Campus Crimes: The Murder of Jane Stanford

Summary

CRIME HOUSE 24/7
Episode: Campus Crimes: The Murder of Jane Stanford
Date: August 9, 2026
Host: Vanessa Richardson

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Episode Overview

This episode of Crime House 24/7 launches the "Campus Crimes" limited series, delving into the mysterious and still unsolved death of Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University. The episode explores her life, the founding of the university, mounting tensions between Jane Stanford and her university president, as well as the two dramatic attempts on her life. The show also uncovers the subsequent cover-up by institutional leadership, culminating in a tangled web of suspicion, historical revision, and the fight to protect the legacy and fortune of one of America’s most renowned universities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jane Stanford’s Early Life and the Founding of Stanford University

[04:54 – 14:35]

• Jane Stanford, born in 1828, married Leland Stanford, who became immensely wealthy through the Central Pacific Railroad and his political influence.
• The Stanfords had one son, Leland Jr., whose death at 15 in 1884 from typhoid fever devastated them.
• Out of grief, Jane and Leland Sr. founded Leland Stanford Jr. University in 1885 to memorialize their son.
• Jane played a deeply personal and hands-on role in both the creation and daily operation of the university, especially following her husband's death in 1893.

2. Power Struggles and Rivalries at Stanford

[14:35 – 18:25]

• Jane became the undisputed steward of Stanford University, fiercely protective over its finances, reputation, and mission, which led to conflicts with both outside parties (creditors, government) and insiders.
• A bitter rivalry developed between Jane and David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, who was a proponent of eugenics and academic freedom, clashing with Jane’s controlling style and spiritualist beliefs.
• Jordan resented Jane’s interference in hiring and governance; Jane mistrusted Jordan’s motives and competence, setting the stage for deeper institutional strife.

Notable Quote

“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.”
(Narrator, 13:51)

3. The Attempted and Successful Poisonings

[18:26 – 25:36 | 27:14 – 34:00]

• After the acrimony between Jane and Jordan peaked, Jane attempted to oust Jordan from the presidency.
• On January 14, 1905, Jane’s bottle of spring water was found to be laced with strychnine—she survived after tasting the bitter substance and vomiting.
• Jane fled for some respite to Hawaii with her personal secretary, Bertha Berner.
• On February 28, 1905, Jane ingested another dose of strychnine, this time masked in her customary baking soda drink, and died in agony.
• Local authorities treated her death as a crime scene, preserving evidence and convening a coroner’s jury, which formally ruled the death as poisoning.

Memorable Moments

"She begged for a doctor. When he arrived shortly after, the doctor found her rigid, struggling to breathe, her jaw clenching shut...Jane was fully aware of what was happening to her. She cried out how horrible it was to die this way."
(Narrator, 22:35)

4. David Starr Jordan’s Intervention and the Cover-Up

[27:14 – 34:00]

• Newspapers fueled public scandal, often with racist overtones, blaming Jane’s Chinese servants.
• Jordan immediately took control, bringing in two detectives and hiring a local doctor to re-examine the case.
• The key suspect became Bertha Berner, Jane’s long-serving secretary, who stood to inherit $15,000 (over half a million today) if she maintained the appearance of loyalty.
• Under scrutiny, Bertha admitted to a strained relationship with Jane and minor theft, providing a possible motive.
• But instead of accusing her, Jordan helped engineer a new cause of death—heart failure—through the testimony of his hired doctor and pressured the original attending physician to recant.
• The true finding of strychnine poisoning was effectively buried, replaced by an official narrative of a “natural death.”

Notable Quotes

“It was brazen, and it worked.”
(Narrator, 33:27)

“A university president, two detectives, a hired doctor, a cooperative police department, a frightened secretary. 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.”
(Narrator, 34:49)

5. The Lasting Impact and Renewed Investigations

[34:00 – 39:30]

• The “natural causes” ruling protected both Stanford’s reputation and the financial endowment Jane had left, preventing challenges to her will.
• For almost a century, her death was passed off as an ordinary heart failure.
• In 2003, neurologist Robert Cutler and, in 2022, historian Richard White published research revisiting the evidence, concluding Jane Stanford was almost certainly murdered, likely by Bertha Berner.
• Motives may have included Bertha’s desire for freedom from Jane’s control—potentially even influenced by spiritualist beliefs.
• Evidence fit the scenario: both poisonings involved Bertha, poisoning method was concealed, and police never pursued key leads.
• No one was ever charged. Jane Stanford’s murder remains unsolved—but her university flourishes, an outcome she would have valued, even if justice for her own death was never served.

Notable Quotes

“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.”
(Narrator, 39:05)

“She just never got justice for the fact that someone killed her on the way there.”
(Narrator, 40:19)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:50 – 02:21: Series intro & significance of the Jane Stanford case
• 04:54 – 14:35: Jane Stanford’s life, marriage, tragedy, and university founding
• 14:35 – 18:25: Power struggles between Jane and David Starr Jordan
• 18:26 – 25:36: The poisoning attempts and Jane’s death in detail
• 27:14 – 34:00: Jordan’s cover-up and manipulation of the investigation
• 34:00 – 39:30: Historical reassessment and lingering questions of justice

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Quotes & Highlights

“It wasn’t a charity project. It was a mission and an obsession...She ran it like it was hers, because to her, it was.”
(Narrator, 13:40)

“She cried out how horrible it was to die this way. Within minutes, the convulsions took her.”
(Narrator, 22:49)

“Which is exactly what Jane wanted. She just never got justice for the fact that someone killed her on the way there.”
(Narrator, 40:19)

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Summary Takeaway

The murder of Jane Stanford is as much a tale of personal ambition, grief, and power as it is a whodunit. The episode expertly threads together her unique vision, the bitter internal politics at Stanford University, the chilling details of her death, and a conspiratorial institutional cover-up that succeeded for a century. Ultimately, as historian Richard White and Dr. Robert Cutler revealed, Jane Stanford’s true cause of death—and the mechanism by which it was hidden—was uncovered only long after the fact, leaving open the question of accountability inside even the most esteemed American institutions.

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Transcript

[Vanessa Richardson]

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[Narrator]

A university is supposed to be the one place built for the truth. So what happens when the ugliest truth of all turns up on its own doorstep and the person who's been murdered is the woman who built the place? Welcome to crime house 24 7. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Twice a day, every day, we bring you the best, most timely and gripping cases from across the entire Crime House network, all in one place right here. Sundays are reserved for our special limited series. Right now, that's Campus crimes, a crime house 247 exclusive digging into the murders, disappearances and dark secrets buried behind the ivy of America's most prestigious universities. Today we're opening our Campus Crime series with the death of Jane Stanford. And more than a century later, a Stanford historian said out loud what the university spent decades burying. Jane Stanford was murdered and the COVID up came from inside her own institution. Our community exists because of listeners like you want even more? Join Crime House plus for every episode of Crime House 24.7ad free. Not only that, but you'll get complete access to an exclusive limited series every month and early ad free access to all Crime House shows and bonus episodes go to crime houseplus.com or on Apple Podcasts Tap try free at the top of the crime house 247 page.

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Now I take you back to the

[Narrator]

strange death of Jane Stanford.

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for most of her life, Jane Stanford 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 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. 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 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.

[Historical Narrator]

Many.

[Narrator]

Jane had everything money could buy. 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 rail cars. 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 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. 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 and 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 Jr. Died. He was 15 years old. 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. 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. 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. 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 seances and consulted mediums convinced the dead could still be reached. 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 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, 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'd 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. 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 hiring, firing, curriculum, spending, consulting on decision after decision 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.

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[Narrator]

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 over what the university should even be. Jordan was a nationally known scientist and a leading character 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 seances were an embarrassment to Jane. Jordan was arrogant and overreaching. 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. 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. 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 14th, 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, 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. 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 Berner, 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. By the end of February, Jane had settled in at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu. On the night of February 28, 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. Her jaws clamped her legs stiff, hands balled into feet, 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 just watched her be murdered. And they did something that a century later would matter enormously. They treated the 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 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.

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[Narrator]

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. And that alarmed the one person with the most to lose from a scandal. David Starr 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. 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. 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 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. 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 Bera admitted she'd still been trying to talk her way out of it on the ship.

[Vanessa Richardson]

Over.

[Narrator]

And there was more. Jane disapproved of Bertha's love life, suspecting that she was having an affair with the butler. 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. 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 do, 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 suites now, but a cold, windy afternoon that had chilled Jane and made her ill. It didn't hold together. It had actually been a warm day up in the 70s, but. 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. 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 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 15, 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. About a week later, on March 21, 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 and 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. 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. So who killed Jane Stanford? For that, we have to jump forward, because the natural causes story held for about a hundred 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, Rich White, went further, laying out the case for who did it. White's conclusion is that David Starr 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. 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 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. 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 13, 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. 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 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 the 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 for a hundred years, though none of that was public. The official record said heart failure. The obituary 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 COVID 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 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.

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Thanks for listening to this episode of Pampas Crimes here on Crime House 24. 7. Campus Crimes runs for four Sundays, so join me next Sunday for the next case. Be sure to come back tomorrow for Killer of the Week, where I take you inside the mind and motives of one of the world's most notorious murderers. And to enhance your listening experience. Join Crime House plus and get every episode of Crime House 24.7 completely ad free, along with early ad free access to all Crime House shows plus monthly bonus episodes. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or if

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Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe@c CrimesofRedditpod on YouTube.