Campus Crimes: The Murder of Jane Stanford

In the first of our four-part limited series "Campus Crimes," Vanessa breaks down the 1905 murder of Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who was poisoned to death in a Honolulu hotel room. A coroner's jury ruled it murder, the evidence was clear, and the prime suspect had motive and opportunity. But the university's own president intervened, hired a compliant doctor, and replaced a murder verdict with "heart failure" in a cover-up that held for a hundred years. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join atcrimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

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

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus, Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:42Vanessa Richardson?

  A university is supposed to be the one place built for the truth, a place that gathers the evidence, follows it wherever it leads, and isn't afraid of what it finds. That's the promise. That's what all the marble and the mottos are for. So what happens when the ugliest truth of all turns up on its own doorstep? When the person who's been murdered is the woman who built the place? In 1905, Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, was poisoned to death. By then, she knew she had enemies. She'd spent years making them herself, but she never guessed who was really coming for her. And once she was dead, the people who ran her university made a choice. They decided the truth about

• 1:27Vanessa Richardson?

  her death was more dangerous than a lie. So they buried it with the help of crooked doctors, a compromised police department, and the university's own president.

• 1:56Vanessa Richardson?

  This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and for the next four Sundays, I'm taking you onto the American university campus for our next special series, Campus Crimes. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crime House Plus subscriber, all four episodes of Campus Crimes are available right now, completely ad-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap Try Free on the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page on Apple Podcasts. Along with early access to this series, you'll also get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early.

• 2:39Vanessa Richardson?

  College is a place of enormous promise. It's where futures are built and young minds are nourished, where people arrive to become who they're going to be. But that same place can also become the setting for something monstrous. Over these four Sundays, we're looking at four crimes that erased the very futures a campus exists to create. Bright lives cut short in the place that was supposed to launch them. And in each case, when the worst happened, the people in charge had to decide what they'd protect: the person who was harmed, or the institution's good name. Before we dive in, a quick note: this episode includes discussion of murder and poisoning,

• 3:22Vanessa Richardson?

  so please listen with care. Today, we start at the very top, with the woman whose name graces one of the world's top universities: Jane Stanford, co-founded Stanford University, bankrolled it out of her own fortune, and ran it almost single-handedly. She was a former First Lady of California and one of the wealthiest, most influential women in the country. And at 76 years old, she was poisoned to death on a trip to Hawaii. There was an autopsy, there was a coroner's jury, and there was a verdict, which the university she built then spent enormous effort making sure the world would never believe. In this

• 4:03Vanessa Richardson?

  episode, we'll take you through the empire Jane built, the enemies she made along the way, the poison that ended her life, the cover-up over her death, and the answer that took a century to surface. And running underneath all of it, one question: what will an institution do to protect itself?

• 4:30Vanessa Richardson?

  For most of her life, Jane Stanford's story followed the script written for wealthy women of her time. She was born in Albany, New York, in 1828, one of several children in a comfortable, stable home. She got a good education, and by the time she was 22, she'd married a lawyer named Leland Stanford. That's the moment her real story starts, because Jane's new husband was about to become one of the richest men in America. After a few years practicing law, Leland traveled west to chase the California Gold Rush. Not by digging, but by selling supplies to the people who did. Jane stayed behind to care for her ailing father. When he died in 1855, she joined her husband and watched

• 5:15Vanessa Richardson?

  him make his real fortune. Leland understood that the Gold Rush had set the whole country in motion, and he wanted to be the one moving it, by helping found the Central Pacific Railroad and becoming its president. A railroad that size needed money and political muscle. So Leland got into politics. In 1861, he won the governorship of California, with Jane turning their home into a social headquarters. The dinners, the luncheons, all designed to raise her husband's profile. As governor, he steered public money and land toward his railroad. Then he left office and poured everything back into the company. Building

• 5:58Vanessa Richardson?

  it was a monumental feat, clawing a rail line up and over the Sierra Nevada mountains through solid granite and brutal winters, at the cost of enormous sums of money and many laborers' lives. When the line was finished, it stitched the young country together from coast to coast, and it changed the way Americans lived. It also made Leland and his partners into something America hadn't quite seen before: men of almost limitless wealth and political reach, the kind the newspapers would come to call robber barons. The Stanford fortune swelled into one of the largest in the country. It bought influence, deference, and the freedom to do more or less whatever they wanted, and the company only grew from

• 6:42Vanessa Richardson?

  there. Leland became one of the big four railroad barons of his era, and when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the Stanfords became staggeringly rich. They lived in a 50-room mansion in San Francisco. They kept a small army of servants. They spent months at a time touring Europe, mixing with artists and politicians. Jane had everything money could buy.

• 7:10Vanessa Richardson?

  But the railroad wasn't Jane's proudest achievement. It was giving birth to her son, Leland Jr., the year before. For almost two decades of marriage, Jane had desperately wanted a child. And at 39 years old, an age when pregnancy was rare and dangerous, she finally got one. Junior arrived healthy and became the absolute center of Jane's world. She and Leland built his whole world around what he loved. Junior was obsessed with trains, hardly a surprise, given his father, and filled his room with drawings of steam engines and railcars. The family even kept a workroom where he could tinker with his own miniature engines. They wanted him to have a real childhood, too, so they

• 7:54Vanessa Richardson?

  bought a sprawling farm in nearby Palo Alto, turning it into thousands of acres where they bred and raced horses. There, Junior had his own pony, and rode and fished and roamed. And they wanted him polished for high society: the best tutors money could buy, fluent in French, steeped in European history. They took him everywhere, from the opera houses and museums of Europe to an audience with the Pope. It was a boyhood almost no one else on earth could have given a child, which made what happened next all the more devastating.

• 8:34Vanessa Richardson?

  In early 1884, when Junior was 15, he and Jane were deep into one of those long European tours. In Greece, picking through ancient ruins in knee-deep snow, Jane noticed her son looked pale. They hurried south to Florence for the warmer air, but he only got worse. A doctor diagnosed him with typhoid fever. That was a bacterial infection spread through contaminated food or water that, in the years before antibiotics, killed a substantial share of the people it struck. For three weeks, a team of physicians fought his fever, waiting for it to break. It never did. In March 1884, Leland Stanford Junior died. He was 15 years old.

• 9:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Jane and Leland were shattered, and out of that grief came a decision that would define the rest of Jane's life. According to some accounts, Leland had a dream after Junior died in which the boy urged his parents to keep living for the good of humanity. Whether or not that's literally true, it captured what they set out to do: turn their private loss into a public good. They would build something in their son's name, give a generation of other people's children the kind of education they'd given him. So in 1885, they founded Leland Stanford Junior University on their farmland in Palo Alto. The loss of Junior hollowed his parents out.

• 10:04Vanessa Richardson?

  For a while, they were simply two grieving people with more money than almost anyone alive and nothing they wanted to spend it on. The university became their answer. And for Jane in particular, it became the purpose that would organize the rest of her life, the reason to keep going, and the thing she would ultimately guard with everything she had. For Jane, it wasn't a charity project. It was a mission and an obsession, a school that would be progressive, affordable, and, unusual for the time, open to women as well as men. Then, eight years later, in 1893, Jane endured another tragedy when Leland died of heart failure at 69.

• 10:48Vanessa Richardson?

  In the span of a single decade, she'd lost her only child and her husband. In response, she poured herself even deeper into the university and into a memorial she built at the heart of it. On campus, Jane oversaw a great stone compound, a soaring memorial arch, a church, a museum, and a mausoleum where her husband and son were entombed. She spent hours inside it, praying and, she believed, talking to them. Her spiritualism wasn't as strange then as it might sound now. In Gilded Age America, plenty of respectable people attended séances and consulted mediums convinced the dead could still be reached.

• 11:31Vanessa Richardson?

  It was common, although it was controversial. And at the university Jane was building, it would soon put her on a collision course with the man in charge of it. Leland's death left Jane exposed. He'd made a lot of enemies over a long ruthless career, and with him gone, they turned to her. The people coming after Jane weren't strangers. Leland's old business partners had long grumbled that he'd used company money to build the family's mansions and bankroll the university. And with Leland gone, they wanted Jane to answer for the railroad's enormous debts. In their eyes, she was sitting on a fortune

• 12:12Vanessa Richardson?

  that partly belonged to them, and they meant to collect. Then the federal government sued the Stanford estate for some $15 million it claimed Leland owed, a sum that could have bankrupted the university before it truly began. For years, the university's survival genuinely hung in the balance. Between the railroad's creditors and the government's lawsuit, the money Jane needed to keep Stanford's doors open was frozen or under threat. And there were stretches where the whole enterprise could simply have collapsed before it found its footing. That it didn't was largely down to Jane's sheer stubbornness. Because she fought the lawsuits with everything she had.

• 12:56Vanessa Richardson?

  She hired a formidable lawyer, who was a former judge, and she won. The government never collected a cent. But the attacks weren't only about money. Around the same time, a university employee publicly accused the Stanfords of building their fortune on the backs of exploited railroad workers. And uncomfortably, the charge was true. Jane was no saint, and she knew it. She had her own skeletons, and she decided that whatever it cost and whatever she had to do, the university would survive her. From the start, Jane's vision for the school was genuinely radical. She wanted it to be affordable and open to men and women alike.

• 13:40Vanessa Richardson?

  And she insisted the university have no religious affiliation at all. It would be a place of learning for everyone, built in her son's memory. And she meant to make sure it turned out exactly the way she pictured it. Jane was a polarizing woman. Some people found her domineering and difficult. Others thought she was generous and far ahead of her time. Either way, she wasn't afraid to rub people the wrong way. To protect the school, she ran it like it was hers. Because to her, it was. And as the university's co-founder, she involved herself in the smallest details of running the place: hiring, firing, curriculum, spending, consulting on decision after decision

• 14:24Vanessa Richardson?

  that, on paper, weren't hers to make. More and more, she collided with the man she and Leland had hired to actually run the place: the university's first president, David Starr Jordan. And he wasn't about to let Jane get her way. On paper, David Starr Jordan ran the university's daily life, including who got hired and who got fired. Jane Stanford saw it differently. As co-founder and president of the Board of Trustees, she involved herself in all of it. And the two of them constantly butted heads

• 15:08Vanessa Richardson?

  over what the university should even be. Jordan was a nationally known scientist and a leading champion of eugenics, which was the belief that humanity could be improved by discouraging or preventing the people it judged unfit from having children. Now, we recognize eugenics for what it is: deeply racist, ableist, and xenophobic. But at the time, it was a fashionable idea in elite circles. Jordan was one of its most prominent champions, an advocate of forcibly sterilizing those he deemed unfit. To Jordan, a hard-nosed man of science, Jane's séances were an embarrassment. To Jane, Jordan was arrogant and overreaching.

• 15:52Vanessa Richardson?

  They were a mismatch in almost every way. But what actually drove them apart day to day wasn't ideology, it was control. In public, Jane and Jordan stayed civil. But in private, it was open warfare. He resented her meddling. She distrusted his every move. And it wasn't their first fight. Earlier, Jane had forced Jordan to push out a professor whose politics she disliked. He'd spoken up for a presidential candidate she opposed. And the firing blew up into a public scandal about academic freedom, with the university accused of punishing scholars for their beliefs. It was a preview of just how far Jane would go to get her way.

• 16:37Vanessa Richardson?

  By 1904, when Jane was 75 years old, she'd stopped trusting Jordan entirely. She was so convinced he was mismanaging the school and hiring his own friends that she enlisted a professor she trusted to keep a quiet paper trail of Jordan's movements and writings and report it all back to her. Basically, she was building a case to fire him. In early 1905, she got the opening she'd been waiting for. There was an incident at the university library where a professor behaved inappropriately toward a young woman. When it was reported, Jordan handed out discipline. But he punished the librarian who'd blown the whistle, not the professor.

• 17:20Vanessa Richardson?

  Turns out, he was Jordan's friend. For Jane, that was the last straw. On the night of January 13, 1905, the 76-year-old gathered the Board of Trustees at her San Francisco mansion and pressed them to fire him. Okay, hold on to the timing here because of what came next the very next evening, barely 24 hours later. The evening of January 14, Jane was getting ready for bed. She kept a bottle of spring water on her nightstand. She poured a glass and drank, and it tasted wrong: bitter. Alarmed, Jane forced herself to throw up,

• 18:02Vanessa Richardson?

  then called her secretary and a maid and had them each take a sip. They agreed, something was off. She sent the bottle out to be analyzed. Weeks later, the result came back. The water was laced with strychnine, a poison bitter enough to taste and, in a large enough dose, able to kill a person in a matter of minutes. There was no denying it. Someone had tried to murder Jane Stanford, and she had no idea who. For Jane, the discovery was terrifying. She'd known for years that she had enemies: people who wanted her money, her power, or just wanted her out of the way. But she'd never imagined any of them would try to kill her. And now, she couldn't think straight.

• 18:46Vanessa Richardson?

  She was 76, exhausted, and fighting a heavy cold. And the harder she tried to work out who was behind it, the more her mind seemed to fog over. Jane decided she needed to get away somewhere warm. And on February 15, 1905, she boarded a steamship bound for Japan by way of Hawaii with a handful of servants and her personal secretary, a woman named Bertha Burner, who'd been at her side for more than 20 years. That didn't mean Jane was running from her problems at home. She was planning to fire Jordan the moment she got home, with the board's blessing or without it. She just never got the chance.

• 19:29Vanessa Richardson?

  By the end of February, Jane had settled in at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu. On the night of February 28th, as she got ready for bed, her stomach was bothering her. She'd overdone it on sweets at a picnic that day, and she asked Bertha for a spoonful of baking soda in water, something she took now and then to settle her digestion. Just after 11, the household woke to Jane screaming. She said she couldn't control her body, and she was certain she'd been poisoned again. She begged for a doctor. When he arrived shortly after, the doctor found her rigid, struggling to breathe, her jaw clenching shut. He tried to get medicine into her, but her body had already locked up.

• 20:11Vanessa Richardson?

  Her jaws clamped, her legs stiff, hands balled into fists. But Jane was fully aware of what was happening to her. She cried out how horrible it was to die this way. Within minutes, the convulsions took her. A second doctor came running, and together they tried everything they knew, even pumping her stomach. It was no use. Jane Stanford was dead at 76 years old. The men who'd fought to save her were left standing over the body of the most famous woman in California, certain they'd just watched her be murdered. And they did something that a century later would matter enormously: they treated the

• 20:54Vanessa Richardson?

  room as a crime scene. They gathered the glass, the spoon, the baking soda, the leftover water, and handed all of it to the authorities. Seven physicians and a toxicologist performed an autopsy. A coroner's jury then heard three days of testimony. And it reached a clear, formal conclusion: Jane Stanford had died of strychnine poisoning, the very same poison found in her water bottle back in San Francisco one month earlier. There wasn't any reason not to believe it. The evidence had been preserved the moment Jane died. It had been examined by trained physicians, weighed under oath, and argued out in public

• 21:37Vanessa Richardson?

  by people with no personal stake in the outcome. Left alone, the process might have led somewhere: to a suspect, to a motive, to a trial. But it was not going to be left alone. And as a result, Jane Stanford's death would remain a mystery. After Jane Stanford's death, the newspapers didn't wait long to pounce. Within days, they were reporting Jane's passing as murder, floating suspects and motives, a lot of it lurid and openly racist, scapegoating Jane's Chinese servants on no real evidence.

• 22:22Vanessa Richardson?

  And that alarmed the one person with the most to lose from a scandal: David "Star" Jordan. If Jane had been murdered, there would be a trial, and a trial could drag the Young University and Jordan himself through the mud. So he took action. Jordan sailed for Honolulu on March 4th, and he stepped off the boat on the 10th, the morning after the coroner's jury delivered its verdict of strychnine poisoning. He brought two San Francisco detectives with him. Hawaiian officials had agreed to hand the case over to them once their coroner's jury finished its work, which gave Jordan exactly what he needed: control of the investigation.

• 23:04Vanessa Richardson?

  And his very first step was to hire a local doctor to produce a second opinion, one who hadn't been in the room, hadn't seen Jane die, and hadn't attended the autopsy. To understand what happened next, we need to talk about Jane's personal secretary, Bertha Berner. She was a German immigrant in her early 40s, and she'd worked for Jane for more than 20 years, keeping her calendar, doing her shopping, running the household staff, and traveling at her side everywhere she went. By the standards of the day, Jane had treated her well: extra money, gifts of clothing, help for Bertha's own family when they needed it.

• 23:44Vanessa Richardson?

  On paper, they were mistress and devoted companion, all but inseparable, which is exactly what made what came out next so startling. Because there was one obvious suspect: Bertha. She'd been present for both poisonings, the one in San Francisco and the one in Honolulu. In front of the coroner's jury, she'd played the grieving, devoted employee. She said she was always the one to prepare Jane's baking soda drink, that Jane hadn't taken it since the start of January, and that someone could have tampered with it without her knowing. On its face, it sounded reasonable, but when the two detectives from San Francisco sat

• 24:27Vanessa Richardson?

  her down, a very different woman emerged. Bertha admitted that she hadn't wanted to make this trip at all. She resented how Jane controlled her. 12-hour days, always on call, allowed out maybe one night a week, dragged around the world whether she liked it or not, refused time off even when her own mother was sick. Years earlier, she'd briefly quit over exactly that. This time, she'd begged to stay behind, and Jane had said no. And Bertha admitted she'd still been trying to talk her way out of it on the ship over. And there was more. Jane disapproved of Bertha's love life, suspecting that she was having an affair with the butler.

• 25:11Vanessa Richardson?

  And another servant had reported that Bertha was skimming the household cash Jane gave her for errands, splitting it with that same butler. Bertha admitted to doing it, although she insisted she'd stopped. Piece by piece, she was handing the detectives a motive. Here's where the story turns. Jordan sat in on that interview himself, which was strange, but he understood exactly what he was hearing. His prime suspect was also the one person alive who knew everything about him and Jane, including just how badly Jane had wanted him gone. He couldn't let Bertha take a witness stand, so instead of pursuing her, he protected her.

• 25:56Vanessa Richardson?

  And she had every reason to accept the arrangement. Jane's will left most of her staff $1,000 each. It left Bertha $15,000, the equivalent of roughly half a million dollars today. But only if she stayed the picture of the loyal companion. So when Jordan arranged for her to be interviewed by his hired doctor, Bertha's story changed yet again. This time, there was no strychnine and no violent death, just a frail old woman who'd slipped away peacefully. She even rewrote the day Jane died. No picnic sweets now, but a cold, windy afternoon that had chilled Jane and made her ill. It didn't hold together.

• 26:39Vanessa Richardson?

  It had actually been a warm day up in the 70s. But it gave the hired doctor what he needed. He ruled that Jane Stanford had died of heart failure. When Jordan announced that finding to the press, the medical community in Hawaii was furious. The hired doctor had spent only a few days on his report. He hadn't been at the scene or the autopsy. He'd never testified under oath. His conclusion rested almost entirely on interviews with Bertha and a maid. The doctor who'd actually knelt at Jane's bedside, watching her die, said so plainly, and for his trouble, Jordan's detectives leaned on him to take it back.

• 27:21Vanessa Richardson?

  And Jordan accused him of planting the poison himself after Jane's death. The charge was baseless, but it didn't matter. This was a university president and celebrated scientist against a doctor from a recently annexed island, and Jordan's version was the one that carried. As for the hired doctor, once he was paid, he left the country to start a new life abroad on a rubber plantation, which Jordan himself had invested in. So step back and look at what Jordan had actually pulled off. He'd taken a death ruled a poisoning by a sworn jury and a room full of physicians, and overturned it on the say-so of a single doctor who wasn't involved in the process

• 28:06Vanessa Richardson?

  at all. It was brazen, and it worked. None of this happened quietly, though. Jane Stanford was one of the most famous women in America, and the public was ravenous for every detail of her death. That appetite cut both ways for Jordan. It meant enormous scrutiny. But it also meant that if he could hand the press a clean, respectable ending, they would carry it to the whole country for him. On March 15th, thousands lined the streets of Honolulu for Jane's funeral procession to a service at Central Union Church. Afterward, her body was loaded onto a steamship home.

• 28:47Vanessa Richardson?

  About a week later, on March 21st, it reached San Francisco. And that very night, the city's acting police chief announced the official finding: Jane Stanford had died of natural causes. Case closed. Jordan had friends throughout the police department, and by then, the detectives had muddied the story so thoroughly that even if it had somehow gone to trial, no prosecutor could have won. Everyone got the outcome they wanted. It's worth pausing on how many people that took: a university president, two detectives, a hired doctor, a cooperative police department, a frightened secretary.

• 29:31Vanessa Richardson?

  None of them had to pull a trigger or measure out a poison. They only had to look away, or shade the truth, or sign their name to something they knew was false. That's usually how an institution protects itself: not with a single villain, but with a dozen ordinary people, each deciding it's easier to go along than to make trouble. And once the machinery started turning, it was almost impossible to stop.

• 30:02Vanessa Richardson?

  So who killed Jane Stanford? For that, we have to jump forward because the "natural causes" story held for about 100 years. Then, in 2003, a Stanford neurologist named Robert Cutler published a book arguing what the doctors in that hotel room had known all along: that Jane was murdered. And in 2022, a Stanford historian, Richard White, went further, laying out the case for who did it. White's conclusion is that David "Star" Jordan almost certainly wasn't the killer. He cared about the university more than his own job, and a murder would have been far too great a risk.

• 30:43Vanessa Richardson?

  What he wanted was for the whole thing to vanish, and a "natural causes" ruling did more than shield the school's reputation. It also headed off a second dangerous possibility: suicide. Strychnine was a common way people took their own lives back then, and if Jane's death were ruled a suicide, someone might challenge whether she'd been of sound mind when she wrote her will, which could have cost the university the enormous fortune she'd left it. A quiet, natural death solved every problem at once. It's worth spelling out just how much was at stake. The bulk of Jane's fortune was earmarked for the university's endowment, the money

• 31:24Vanessa Richardson?

  meant to keep the school alive for good, with the rest going to her family and staff. A suicide ruling could have thrown the will open to challenge, and if the will fell, all of it, the endowment included, might have evaporated. For a man whose entire aim was to secure the university's future, a quiet, natural death wasn't just convenient, it was everything. Which points, in Richard White's telling, to Bertha acting alone. Her motive: freedom from a woman who controlled every hour of her life, without losing the inheritance that depended on her loyalty.

• 32:05Vanessa Richardson?

  The strychnine most likely came from a pharmacist she was close to, a man with a criminal record who could have sold it to her off the books. And the physical trail fits. After the board meeting on January 13th, Bertha talked Jane into staying the night at the San Francisco mansion, even though the rest of the staff was already waiting at the Palo Alto House. And that night came the first clumsy dose, strong enough that Jane could taste it. Before the trip, Bertha got advice on how to disguise it better. In Hawaii, the second dose went down, with just enough poison left in the glass for the coroner to find. And there was a packet of baking soda discovered among Jane's things in Honolulu, with exactly one dose missing.

• 32:49Vanessa Richardson?

  A packet Bertha had claimed she never brought. But by then, she was on Jordan's side, and his detectives never followed any of it up. Bertha was gossiped about in the papers, but never treated as a serious suspect. And once she was safely back in San Francisco, she wrote Jordan a letter, thanking him for his help. There's one stranger possibility, and it comes from Richard White, too. Bertha may have been a spiritualist herself, a medium, according to one of Jane's own relatives, and Jane spoke constantly of longing to rejoin the husband and the son she'd lost. So it's possible, just possible, that the woman who poisoned her believed she was doing

• 33:33Vanessa Richardson?

  her a kindness, easing her at last into the next life. But we'll never know, because no one was ever charged with the murder of Jane Stanford. What's remarkable is that the truth surfaced at all, and that it came from inside the very institution that had buried it. Robert Cutler, the neurologist, went back through the surviving medical records and recognized the unmistakable signature of strychnine. Richard White, the historian, spent years in the archives painstakingly rebuilding the investigation Jordan had dismantled: the shifting stories, the paid-off doctor, the evidence no one chased down.

• 34:18Vanessa Richardson?

  For 100 years, though, none of that was public. The official record said heart failure. The obituaries said heart failure. Generation after generation passed the story down as a sad, ordinary death: an old woman's heart giving out on vacation, while the woman herself lay in a mausoleum on the campus she'd built, her murder unmentioned and unsolved. The cover-up worked. The institution got everything it set out to protect: the respectful funeral, the untarnished name, the fortune Jane left behind, the university itself. And today, thousands of students walk past that mausoleum where Jane, Leland, and their

• 35:03Vanessa Richardson?

  son are buried, on their way to a class at one of the finest universities on Earth. Which is exactly what Jane wanted. She just never got justice for the fact that someone killed her on the way there.

• 35:34Vanessa Richardson?

  A university is supposed to be devoted to the truth. And when the truth about Jane Stanford's death turned out to be ugly, and dangerous, and bad for business, the first thing her university did was bury it, successfully for 100 years. The people who ran it decided the institution mattered more than the woman who built it. That instinct to close ranks around a death, to protect the name above all, is the thread that runs through every story in this series. Next Sunday, we stay on campus, but we move from a founder to a faculty member, when a brilliant scientist is denied tenure and walks into a meeting of her own department with a gun.

• 36:19Vanessa Richardson?

  And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday and Thursday. Thanks so much for listening. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on Instagram @CrimeHouse. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Serial Killers and Murderous Minds listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month.

• 37:02Vanessa Richardson?

  To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Laurie Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Kapp, Alyssa Fox, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 37:42Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.