Upon learning that Jane Stanford's death would likely be ruled a poisoning, David set sail for Hawaii.
Though he told the New York Times his visit had “nothing whatever to do with the investigation which the police of San Francisco and Honolulu are conducting,” that he was there only to escort Jane’s body home, records show he hired a new doctor and paid him the hefty sum of $350—about $10,000 today—to reexamine the case.
The man David selected, Ernest Waterhouse, had only been practicing medicine for a couple of years. Without examining the body or any of the evidence, and after a skim of a book on poisoning, conversations with a couple of the witnesses, and a series of meetings with David, in his hands the explanation of Jane’s death took an acrobatic turn.
In a typed memo to David (which David had instructed he prepare for him), Dr. Waterhouse declared that he was “decidedly not” convinced that Jane Stanford had been poisoned. Though concerned by the amount of strychnine found in her belly and bottle, he wasn’t sure it was enough to have killed her. So how to explain the violent convulsions, the lockjaw, the whole rapid death thing? Gingerbread!
Now Bertha — Jane's personal assistant — said that the gingerbread prepared by the hotel for Jane's picnic had not been freshly cooked, as she had originally testified to the police (and the hotel continued to claim), but under-cooked. And not only did Jane inhaled gob after gob of the sloppy, eggy dough, she also sucked down eight sandwiches, filled with thick slabs of beef tongue and Swiss cheese, multiple cups of cold coffee, and over a dozen French candies.
So, as David informed the New York Times, that he was “wholly convinced” that Jane's death was due to heart failure triggered by a combination of overexertion (from a leisurely picnic outing?) and consuming “a surfeit of unsuitable food.”
When the statement went public, the Hawaii doctors were horrified. They banded together and immediately released a counter-statement, which read:
"She did not die of angina pectoris because neither the symptoms of the attack nor the condition of the heart confirms that diagnosis. It is imbecile to think that a woman of Mrs. Stanford’s age and known mental characteristics might have died of an hysterical seizure in half an hour.… No Board of Health in existence could allow a certificate based on such a cause of death to go unchallenged."
David retorted by calling the key medical witness, Dr. Humphris, “a man without professional or personal standing.” When the Hawaii doctors rushed to Humphris’ defense, David accused them all of colluding in a conspiracy—fabricating the diagnosis of murder as a way of getting money to perform the autopsy and coroner’s inquest.
A ludicrous accusation. No matter. Because of David's prestige, his power, and probably a nation's disregard for its outlier islands (Hawaii was not yet a state at that time), the Hawaii doctors’ account of what happened never really took hold on the mainland.
Until almost a hundred years later.
Robert Cutler, a Stanford neurologist, stumbled across an old newspaper article about an investigation into the poisoning of Jane Stanford while researching another project. Robert was shocked. He was a history buff and a proud Stanford man. Why had he never heard that the founding mother had potentially been poisoned? So he began digging.
With the help of his wife, Maggie, and a flock of archivists from Honolulu to San Francisco to Washington, DC, he gathered the coroner’s report, the eyewitness testimonies, the court transcripts... all the evidence, laid out as clearly as possible, with long quotations from the primary sources themselves. Then he published the book "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford" in 2003 before he died.
In his book, Robert Cutler, a medical doctor for more than three decades, is clear: given Jane’s symptoms and the discovery of strychnine in both her belly and medicine bottle, he believes she was poisoned. And after tracing David’s actions in the wake of her death, he believes it’s hard not to conclude that David was trying to cover up the poisoning. Why? Perhaps to protect the university from scandal. Perhaps for other reasons. Robert Cutler won’t wager a guess.
Other scholars go further. Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor who studied the letters between Jane and her spy, thought the timing of the murder was fishy. He wrote that David, as a means of protecting his presidency, “had the motive.”
Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information. White’s current guess is that Bertha did it (for the will money), but he remarks that the timing of Jane’s death was remarkably “lucky” for David. He feels increasingly confident that, no matter who did it, David covered up the poisoning.
In one of David's fish-collecting manuals, "A Guide to the Study of Fishes," that advises readers how to find fish anywhere in the world, under the section called “How to Secure Fishes,” he divulges a secret to his readers, his favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. And the particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.
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