame another. And I don't think any of the servants were named. It was just a theory that was like, good enough. We're not even going to publicize that one. Let's just let this die. Meanwhile, Jane Stanford has gone to Hawaii, remember? She's in Waikiki at the Moana Hotel, which is still there.

• 31:55Josh Clark?

  And she's taken two people with her, Bertha Berner, the secretary who's been with her for years now, who she was like, here, you taste this. And a new maid, May Hunter, who was not, I don't believe even on the staff at the time of that first poisoning attempt, she took both of them to Hawaii with her.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she's holed up there. We should point out that Berner did not want to go. She had an ill mother in California and she wanted to stay and be with her. Jane Stanford said, nope, you're coming to Hawaii with me.

• 32:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's why I pointed out how Jane Stanford went back to Albany to care for her father until he died.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  That's right. So a couple of weeks into Hawaii, this is February 28th, we'll call this murder, well, successful murder, not murder attempt number two. She said, hey, I got a little upset tum tum. Go get me some baking soda and water. And Berner went and did that. And around 11 o'clock, she's not feeling too good. She was like, I'm really, really sick. I think I've been poisoned again. And they call in a local doctor, Francis Humphries, who came to the hotel room. And by that time, Jane Stanford was in pretty bad shape.

• 33:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, she was showing some telltale signs of strychnine poisoning. Remember, somebody put rat poison in her Poland Springs water. That's strychnine. And if you take strychnine, some very, very telltale things take place over your body because strychnine interferes with your nerve receptors or your muscle receptors, I guess, along your spinal column. And you suddenly are having like massive, violent involuntary muscle clenching. And they follow like certain patterns or whatever. And Jane was following the same, I guess, progression of strychnine poisoning is certainly what it looked like. And ultimately, she died

• 33:56Josh Clark?

  with her body clenched still. And I think she died at 11:40 about.

• 34:02Josh Clark?

  But a little over 30 minutes after she had gotten up and said she thought she'd been poisoned.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, and well, I think that's a perfect time, actually, for act three to resume. Yeah?

• 34:14Josh Clark?

  This is where the gun goes off.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  All right, right after this, we'll be right back.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  If you wanna know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know.

• 34:33Josh Clark?

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• 34:55Josh Clark?

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• 35:33Speaker 02

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• 36:07Speaker 02

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• 36:14Josh Clark?

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• 36:33Josh Clark?

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• 37:25Speaker 02

  All right, so Jane Stanford is now dead. Her last words were, "This is a horrible death to die."

• 37:31Josh Clark?

  That's terrible.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Allegedly. And Jordan was like, "All right, this is no good. You know, it's no good if she was murdered, it's no good if it was suicide, like this is all just bad news. We have to kind of get this thing taken care of so the university can not be tainted by the death of this woman." And he gets a trustee, he flies out there with this guy Timothy Hopkins to Hawaii. They said they were going to get the body. And there was also a couple of San Francisco police detectives that went, a guy named Harry Reynolds and Jules Callenden of the Morse Detective Agency. They go there, obviously, to investigate this death

• 38:12Speaker 02

  because at the time Hawaii is, it's very rural, sort of, I think there wasn't a lot of trust in like either the, well, both the local cops and the local doctors.

• 38:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think it had been a territory for either three years or five years at that point. It was considered a backwater, essentially. I think also Jordan was getting there so he could do whatever he could to control the narrative. And those two detectives were working at the behest of the university, essentially, not the public. So a coroner's jury was convened on March 8th. Remember, she died on February 28th, so about a week later. And they heard three days of testimony. And after the three days of testimony, they adjourned for two minutes before they came back and said she was murdered by poison.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  That's right, but that was no good for Stanford University. So Jordan was like, alright, let me see if I can rewrite this narrative. He gets another physician in there, a guy named Dr. Waterhouse, has his own separate private investigation. Waterhouse doesn't examine the body. He just goes on the description of events as they happened. He heard Burner say, hey, you know, when we were at this picnic, she really ate a lot. And she had tummy trouble. That's why I was getting her that soda water at the end of the night. And he put out a four-page report that said, that was fully announced to the media,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  that no, it was not poisoning. She died of heart failure. And the local doctor and the local cops were pretty furious.

• 39:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so this is what Waterhouse came up with, and this is what Jordan took back to the mainland and presented to everybody and said, this is what really happened. This doctor said so. That she had overeaten tongue sandwiches, undercooked gingerbread, lots of coffee, a bunch of chocolate candy, had basically indigestion, made herself hysterical from the indigestion, and got so hysterical that her heart stopped.

• 40:11Josh Clark?

  That's how she died. That's basically what President Jordan came back and told the world. And it actually worked. It worked because he was a white man in a prominent position and people just listened to him because who are you going to listen to? This guy or the Hawaii authorities?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, the media was covering in Hawaii, the media was covering kind of their side of things. But in the lower 48, especially in San Francisco, that Jordan narrative was the one that got out. He was criticizing the local doctors. He was criticizing the local cops. He said, in fact, he flat out accused the local doctor there of adding strychnine after the death to make it look like a murder. And said, you know, Berner was a very close friend. There's no way that she would have been any part, you know, she was her trusted secretary for years. There's no way that she had any part in any of this.

• 41:08Josh Clark?

  And again, the San Francisco PD and the public and the press were like, okay, good enough for us. You said that the one person who was present at both poisonings is A-OK in your book? Great. She's off the hook. We're not even going to investigate her thoroughly.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it kind of went away from there. For a little while, the local papers in San Francisco covered it. You know, they said that there was still investigations ongoing and that people, you know, would be brought in and arrested or at least, you know, investigated. And that lasted for about a month and no charges were ultimately filed at all. And it was kind of like, that's the way it went until the early 2000s. It just kind of went cold until a writer named Robert W. P. Cutler, who was a neurology professor at Stanford and a physician, put out a book called The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford.

• 42:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and this was a big deal to question the orthodoxy, which was, like you said, for a century that she died of natural causes. That's just what the official line was. And that's, you know, the idea that she'd been poisoned just completely fell out of the public awareness or imagination until Cutler brought it back in 2003. And he was a neurology professor from Stanford. So he had like a certain amount of um, uh, medical background that he applied into this research. And one of the first things he did was investigate whether uh, Robert Star Jordan had any basis in um, questioning the the qualifications of Dr. Humphreys and the other doctors that were there. And he found that, no, actually, they did a really

• 42:47Josh Clark?

  good job of trying to revive her. And then once they, once she was dead, preserving the evidence, because it was so clear to these guys that it was um, strychnine poisoning, because she was showing all the telltale signs. So they preserved evidence in the uh, in the room with her. They preserved the um, sodium bicarbonate, I guess, jar, the spoon, the glass that had been served in, uh, the chamber pot, and some vomit of hers.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  That's gross.

• 43:16Josh Clark?

  It is gross, but not only did they preserve it, they got a judge to come in who was served as a witness while they handed it over to the sheriff. Then the judge accompanied the sheriff while he took this evidence to the chief sanitary officer at the um, Board of Health for Hawaii. And when they, when they carried out this autopsy, there were seven doctors and a toxicologist who worked on this autopsy. Um, three of the doctors hadn't been at the scene, so they hadn't, they hadn't seen, they were just working with just the body and all the evidence that they got from the body. And they had a mortician and a morgue assistant act as witnesses. Essentially, you could not do a better job of handling a suspected murder poison case than these guys did in Hawaii.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he also found a letter from Jordan to the president of the Board of Trustees that had, you know, just a lot of different explanations. He said, if the tonic theory of strychnine is not acceptable, you have the other that it was put in by the doctor just to bolster up his case. And after he had time to read up on the symptoms a little, he's a man without professional or personal standing. So he was, it seems like it was just such a clear cover up that he was offering up all these different theories of what could have happened besides the obvious.

• 44:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  And Cutler was like, you know, it is super obvious. He didn't come out and like accuse anyone, but he did sort of offer some ideas. Maybe Berner, the personal secretary, maybe she was there and had the opportunity to do something, even though she didn't have much of a motive. Jordan certainly had the motive, but he wasn't there. So maybe those two were in cahoots or something.

• 44:56Josh Clark?

  Yes. So that's kind of where it sat. This 2003 book, The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford, it got some pretty good press that's still around today, that, you know, book reviews and stories and stuff like that. And that just kind of faded away again, even though he had kind of upset the balance that had been around for 100 years. There wasn't anything major about it until about 20 years later, another book from another Stanford professor, a historian named Richard White came out and he just came out and said it. Who Killed Jane Stanford was the title of his book. And he, like Cutler, did a really

• 45:37Josh Clark?

  good job of digging into the story and finding new evidence that, as far as he's concerned, pointed to the murderer.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he said that Jordan definitely covered this thing up. But he said, I don't know if he would have been the murderer, though, because. Just her dying period was not good for the university.

• 45:57Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  You know, either way, if it was suicide, that's no, no good. If it's murder, that's certainly no good. So he doesn't, he didn't think that Jordan would have gone that far because Jordan really wanted to protect Stanford at all costs.

• 46:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And you might be like, well, what's the, what's the problem with that? Well, the murder, that's a scandal. The suicide was a legal problem because it would call into question her, her, um, her mental fitness at the time that she had, uh, offered that grant. And so all of a sudden, heirs, people connected to him, relatives would have come out of the woodwork, uh, challenging that $10 million grant and saying, no, that, that money's supposed to go to us instead. So he really did have every reason to cover this up. And it definitely seems that that's, that was his motivation. He, but like you said, he probably had nothing to do with the murder. Instead, Richard White trains his spotlight on Bertha Berner.

• 46:55Josh Clark?

  And he disagrees with Cutler, who Cutler was like, she didn't really have a motive, even though she had opportunity. He was like, they weren't the best motives, but there are a couple of motives that she had. One, she knew that she was getting an inheritance and maybe she wanted it sooner than later. And two, she could have just gotten sick of basically being, um, having to devote her life to Jane Stanford because that's what was expected of her.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. The job that she voluntarily asked for.

• 47:25Josh Clark?

  Yes, but Jane Stanford like tried to keep her from having any kind of personal life. And that was not the kind of person Bertha Berner was. So that was just a constant source of tension between them. And who knows, supposedly both of them were like, no, we're actually good friends. But, uh, there were people on the outside who were like, it's kinda, I'm not sure if they're actually friends.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  That's right. So that's it. That's the death of Jane Stanford, uh, probably never be solved. Uh, Jordan continued to work there as university president until 1913. Berner lived pretty well, you know, because she had all that dough from the will. And she, you know, people were suspicious of her, but she basically lived a pretty decent life until she died in 1945.

• 48:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, she wrote two biographies on Jane Stanford before she died, and neither one of them revealed much of anything. So it's almost teasing, tantalizing, if you will. That's it.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Well, Susan Jott said, "That's it." It's time for Listener Mail.

• 48:25Josh Clark?

  You bet.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I'm going to call this weird coincidence, because we have these episodes that come out from time to time that line up with the news. And that's what happened with our lasers episode. It came out in real time today, the day after we learned that a laser was used to shoot down a drone at the El Paso airport and close the airport down.

• 48:48Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  So this is Josh in Chuckers Equal Deep State. "Secures chin strap to my tinfoil hat. I'm officially on to you, guys. You release an episode about lasers the day after the FAA closes the El Paso airport, and their cover story is they had to shoot drones with their new lasers. You might slip this one past some of the other sheep listening, but oh, no, not this guy. I want to know who you really work for, guys. Is it Jerry? Or does it go all the way to the top? Well, consider not blowing the whistle on this conspiracy if you did an episode on bicycles or the history of mountain biking. Those are my demands, and that is from Dan."

• 49:26Josh Clark?

  Yes, Dan, we work for Jerry. Jerry's actually an acronym like Spectre, but we're not at liberty to say what it stands for.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 49:34Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Dan. You got us figured out. We're going to have some goons come to your house, and it's not going to be pleasant for you. Maybe that'll teach you not to email and shoot off your big mouth from now on. If you want to be like Dan and have things happen to you, you can send us an email, too. Send it off to [email protected].

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 50:13Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. Introducing Voices of Vivgard. Vivgard is also known as its generic name, Efgart Tigamod Alpha F-Cab. And this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease.

• 50:54Josh Clark?

  Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of Vivgard. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of Vivgard on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client, paid or sponsored.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.