Just a year into David’s presidency, Leland Stanford had died and left Jane in charge of affairs. And it was turning out that Jane was not such a fan of the swashbuckling giant after all. She expressed concern about the amount of time and money David was devoting to fish. She wanted the university to expand in other directions, such as, say… the scientific study of spiritualism, where they might find some newfangled technologies that lead to breakthroughs in contacting the dead, such as Jane and Leland's son who died at 15, in whose memory the university was founded. She was also concerned over David’s hiring practices, accused him of nepotism, calling the men he hired in his science departments his "pets."
Her concerns about David's leadership grew to the point where she appointed a spy to keep tabs on him. The spy was a professor in the German department who, after a few years of watching, caught David doing something that didn’t look great. It was not David himself, but a long time student-turned friend of his, who as head of zoology department and a married man, had an affair with a young Stanford woman and were discovered one day by a librarian, who came to David demanding that he be fired for such impropriety. But David did not want to lose this “brilliant taxonomic mind" friend of his, so, thinking on his feet, he threatened the librarian with “incarceration in the insane asylum for sexual perversity” (often code for homosexuality) if he breathed a word of it to anyone else. That succeeded in shutting the librarian up—he quit Stanford, left town. But somehow Jane’s spy got wind of the whole saga, and typed it up in a formal letter to Jane.
In it, he accused David of “whitewashing” a sex scandal to protect a friend, and he claimed that this was far from a lone incident. According to the spy, David ran the university like a “gang,” with faculty members afraid of disagreeing with him for fear of “risking their heads.”
Jane wrote via signed letter to the senior trustee of the school that David’s moral shortcomings had “been painfully evident to me for a long time.” By the end of 1904, rumors abounded that Mrs. Stanford planned to replace David.
Then Jane died, unexpectedly one night in early 1905 while traveling in Hawaii.
On that fatal, sunny day, Jane took a carriage with her entourage to a seaside lookout for a scenic picnic, spending hours sitting in shade, enjoying ocean view, snacking, reading.
In the late afternoon, they returned to the hotel, rested for a bit, and had a light dinner of soup. Then, as Jane was readying herself for bed, she asked one of her assistants, Bertha, to leave out her medications—baking soda and herbal cascara capsules to help with digestion. Bertha left out a spoonful of baking soda and one cascara capsule, and around 9:00 p.m. she and another assistant May retired to their room across the hall.
At approximately 11:15, Jane’s assistants were awakened by cries coming from across the hall. “Bertha! May!” Jane called. “I am so sick!” They hurried to Jane’s room, opened the door, and found Jane keeled over. She was having trouble opening her mouth, her jaw muscles beginning to clamp down against her will. Through widened eyes and barricaded teeth, Jane bleated, “I have no control of my body. I think I have been poisoned again.”
By that point, the man staying next door, having heard the commotion, had rushed over to help. He ran for a doctor. A few minutes later, a sleepy, doe-eyed Dr. Francis Humphris arrived, medicine bag in hand. He sat with Jane, gently palpating her jaw, trying to coax her muscles into relaxing, and finally yanking out her dentures so he could give her some mustard water to induce vomiting. But it was no use. Jane looked at Dr. Humphris with eyes wide as her body began to contort in stranger and stranger ways. Her toes pigeoned inward, her fists clenched into rocks, and her legs splayed open into an unseemly spread-eagle. Helpless, horrified, she stared at something, somewhere just beyond or within her, and pleaded through toothless gums, “Oh God, forgive me my sins.” She was dead, only fifteen minutes after it had all begun, by 11:30.
Two more doctors arrived a few minutes later. One with a stomach pump dangling uselessly from his hand. All three doctors tasted the baking soda remaining in the bottle and noted a foreign, bitter taste. The sheriff arrived and wrapped the spoon and glass in paper and sent them to the toxicologist’s office, and sent Jane’s body to the morgue.
The toxicologists got to work examining the contents of the bottle of baking soda and the contents of Jane’s intestines. They found traces of strychnine in both.
A jury of six citizens was convened. It took them two minutes to settle on a verdict. Jane Stanford, they decided, had died from “strychnine having been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.”
Now you had heard Jane say before her death that she thought she was poisoned again. Why did she say that?
Just about 6 weeks ago, on January 14, 1905, she was at home in her San Francisco town house, getting ready for bed, when she took a big swig of water poured from her usual source, the tank of Poland Spring water in her kitchen. She tasted something so alarming and astringent that she immediately stuck her fingers down her throat to force vomiting.
She summoned her assistants, Bertha and Elizabeth, to help. After calming her, they both tasted the water and, noting a “queer” and “bitter” taste, took the tank to a nearby chemist, who analyzed it and found it contained lethal amounts of strychnine.
Jane survived but was understandably shaken. A detective turned up no leads; the investigation had focused solely on her household staff—the maid, the cook, the secretary, the ex-butler—and ended up clearing everybody.
Knowing there was someone out there who wanted her dead, but not knowing who, Jane set sail for Hawaii, hoping that a few weeks in the tropics would calm her nerves.
That did not pan out, alas.
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