Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: James Stanford, she embarrasses the university a great deal because
Speaker 2: the university is trying to be a respectable new research university,
Speaker 2: and at the same time, the founder of the university
Speaker 2: and the person for all practical purposes in charge of
Speaker 2: his finances is consulting with mediums, as she attracted a
Speaker 2: lot of mediums.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
Speaker 1: true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
Speaker 1: of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
Speaker 1: around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
Speaker 1: are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
Speaker 1: crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
Speaker 1: stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Speaker 1: Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
Speaker 1: good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
Speaker 1: behind the stories. Stanford University's co founder, Jane Stanford, was
Speaker 1: a mess. Her husband and beloved son were dead. Stanford's
Speaker 1: officials despised her Jane abused her servants, and then she
Speaker 1: was murdered. Author and Stanford professor doctor Richard White tells
Speaker 1: us about the wealthy eccentric's troubled legacy and her mysterious death.
Speaker 1: One review that just popped out at me said simply
Speaker 1: that Jane Stanford was a mess. And that seems like
Speaker 1: a really apt way to start this conversation. As the
Speaker 1: person that we're talking about, let's start from her beginning
Speaker 1: wherever you think it makes senses, At her as a child,
Speaker 1: how she grew up.
Speaker 2: She grew up in upstate New York. She was not
Speaker 2: boy wealthy, She's from middle class circumstances. She marries Leland
Speaker 2: Stanford Senior, and Leland Stafford Senior is at the time
Speaker 2: a lawyer. He comes to California. He's in the gold Rush.
Speaker 2: He's not successful in the gold Rush. He's not successful
Speaker 2: at much of anything until he falls in with Colline P.
Speaker 2: Huntington and Collins P. Huntington brings Leland Stanford along with
Speaker 2: him and for shopkeepers become the associates. What they do
Speaker 2: is they have no money, so they're operating on borrowed money.
Speaker 2: I mean many ways, it's a silicon Valley store. These
Speaker 2: guys don't have the money, but they are very good
Speaker 2: at getting subsidies, and they are very good at getting
Speaker 2: investors initially, and so more and more often. This is
Speaker 2: a paper enterprise that put very little money into it,
Speaker 2: but on paper it becomes worth more and more. It's
Speaker 2: the Central Pacific Railroad, so it's always on the edge
Speaker 2: of breaking up and falling apart, but on paper it's
Speaker 2: always worth a lot of money. The goal is is
Speaker 2: somebody else who could collapse will be left holding the bag,
Speaker 2: not these guys. So they begin to get a paper fortune,
Speaker 2: but it is a paper Fortune's the kind of fortunes
Speaker 2: that we've seen all the time. Now they're very rich
Speaker 2: one day, the next day the whole thing can collapse
Speaker 2: on them.
Speaker 1: So Leland and Jane meet. What was their dynamic as
Speaker 1: a couple when they first got together, maybe even before
Speaker 1: they had Leland junior.
Speaker 2: Leland is in California by himself for three years, so
Speaker 2: there's a three year separation in their marriage. Then Jane
Speaker 2: comes out. Their dynamic is, you know, they're upstate New York,
Speaker 2: lower middle class Protestants. They are not exciting people, but
Speaker 2: they are ambitious. Jane herself will become more and more
Speaker 2: of a feminist. But these people are full of contradictions.
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford is a feminist who wants women in the university,
Speaker 2: and by the end of her life she's trying to
Speaker 2: purge women from the university. Leland Stanford thinks of himself
Speaker 2: as a self made man, but all his money comes
Speaker 2: from being able to get loans from the federal government
Speaker 2: and be able to achieat stockholders. So everything you look
Speaker 2: at with them, the way they make their money, their ideals,
Speaker 2: they're full of contradictions, which makes them really quite interesting
Speaker 2: people in some ways. So by this time they're living
Speaker 2: in a mansion in knob Hill, that's where Leland Stanford
Speaker 2: Junior grows up. They have another house in Palo Alto.
Speaker 2: These are Gilded Age mansions, the kind of things that
Speaker 2: you'd see in New York City, the kinds of things
Speaker 2: you'd see in Rhode Island. They are ostentatious in their
Speaker 2: displays of wealth. They are clearly among the richest people
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, and they are also increasingly widely hated.
Speaker 1: Why just because of the amount of money that they're
Speaker 1: spreading around. Because this is what late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: At this point, it's the late eighteen hundreds is they're
Speaker 2: hated largely because their wealth is seen as coming into
Speaker 2: the expensive California's growth that they see as being exploit
Speaker 2: In California, Leland is seen as a monopolist along with
Speaker 2: his associates, and what's good for Leland Stanford is not
Speaker 2: necessarily good for California. So he becomes more and more
Speaker 2: a figure who is scorned, particularly by working class people.
Speaker 2: But at the same time he corrupts San Francisco politics
Speaker 2: and he corrupts California politics. He becomes a political boss,
Speaker 2: he becomes governor of California, so he's somebody who shows
Speaker 2: the power of money to corrupt.
Speaker 1: So late eighteen hundreds is his main enterprise, the Central
Speaker 1: Pacific Railroad. At this point he is the.
Speaker 2: President of the Southern Pacific. He's a figurehead. And the
Speaker 2: same row the Southern Pacific gones to Central Pacific. So
Speaker 2: all of this becomes quite complicated because college be Huntington,
Speaker 2: who lives in New York, who's the money man, is
Speaker 2: the real figure behind it, but the figurehead is Leland Stamford,
Speaker 2: and Leland Stafford lives in California, lives in San Francisco,
Speaker 2: lives in the knob Hill Mansion.
Speaker 1: So in the late eighteen hundreds, when Jane and Leland
Speaker 1: Junior and Leland Senior in knob Hill, what is Jane doing?
Speaker 1: Is she a household manager or is she doing anything
Speaker 1: that's altruistic volunteering.
Speaker 2: Jane Stamford is busy being rich.
Speaker 1: Was spending money.
Speaker 2: Okay, she spends a lot of money, and she dotes
Speaker 2: on her son, and they treat their son more as
Speaker 2: a companion than as a child. James Stamford will take
Speaker 2: him to Europe. Jane Stanford during this time, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's hard to see. I don't want to psychoanalyze somebody
Speaker 2: who I haven't ever known personally, and there's no record
Speaker 2: of what she was like. But I do know at
Speaker 2: this period she comes almost immobile. She seems like she
Speaker 2: would be depressed. She seems to be confined in a
Speaker 2: narrow or a narrower life. And even if she becomes
Speaker 2: richer and richer, and much of her life is going
Speaker 2: to be live vicariously through her son, she has huge
Speaker 2: ambitions through her son. He's a precocious child, he's a
Speaker 2: spoiled child, and he quite literally will get anything that
Speaker 2: he wants. So to understand Jane Stamford, you have to
Speaker 2: understand her devotion to Leland Stamford Junior, and that's what's
Speaker 2: going to make her so vulnerable when he dies. An
Speaker 2: only child, but more than just an only child, this
Speaker 2: is a child she has invested her whole life in.
Speaker 1: When does he die and how does he die? At
Speaker 1: age fourteen, he.
Speaker 2: Dies of typhoid in the early eighteen eighties in Florence.
Speaker 2: He dies with his parents. His father is sitting by
Speaker 2: the bedside and they both have a nervous breakdown. Jane
Speaker 2: is going to have a nervous breakdown. Then Leland is
Speaker 2: going to have a nervous breakdown. And this is where
Speaker 2: it gets a little creepy. They can't bear to bury him.
Speaker 2: They carry his body with him first to Paris, then
Speaker 2: to New York City, then all the way across the country.
Speaker 2: So there's going to be these long trips with the
Speaker 2: dead Leland Junior accompanying the parents on this long funeral
Speaker 2: trip which will end up back at Palo Alto on
Speaker 2: the Palo Alto estate with the memorial service in San Francisco,
Speaker 2: so it's a long, very very sad and in some
Speaker 2: ways a little creepy story even for the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: So Leland Junior has died in the early eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and now Leland Senior is sick.
Speaker 2: He's sick, he's a sick and they go back to Europe.
Speaker 2: They go back even around the places where they've been
Speaker 2: with Leland Junior. Now they go back on a trip
Speaker 2: where they visit places they'd known when he was alive.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile Leland Senior is getting sicker and sicker the
Speaker 2: whole time. And Leland Senior had a dream about Leland
Speaker 2: Junior who had told him to found a university so
Speaker 2: that the children of California to get the same advantages
Speaker 2: that he'd had. And around this they begin to decide
Speaker 2: that they're going to found Stanford University. At the same time,
Speaker 2: when they're back in the United States, Ulysses S. Grant,
Speaker 2: who's now an ex president, and his wife, they're both spiritualists.
Speaker 2: They're consulting spiritualists in New York. The line between spiritualism
Speaker 2: and the Protestant ministry can be a thin one. They're
Speaker 2: considering ministers, and so while they're doing all of these
Speaker 2: things before Leland's death. They're preparing to found the university,
Speaker 2: and Leland Senior will set this in motion. But he's
Speaker 2: the university has only been open about a year. When
Speaker 2: he will die.
Speaker 1: Let me ask a very naive question. He's still rich
Speaker 1: on paper, right, How are we founding a university when
Speaker 1: there's this sort of house of cards where he has
Speaker 1: no actual money to build an institution, higher faculty. How
Speaker 1: was that even possible?
Speaker 2: You borrow it?
Speaker 1: Nope, Welcome to the early nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Essentially, what Leland Stanford did was he took three estates
Speaker 2: and donated them to the university. One of them is
Speaker 2: going to be the estate in which it's founded. The
Speaker 2: problem with those estates is they have absolutely no income.
Speaker 2: As one of the early trustees said, all that he
Speaker 2: gave us was the taxes. So they owe taxes on
Speaker 2: these things, but they're not producing income to produce the buildings.
Speaker 2: He goes into what's a slush fund from the Pacific
Speaker 2: Improvement Company, which is a slush fund of the associates
Speaker 2: where they drain money out of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
Speaker 2: and he borrows from that and he uses that borrowed
Speaker 2: money to begin setting up the buildings and to build
Speaker 2: the faculty. So when David starred Jordan the first present
Speaker 2: and comes, he thinks he's getting this huge fortune. And
Speaker 2: he arrives there and he finds out he has barred
Speaker 2: money to pay the faculty. He has a lot of
Speaker 2: land which cannot be sold in which really is draining
Speaker 2: out taxes. He has a giant horse farm which raised
Speaker 2: the successful trotting horses, but which doesn't make a lot
Speaker 2: of money. But he has the promise that at a
Speaker 2: certain point the entire Stanford fortune will be left to
Speaker 2: the university. So Stanford University is founded on promises.
Speaker 1: A money pit. That's what it sounds like. It sounds
Speaker 1: like a big money pit.
Speaker 2: That's a good enough analogy.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you are contending that Leland has done all
Speaker 1: of this essentially on his deathbed, based on a dream.
Speaker 1: I know that's what started it. But did he anticipate
Speaker 1: this being a legacy or this was really connected to
Speaker 1: his son more than anything both.
Speaker 2: It's connected with his son. But as Charles Elliott, the
Speaker 2: president of Harvard says, and he's not alone in saying this,
Speaker 2: that he considered Stanford University the personal monument for an
Speaker 2: ill gotten fortune. It's a way of using money, essentially,
Speaker 2: it's been stolen to commemorate the family. It's not that
Speaker 2: dissimilar to a lot of donations to a lot of
Speaker 2: institutions which you don't want to look really closely at
Speaker 2: where this money came from. And what is setting up
Speaker 2: is a personal monument in Stanford University in his early
Speaker 2: days is a personal monument to the Stanford family. All
Speaker 2: the big buildings, many of which came down in the earthquake,
Speaker 2: were monuments to the Stanfords.
Speaker 1: So they're spending their time between San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Speaker 1: Do they move down there permanently before he dies down
Speaker 1: to where Stanford is.
Speaker 2: They still alternate between both houses. After Leland dies, Jane
Speaker 2: will travel more and more because both houses remind her
Speaker 2: too much of her dead husband and her dead son.
Speaker 2: But at the same time she wants to get her
Speaker 2: dead husband and her dead son to communicate with them,
Speaker 2: so they will spend more time at the Palo altoa
Speaker 2: state founding the university. But they still have this immense mansion.
Speaker 2: It looks like a all village up on knob Hill.
Speaker 1: Does Jane really feel strongly about higher education. This just
Speaker 1: seems so contradictory to her personality. Was she just going
Speaker 1: along with Leland or they were in united fronts with
Speaker 1: all of this. They felt like they were going to
Speaker 1: leave behind something good.
Speaker 2: They're a united front. They believe in education of a
Speaker 2: certain kind. I mean, Jane Stanford despises elite education. She
Speaker 2: despises Harvard, Yale, Princeton, in part because they tried to
Speaker 2: hire presidents of these places, Cornell to be head of
Speaker 2: Stamford and they'd failed to do it. They say, this
Speaker 2: is going to be a different kind of university. There's
Speaker 2: gonna be a hands on university. This is going to
Speaker 2: be a university for the betterment of humankind. It's going
Speaker 2: to be a university whi's going to teach practical skills
Speaker 2: and that's where their fortune is going to go. And
Speaker 2: she sort of believes in this, but if she gets
Speaker 2: more and more interested in spiritualism, she begins and this
Speaker 2: is after her husband's death, shifts the focus of the university,
Speaker 2: thinking that they really should be the education of the soul.
Speaker 2: What they believe is the soul is eternal and it's
Speaker 2: educated even after your death. So when you're getting soul education,
Speaker 2: it begins when you're a human, but after you die,
Speaker 2: your soul will continue to grow, and so the education
Speaker 2: should just be a small part of what's going to
Speaker 2: be a long standing education. And she just says that
Speaker 2: the faculty doesn't seem to recognize the importance of educating
Speaker 2: the soul. And she is right. The faculty does not
Speaker 2: recognize the importance of educating the soul. They think they're
Speaker 2: just giving a normal education for humanity sciences and social sciences.
Speaker 1: So Leland dies in what year? When does he die?
Speaker 1: And it's just of poor health in general, pneumonia or
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 2: Eighteen ninety three, and it's going to be this heart
Speaker 2: will give out, that a lot of things are giving out.
Speaker 2: He has gout. I mean, he's a very sick man.
Speaker 1: Okay. So if I were Jane and my husband, who
Speaker 1: was incredibly wealthy and the only source of income in
Speaker 1: the family, had done I'm not sure I would be
Speaker 1: that enthusiastic about then turning over more money that could
Speaker 1: be limited to a university. What is her thinking here?
Speaker 1: Is she not panicked or is there just so much
Speaker 1: money left behind that it's okay?
Speaker 2: She does not know at this stage what the fortune
Speaker 2: consists of. What she knows is that she owns a
Speaker 2: one quarter share in one of the most powerful corporations
Speaker 2: in America, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and that he is
Speaker 2: also siphoned off and has a lot of other money.
Speaker 2: But she has no knowledge of the details of this.
Speaker 2: She is somebody who on paper, she can look at
Speaker 2: it and say, oh, Southern Pacific stock, My share of
Speaker 2: that is going to be forty million dollars, which is
Speaker 2: a huge amount of money at the time, But it's
Speaker 2: only forty million dollars if you can sell it for
Speaker 2: forty million dollars. And in fact that it's not sure
Speaker 2: at all what that stock is going to be worth.
Speaker 2: And after his death there's going to be the Panic
Speaker 2: of eighteen ninety six, the depression of eighteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: and the Southern Pacific Railroad nearly goes bankrupt. It appears
Speaker 2: that not only is Stanford University going to have to
Speaker 2: close down, but the Jane Stanford is going to lose
Speaker 2: her entire fortune. And on top of that, the federal
Speaker 2: government says, wait a minute, a lot of this money
Speaker 2: in the Southern Pacific Railroad came from our subsidies to
Speaker 2: the Central Pacific Railroad, which was alone. You're supposed to
Speaker 2: pay back. You have not paid it back. We want
Speaker 2: our money back, so they sue for that money. So
Speaker 2: she suddenly realized that she thought she was an immensely
Speaker 2: rich woman, but in eighteen ninety six she realizes she
Speaker 2: might be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Speaker 1: Now Huntington, who was his business partner before he died, right, right,
Speaker 1: does he come into play at all? Is he coming
Speaker 1: back into her life now that her husband's gone.
Speaker 2: Yes, because Huntington is panicked that, in fact, the Southern
Speaker 2: Pacific is going to go under. Yeah, you will pay
Speaker 2: Jane a backhanded compliment. He says that she is smarter
Speaker 2: and manages money better than her husband, but he's not
Speaker 2: so little of her husband. It's hard to say what
Speaker 2: that actually means. Gosh, And what he's trying to do
Speaker 2: is bully or into seating control of the Southern Pacific
Speaker 2: to him, and he wants to afford university shut down.
Speaker 2: He says, it's simply going to be a drain on
Speaker 2: the company's assets. We need every dollar we can get
Speaker 2: to keep this from going under. You have no idea,
Speaker 2: how how bad the situation we're in. So he really
Speaker 2: tries to bully Jane Stamford take control of the board
Speaker 2: of the Southern Pacific hansel out her vote, stop her
Speaker 2: from draining any more money out of it. So it
Speaker 2: turns into a battle between her and Collins P. Huntington,
Speaker 2: and she turns out to be fairly shrewd, pretty tough,
Speaker 2: and does not give in to him. But it still
Speaker 2: looks in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven as if
Speaker 2: they're both going to go down together. They are just
Speaker 2: passengers on a sinking ship.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the panic of eighteen ninety six, just
Speaker 1: so that we can have some context. Is this a
Speaker 1: Wall Street panic or what ends up happening?
Speaker 2: It's the kind of panic which afflicts the United States
Speaker 2: repeatedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Essentially,
Speaker 2: what happens is there's boom periods where people borrow a
Speaker 2: lot of money, invest a lot of money. Values, paper
Speaker 2: values shoot up, and then there's going to be a
Speaker 2: point where it reaches the top, and suddenly people start
Speaker 2: reneging on loans. And once this goes, you begin to
Speaker 2: get bank runs. Banks start collapsing, they start calling in
Speaker 2: their loans. As everybody begins calling in their loans, this
Speaker 2: whole paper pyramid begins to collapse, and that people find
Speaker 2: that their assets are very often not going to be
Speaker 2: anything they can make liquid, and so they begin to
Speaker 2: go bankrupt too. That's the kind of panic you get.
Speaker 2: And in eighteen ninety six, until the Great Depression was
Speaker 2: the worst one the United States has ever seen. It
Speaker 2: throws the United States into a deep recession, a deep depression,
Speaker 2: and railroads are at the head of it. The major things.
Speaker 2: Railroads tend to overinvest, over expand, and then when the
Speaker 2: traffic begins to go down, they can't pay back their
Speaker 2: loans because they're all operating on borrowed money, and they
Speaker 2: begin to go under. And that's what's happening in eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety six.
Speaker 1: Okay, So in eighteen ninety six, does Jane's Stanford get
Speaker 1: over this hump? How does she fare ultimately from the panic?
Speaker 2: Stanford University and Jane Stanford will have a hard few years.
Speaker 2: And what they will do is this is the legend
Speaker 2: of Stanford University. Jane Stanford os her jewels, uses the
Speaker 2: personal allowance she's allowed by the bankruptcy courts to pay
Speaker 2: the faculty. The faculty takes deep cuts. A lot of
Speaker 2: people are urging her to shut the university down. She
Speaker 2: reviewses to do so, and when she comes out of it,
Speaker 2: the way she comes out of it is the depression
Speaker 2: will begin to end, and then other people will buy
Speaker 2: the Southern Pacific Railroad to make even larger railroads out
Speaker 2: of it. And the suddenly the stock market money she
Speaker 2: had becomes real money. She can cash it in she
Speaker 2: gets out. And so by the early nineteen hundreds, Jane
Speaker 2: Stanford finds this paper wealth she's made it through it's
Speaker 2: now turned into real liquid wealth which she either invests elsewhere,
Speaker 2: keeps the Southern Pacific bonds, or has in cash, and
Speaker 2: so now it is liquid. Stanford University has real money
Speaker 2: to get from Jane Stanford.
Speaker 1: So by nineteen oh five, Stanford is established as a university,
Speaker 1: a well thought of university on the same echelon as
Speaker 1: a Harvard or a Yale or no.
Speaker 2: No, it's a university which is involved in the Edward
Speaker 2: Ross affair, which is one of the great free speech
Speaker 2: academic freedom scandals of the twentieth century, where Jane Stanford
Speaker 2: tries to fire a professor for his political views, and
Speaker 2: does fire a professor for his political views. And he
Speaker 2: is a formidable professor who makes this a national scandal
Speaker 2: that James Stamford is being seen as more and more erratic,
Speaker 2: somebody who wants to turn the university into a college
Speaker 2: devoted to teaching the spiritualist truths. Jane Stanford, who is
Speaker 2: going to convert to Catholicism and give the whole university
Speaker 2: over to the Jesuits. Jane Stamford, who has been a
Speaker 2: pioneer and admitting women into Stanford, now wants to get
Speaker 2: rid of all the women in Stanford because they're corrupting
Speaker 2: what she calls her boys. Stanford University becomes a running
Speaker 2: joke much of academia by the early twentieth century. A
Speaker 2: rich running joke, but at running joke.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about the turn from what you said.
Speaker 1: She had some feminist ideals at first, and then what changed.
Speaker 2: The best explanation I can give is James Stanford begins
Speaker 2: to have a sexual panic in the early twentieth century.
Speaker 2: I mean quite literally sex just she sees sex everywhere.
Speaker 2: She sees young women flirting with male students, young female students,
Speaker 2: flirting with male students. She is alarmed by any hint
Speaker 2: of sex taking place on campus. She thinks that decorum
Speaker 2: is breaking down. She thinks Victorian's standards are breaking down.
Speaker 2: She thinks there's a breakdown of morality, and that's why
Speaker 2: she wants women out. She wants people on horseback, armed
Speaker 2: guards on horseback to be riding around campus monitoring the
Speaker 2: contact between male and female students. She wants to make
Speaker 2: them age at which women's students will be admitted much
Speaker 2: higher than male students, so that you will have seven
Speaker 2: teen year old boys and twenty one year old women.
Speaker 2: She just wants reform after reform after reform, and that's
Speaker 2: the kind of thing which alarms David Starr Jordan. He
Speaker 2: begins to see that if these reforms go through, the
Speaker 2: university is not going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1: So as we approach nineteen oh five, when something very
Speaker 1: bad happens to Jane Stanford, is there a lead up
Speaker 1: to all of this? Is there some sort of like
Speaker 1: a trigger or tensions or something that shifts in her
Speaker 1: world that has her ending up dead.
Speaker 2: She begins to see David star Jordan's opposition to her
Speaker 2: reforms and David Star Jordan's refusal to take the blame
Speaker 2: or failure to take the blame for the firing of
Speaker 2: Ross and the Ross scandal, there's a threat to her,
Speaker 2: so she's desired to fire David star Jordan, and Stanford
Speaker 2: is such a small place it's impossible to believe that
Speaker 2: David Star Jordan doesn't need so by December, the gossip
Speaker 2: is on the street that David Star Jordan is going
Speaker 2: to be picked out at the Board of Trustees meetings
Speaker 2: early in nineteen oh five. So first thing that happens
Speaker 2: is that, and the second thing that happens is around
Speaker 2: her relationship with her servants, who are pretty much her
Speaker 2: closest companions by this time, along with her family. And
Speaker 2: let's say her servants have plenty of reason to hate
Speaker 2: her too, So tensions are building in both the mansion
Speaker 2: and the downstairs with the servants, and tensions are building
Speaker 2: with the university, where David Starr Jordan thinks he is
Speaker 2: going to lose his job, a job he desperately wants
Speaker 2: to keep. But he also thinks if he goes, the
Speaker 2: university is going to go with him, at least the university,
Speaker 2: as he knows.
Speaker 1: Well. We have a near miss and then a direct
Speaker 1: hit right with Jane Stanford. Let's talk about the near
Speaker 1: miss first. What are the circumstances around that.
Speaker 2: The near miss is that James Stamford is doing what
Speaker 2: she often did. She's going to bed early on a
Speaker 2: Saturday night. She's planning the next morning to go to
Speaker 2: Palo Alto to attend church services at the Memorial Church.
Speaker 2: And she goes to bed early, and she always has
Speaker 2: a bottle of Poland Spring bottled water. And what she
Speaker 2: does is take the water and she taste funny. She's
Speaker 2: going to bed and it tastes funny, and she's a
Speaker 2: maid Elizabeth Richmond in the next room, and she spits
Speaker 2: it out. She says it tastes bitter, and brings Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Richmond in, and Elizabeth Richmond dips her finger in and says, yes,
Speaker 2: it does taste funny. And Jane Stamford then begins to vomit.
Speaker 2: She sticks her finger down her throat and is throwing
Speaker 2: up in a portable sink, and she's Elizabeth Richmond bring
Speaker 2: down her companion and her secretary of Bertha Berner, who's
Speaker 2: sleeping upstairs. And Bertha Burner also takes a taste of it,
Speaker 2: and it's very very bitter, and they hold it up
Speaker 2: to the light and when they hold it up to
Speaker 2: the light they see things floating in it. And the
Speaker 2: outcome of this is going to be that Jans Stamford
Speaker 2: Purges herself is very, very sick. But they send the
Speaker 2: bottle out to a chemist at the bottom of knob
Speaker 2: Hill Pharmacy to have it tested, and the pharmacy will
Speaker 2: then send it out to somebody else, to another chemist
Speaker 2: to have it tested. So they think there's been something
Speaker 2: put in the water, and something has been put in
Speaker 2: the water, but they don't know what it is, and
Speaker 2: so for that period they will go about their normal tests.
Speaker 2: James Stanford will set up having a dinner. There's going
Speaker 2: to be a dinner coming in. It's the height of
Speaker 2: the social season. So for a week she has tasted
Speaker 2: bitter water. Something has happened, she doesn't know what it is,
Speaker 2: and her life goes forward.
Speaker 1: You know, if I'm a detective, I'm thinking who has
Speaker 1: access to the Poland springs? How many servants are we
Speaker 1: talking about?
Speaker 2: First of all, we're talking about six or seven servants.
Speaker 2: Some of them have easier access than others. I mean
Speaker 2: Bert the Berner is access to her bedroom. Elizabeth Richmond
Speaker 2: has asked us to her bedroom. Ah Wing, who's the
Speaker 2: chief of the Chinese servan, says access to her bedroom.
Speaker 2: And there are other servants, other maids and other subordinate
Speaker 2: cooks who might be able to get in, but of
Speaker 2: less access than these people. So they're the major people
Speaker 2: who have access to the bedroom. But the problem is
Speaker 2: that somebody might have put the poison in the bottles
Speaker 2: someplace else, that might have put it in the kitchen
Speaker 2: and brought it in right, So at this point they
Speaker 2: don't have it. But at this point, nobody even knows
Speaker 2: it's poison. They're not going to know it's poison until
Speaker 2: it comes back from the chemists. And the chemist report
Speaker 2: is very very clear, and the chemist report says there
Speaker 2: is Stryc nine in the water, and it's not just
Speaker 2: stryc nine, it's rat poison. You know that that indicates
Speaker 2: to me because whatever was doing this, it's not that
Speaker 2: skilled that poisoning people. You just rat poisoning it.
Speaker 1: Well, we talk about that a lot on my other
Speaker 1: show with Buried Bones with pol Holes. We talk about
Speaker 1: that you have to be skilled as a poisoner because
Speaker 1: If you don't put in enough, you don't kill the person.
Speaker 1: If you put in too much, it's detectable, and it's
Speaker 1: a passive way to murder someone. But boy, you really
Speaker 1: have to know what you're doing. So it sounds like
Speaker 1: this person wants to try again. Whoever the suspect is
Speaker 1: how much time elapses before we find out more information.
Speaker 2: Once they find out the poisons in it, they hire detectives,
Speaker 2: but the private detectives are going to be Jules Collindon,
Speaker 2: and his job is to make sure that nobody finds
Speaker 2: out about the poisoning and also to find out who
Speaker 2: put the poison in. So for the first three or
Speaker 2: four weeks there is an investigation, but it's not by
Speaker 2: the police. Nothing's reported to the police. It's going to
Speaker 2: be by a private detective agency. And their job is
Speaker 2: both to discover the poisoner and to keep this out
Speaker 2: of the papers. And they do keep it out of
Speaker 2: the papers for three weeks, but then they make a
Speaker 2: mistake of antagonizing Elizabeth Richmond, who's friends with an ex butler,
Speaker 2: Alfred Beverly, And what they're going to do is go
Speaker 2: to the papers at the end of January. They're afraid
Speaker 2: that they are going to be set up. And so
Speaker 2: Albert Beverly, who's a butler who had left Jane Stamford's
Speaker 2: service that summer, he realizes that he can be implicated
Speaker 2: because he has been stealing from Jane's. He wants to
Speaker 2: keep that out of the papers. He's friends with Elizabeth Richmond.
Speaker 2: He thinks she's being unjustly accused, and he thinks that
Speaker 2: if his friendship with her is going to get him implicated.
Speaker 2: So they don't want this going on. They think they're
Speaker 2: safer spilling it to the papers and telling their side
Speaker 2: of the story.
Speaker 1: So are the papers on their side? When they do
Speaker 1: reveal all of this? How do they frame it?
Speaker 2: They frame it as the service did it? I mean?
Speaker 2: This actually does enter into an Agatha Christie plot the
Speaker 2: first Agatha Christie novel. The plot is very much like
Speaker 2: the Poisoning of Jane Stamford. Wow. But the problem I
Speaker 2: found is once the servants go to the papers, they're
Speaker 2: all lying. Everybody's lying. The detectives are lying. Jane Stamford
Speaker 2: when they doesn't say much, what she says is lies.
Speaker 2: All the servants are lying. So my first problem in
Speaker 2: looking at all this is everybody's lying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard when you have unreliable sources. It so
Speaker 1: what does Jane say? Regardless of if it's a lie
Speaker 1: or not, she has to be scared.
Speaker 2: She's terrified, but she doesn't say that she's terrified. She
Speaker 2: just says that she is the flu, which she catches
Speaker 2: the flues. She goes down to San Jose, she stays there,
Speaker 2: but by the time she comes back up to San Francisco,
Speaker 2: she is ready to leave the country. She is afraid.
Speaker 2: That's afraid to go back into the house. She's afraid
Speaker 2: whoever did it is going to try again. And she's
Speaker 2: decided to go to Asia. And she's writing letters since
Speaker 2: she writes letters to Charles Brothers, who's a confidant, who's
Speaker 2: the youngest of the trustees, have been a Stanford undergraduate.
Speaker 2: And again this stuff gets really creepy because he looks
Speaker 2: exactly like her dead son, which is why she trusts them.
Speaker 2: So she writes them a letter which won't be disclosed
Speaker 2: until nineteen thirty five, which says, you know why I'm
Speaker 2: going I have no idea why people would be trying
Speaker 2: to kill me. This is not the way I expected
Speaker 2: to end my life. I have to get out of here.
Speaker 2: I have to leave because I'm afraid that, in fact,
Speaker 2: an attempt is going to be made again, and I
Speaker 2: have no way of protecting myself. So she clearly is terrified.
Speaker 2: When she's in the hotel, she doesn't register under her
Speaker 2: own name, she won't stay in the mansion, and she
Speaker 2: brings Bertha Berner, her private secretary, with her to taste
Speaker 2: dollar water and to taste dollar food.
Speaker 1: Is she paying birth a lot of money? I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of suspects for being a medium, and I
Speaker 1: know she's her companion.
Speaker 2: Also, they have a tricky relationship because the sexual panic
Speaker 2: that goes to the undergraduate women goes to Bertha Burner.
Speaker 2: Bertha Berner is constantly quitting her job with Jane Stamford,
Speaker 2: very often because Jane Stamford is interfering in Bertha Berner's
Speaker 2: personal life. Bertha Berner will leave, go out, but she's
Speaker 2: the only person apparently who can manage Jane Stamford, and
Speaker 2: so the Stamford family, the Lathrop family, her brother, pay
Speaker 2: Bertha to come back again and be a traveling companion.
Speaker 2: But Bertha meanwhile has a mother who is very sick
Speaker 2: and she is also having an affair with Albert.
Speaker 1: Beverly, the former butler, right, former.
Speaker 2: Butler, and the former butler is embezzling money and so
Speaker 2: is Bertha Berners. Wow, so she is in bezzling money. Also,
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford is putting increasing pressure on Bertha Berner to
Speaker 2: travel with her on this trip to Hawaii, a trip
Speaker 2: to Japan, and another trip she had planned for Europe,
Speaker 2: even though her Bertha Berner's own mother is sick, is dying,
Speaker 2: and she even needs to stay with her mother. So
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford is essentially telling Bertha Berner choose do you
Speaker 2: come with me or do you stay with your dying mother.
Speaker 2: So she's putting Bertha Berner in an impossible position.
Speaker 1: Now, this also must distract her from what's happening at
Speaker 1: Stanford University. Does this mean that David Starr Jordan is
Speaker 1: kind of off the hook? I mean, has she forgotten
Speaker 1: about him and you know what's happening at the school?
Speaker 2: No? No, she wants blood, she wants David star Jordan.
Speaker 2: But what does help David star Jordan is since she's
Speaker 2: gone and the board of Stanford's Trustees is sort of
Speaker 2: like the modern US Senate they are really quite old.
Speaker 2: It's hard to get them all together in one place,
Speaker 2: and so David start Jordan gets some breathing room. Because
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford is leaving the country. She won't be there
Speaker 2: to convene the Board of Trustees, and many of the
Speaker 2: boarder trustees are old and sick. We're traveling themselves. So
Speaker 2: he begins to escape. But eventually there's going to be
Speaker 2: a quorum, and Jane Stafford is making it very clear
Speaker 2: to the Board of Trustees what she wants done when
Speaker 2: she can get that quorum.
Speaker 1: So then there is the incident that ends her life.
Speaker 1: How many years elapse between the first attempt and the
Speaker 1: one that works.
Speaker 2: Well, not many years elapse, not many weeks elapse at
Speaker 2: it's about six it's about six weeks later. Six weeks later,
Speaker 2: she and Berta Berner and another maid are on a
Speaker 2: ship go to Hawaii, check in at the Milana Hotel.
Speaker 2: Jane Stafford tells people repeatedly that somebody tried to poison her.
Speaker 2: That's why she has left San Francisco. She begins to
Speaker 2: relax a little. She's a tourists. She travels with Bertha Berner.
Speaker 2: She comes back after a day with her gone on
Speaker 2: a picnic. She's tired to her room. She and Bertha
Speaker 2: Berner have a light supper out on a veranda. Jane
Speaker 2: Stamford wants to retire early, and Jane Stamford says, because
Speaker 2: she said she'd eaten a lot of food at the
Speaker 2: picnic lunch. She said she wants some by carbonate of soda,
Speaker 2: which she hadn't been taking but now she takes them
Speaker 2: by cardon Minnesota, and she asks Bertha Berner to give
Speaker 2: her a by cardinate of soda and also a digestive pill,
Speaker 2: the kind that contains a tiny amount of strychnine. They
Speaker 2: actually use strychnine medicinally in the early twentieth century, and
Speaker 2: Bertha Berner scoops it out. Jane Stafford says, why don't
Speaker 2: you take some by carbonate too, since you were there,
Speaker 2: and Berth Burner says, no, I don't need it, and
Speaker 2: Jane Stamford says, well, I'll go to bed. I'll take
Speaker 2: this before I retire, So she retires, goes to bed.
Speaker 2: She wakes up the maid a little later because she
Speaker 2: has trouble locking the door. The maid shows her how
Speaker 2: to lock the door. She goes to bed, she falls asleep.
Speaker 2: She apparently forgot to take the by carbon of soda.
Speaker 2: She wakes up in a couple of hours, takes the
Speaker 2: by gardener of Minnesota, and at that point she begins
Speaker 2: to feel that she's been poisoned. Because she has been poisoned,
Speaker 2: staggers to the door. She alerts the guy next door.
Speaker 2: She wakes up Bertha Burner in the maid that bring
Speaker 2: down a doctor or resident doctor in the hotel who
Speaker 2: eventually will call for a stomach pump. Jane Stanford is
Speaker 2: telling people, I have been poisoned. Berth to tell them
Speaker 2: what happened in San Francisco, and Bertha Burner says, yes,
Speaker 2: She's been poisoned in San Francisco. The doctor meanwhile, first
Speaker 2: he's skeptical, but then it begins to look an awful
Speaker 2: lot like STRYC nine poisoning. Jane Stafford's having the usual
Speaker 2: symptoms of strictine poisoning. She's having trouble opening her jaws,
Speaker 2: she's having spasms. One of the things strictin poisoning does
Speaker 2: is make you aware that you are really dying. And
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford, who is a spiritualist to imagine death, was
Speaker 2: not a big deal for spiritualist, it was a passing over.
Speaker 2: You just gently pass over into a second life. And
Speaker 2: Jane Stanford at that point dumps all of the illusions
Speaker 2: of dying of stryctine poisoning is a gentle passing over.
Speaker 2: She says that her last words are, this is a
Speaker 2: terrible death to die, and she dies. She has been
Speaker 2: poisoned by strych nine, but this time it is not
Speaker 2: rat poison. It is pure strict nine, which is not
Speaker 2: easy to obtain, and it has been put in her
Speaker 2: bicarbonate of soda. The only person present at both poisonings
Speaker 2: besides James Stamford is birtha birth.
Speaker 1: So is this not an open and shut case.
Speaker 2: No, it's.
Speaker 1: I don't believe you. How is that possible?
Speaker 2: Because the problem is there's the bicarbonate of soda problem.
Speaker 2: She had not taken any bicarbonate of soda during the
Speaker 2: whole Hawaiian voyage. The bicarbinate of soda had been packed
Speaker 2: away in her truck and then unpacked in Hawaii, So
Speaker 2: one possibility, it's pretty far fetched. Does somebody put the
Speaker 2: poison in the bicarbonate of soda before it left San Francisco?
Speaker 2: Figuring whenever she uses it, this is going to take
Speaker 2: place far away from us. Smart there's still the potential
Speaker 2: that she had been poisoned in San Francisco, but it
Speaker 2: only died in Hawaii.
Speaker 1: And of course there's no way to know how long
Speaker 1: this had been present in the soda or how old
Speaker 1: it was for them to know whether or not this
Speaker 1: was something that had been done a week earlier or
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks earlier.
Speaker 2: Well, there's one thing that turns out. It turns out
Speaker 2: the detectives get to work, and the detectives get to
Speaker 2: work trying to find out who had purchased by carbonate
Speaker 2: of soda, and Bertha Bernard denies she knew anything about
Speaker 2: by carbonate of soda, anything about Strych nine. Bertha Berner says,
Speaker 2: we always said by carbonate of soda in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: I presume this is by carbon of soda from San Francisco.
Speaker 2: And then it turns out that just before they departed,
Speaker 2: Bertha Bernard stopped into a pharmacy in Palo Alto and
Speaker 2: purchased brand new bicarbonate of soda. So the bicarbonate of
Speaker 2: soda could very well have been the bicarbonate of Minnesota
Speaker 2: that had been purchased by Bertha Berner and had been
Speaker 2: been taken into a y. So that begins to undercut
Speaker 2: the theory that the bicarbonate of soda was really going
Speaker 2: to be coming from San Francisco. It doesn't eliminate it,
Speaker 2: but it creates the question of why did Bertha Berner
Speaker 2: lie about purchasing the bike carent of soda? So if
Speaker 2: a carpenter of soda becomes yet another aspect of the mystery,
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily open and shut. It still leaves where
Speaker 2: the Stryck nine came from, because the hardest thing to
Speaker 2: find is a Stryc nine five Pierce Stryc nine. You
Speaker 2: have to sign for it in San Francisco pharmacies, and
Speaker 2: there's ways you can get around that, but in fact
Speaker 2: it is still a lot more difficult than getting rat
Speaker 2: poison that's going to leave a trail. But they can
Speaker 2: find nobody who has purchased Strycht nine at all associated
Speaker 2: with the Stanford household, and the police and the detectives
Speaker 2: are both on it by now.
Speaker 1: So they bring her back. There's the autopsy, Is there
Speaker 1: a large service for her, Is there something at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and does she leave them all the money or not.
Speaker 2: This is why things get dicey. This is where, OK, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's dicey already. It gets diicier. Nothing is simple about
Speaker 2: James Stanford's death. She's going to have the autopsy, so
Speaker 2: they bring her back. They bring back her body, but
Speaker 2: her body the way they do these autopsies in the
Speaker 2: nine nineteenth centuries, they basically take out your insides, churn
Speaker 2: them up and test them for stricma. So Jane Stanfford's
Speaker 2: corpse comes back, but it's the corpse is largely been
Speaker 2: emptied of internal organs, and she is going to be
Speaker 2: buried at a huge ceremony at Stanford University. The student
Speaker 2: body's there, the faculty is there. Five or six thousand
Speaker 2: people show up. The march her to the grave to
Speaker 2: the mausoleum where she is going to join her dead
Speaker 2: husband and her dead son. And the people who are
Speaker 2: marching behind her on the way to the grave are
Speaker 2: all the people who were suspects in her death. They're
Speaker 2: David Starr, Jordan, their Bertha Berner, and it's her service.
Speaker 2: They're all coming behind her. So she goes to the
Speaker 2: grave with the people who might actually have killed her
Speaker 2: marching behind it. But Stanford University does get the money.
Speaker 2: George Crothers, who has gone out of his way. He's
Speaker 2: had to start early. He's had to change the California
Speaker 2: constitution to do this. He has avoided the kind of
Speaker 2: usual legal procedures to make sure the trust and wills
Speaker 2: go through. He has rushed all of these things through.
Speaker 2: He's taken personal responsibility. He's made sure that Jane Stamper's
Speaker 2: brother gets enough money that it makes sure this is
Speaker 2: going to be worth his while to cooperate in shutting
Speaker 2: down any challenge to the wills. The wills will not
Speaker 2: be challenged. They will be challenged later, but it's going
Speaker 2: to be too late. The trust go through, Stanford University
Speaker 2: gets the money. Meanwhile, the police department has decided not
Speaker 2: to do further investigation.
Speaker 1: How is that possible?
Speaker 2: She didn't die strict nine presenting she died a natural death,
Speaker 2: but David start Jordan had done. He had gone into Hawaii,
Speaker 2: hired a doctor who had never seen the body, who
Speaker 2: had never knew anything much.
Speaker 3: About the autopsy, and he said she had died of
Speaker 3: eating too much food at the picnic lunch, which had
Speaker 3: given her gas which are put pressure on her heart,
Speaker 3: which had given her a heart attack.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence of a heart attack in the actual autopsy.
Speaker 2: I mean, essentially, too much gas kills her. David Starr
Speaker 2: Jordan says he's going to bring this back, give it
Speaker 2: to the San Francisco Police. He gets off the ship.
Speaker 2: The San Francisco Police says there's going to be a
Speaker 2: full investigation within twenty four hours. The San Francisco Police says,
Speaker 2: good enough for us, and they say she died in
Speaker 2: natural death. Wow, And the whole thing begins to disappear.
Speaker 2: So some of the newspapers press on it. But the
Speaker 2: next year there's going to be the San Francisco earthquake.
Speaker 2: San Francisco's other things to worry about, and the case disappears.
Speaker 1: Now are we thinking that David Starr Jordan did that
Speaker 1: as a way to simplify things. Let's say he's not
Speaker 1: the suspect here? Is it so that things could move
Speaker 1: forward quickly with Stanford or what would be the motive
Speaker 1: if he weren't the suspect.
Speaker 2: David Star Jordan doesn't want a murder, Yeah, because a
Speaker 2: murder is going to bring out all of the things
Speaker 2: that have gone into the funding that she's a spiritualist.
Speaker 2: It's going to open up challenges to her wills and
Speaker 2: her trust. He doesn't want that testimony. He certainly doesn't
Speaker 2: want Bertha Burner, who knows everything, testifying. He also doesn't
Speaker 2: want a suicide, which is the other theory at the time,
Speaker 2: because the suicide means, in the legal theories at the
Speaker 2: time that she wasn't mentally competent to have made the
Speaker 2: trust in the will. So that's not yea and he
Speaker 2: wants to save his job. So for David Starr Jordan,
Speaker 2: the best of all possible worlds is a natural death,
Speaker 2: and David Star Jordan gets a natural death.
Speaker 1: Is Bertha Berner paid off?
Speaker 2: You know, Bertha Berner is there and I don't know
Speaker 2: what conversations are. I can imagine Bertha Burner has already
Speaker 2: testified that she was poisoned by strychnin. She reverses all
Speaker 2: of her testimony when she talks to this other doctor.
Speaker 2: If I were David star Jordan, you know what you
Speaker 2: tell Bertha Berner is, you know things don't look that
Speaker 2: good for you. You're both murders. You have a reason
Speaker 2: for wanting to kill her and if there is no murder,
Speaker 2: there can be no murderer. And that's pretty convinced thing.
Speaker 2: So Bertha Berner reverses everything, she recants all her testimony,
Speaker 2: but she's not under oath the second time, and the
Speaker 2: police accept that.
Speaker 1: How much money are we talking about in the end
Speaker 1: when Jane Stanford died? How much did the university get?
Speaker 2: The university? Again? It's always hard to say, because a
Speaker 2: lot of it is going to be and what the
Speaker 2: bonds are worth, how are you going to sell it?
Speaker 2: But I would say the university probably gets, you know,
Speaker 2: between the old trusts and the new things, fifteen to
Speaker 2: twenty million dollars, maybe a little more than that.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of money, and it's enough to sustain them.
Speaker 2: Obviously, it makes it the best in dowed university in
Speaker 2: the country. I think briefly at the.
Speaker 1: Time, what is Jane Stanford's whitewashed history at Stanford University?
Speaker 1: If you take out the spiritualism, just as a founder
Speaker 1: who was out of the goodness of her heart and
Speaker 1: wanted higher education inspired by her son? Is that sort
Speaker 1: of the narrative, that's.
Speaker 2: The narrative Leland is engaged in too much sketchy financial stuff.
Speaker 2: Leland is roundly denounced as robber baron. Jane seems to
Speaker 2: be cleaner, and so they erase the spiritualism. That stuff
Speaker 2: just goes away. They erase the murder. She is a
Speaker 2: mother whose grief over her son leads her to donate
Speaker 2: her entire fortune to literally the children of California. She's
Speaker 2: this beloved figure who found Stanford Universe. She's a pioneering
Speaker 2: feminist who brings in women into the university and assists
Speaker 2: on their being there. They pretty much erased the complicated
Speaker 2: Jane Stamford, and more than that, they erased the university's
Speaker 2: long role in denying that there had ever been any
Speaker 2: murder and that Jane Stamford herself would have probably closed
Speaker 2: the university down. And they will continue to do this
Speaker 2: into the nineteen nineties, early twentieth century. And now they
Speaker 2: don't say that she's murdered. They just don't say anything
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: So this is not on the new Freshman orientation tour.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: What do you think now, as I'm talking to Professor White,
Speaker 1: the historian, Why does it matter what the narrative is
Speaker 1: if you've got this incredible school, Because of this woman. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: Why does it matter that this is not the true
Speaker 1: narrative that has been put forward by the school for
Speaker 1: all of these years.
Speaker 2: That's a very good question. It's what I thought about
Speaker 2: a lot. And because to make sure that Stanford's money
Speaker 2: went to something that would later turn into a major
Speaker 2: research university, which doesn't happen for years later, first you
Speaker 2: had to kill Jane Stanford. The real theme of this
Speaker 2: book is the problem with philanthropy is philanthropists. If Jane
Speaker 2: Stanford got what she wanted, Stanford University would not be
Speaker 2: a major research university. Stanford University would be a peculiar
Speaker 2: small college with some esoteric spiritualist beliefs that might have
Speaker 2: faded in time. What seems to me, this bizarre case
Speaker 2: in the early twentieth century, like bizarre cases everywhere, they
Speaker 2: really open up something quite deeper, and they really open
Speaker 2: up the problem with private fortunes, great wealth philanthropy getting
Speaker 2: to dictate the directions of institutions, which sometimes go way
Speaker 2: off track and end up as they do here with
Speaker 2: the murder of Jane Stanford. And you know, we haven't
Speaker 2: told the old story anyway, because there still is the
Speaker 2: question of where the pure strychnine came from.
Speaker 1: And what do you think with out giving away too much?
Speaker 2: I have a suspicion and I think the police knew
Speaker 2: who killed Janmes Stafford, and the police decided that that
Speaker 2: person would disappear and that aspect of the case would
Speaker 2: be dropped. At first, I thought the San Francisco police
Speaker 2: were incredibly corrupt and incredibly incompetent. Now I just think
Speaker 2: they were incredibly corrupt.
Speaker 1: If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
Speaker 1: audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Speaker 1: Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
Speaker 1: right production. Our senior producer is Alexis mme Rosi. Our
Speaker 1: associate producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by
Speaker 1: John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
Speaker 1: Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
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