'Who Killed Jane Stanford?' by professor Richard White has received little attention from the university since its May publication. “I don’t think they see any good in revisiting the origins of the university” or anything that “endangers its endowment.'
A work of history billed as a murder mystery, “Who Killed Jane Stanford?” has been positively reviewed by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED, among others. Not bad for a book by an academic about a little-known woman who died more than a century ago.
White’s book centers on the poisoning of Stanford University’s female founder and its cover up to ensure the school’s endowment. Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, originally intended to endow the university with $30 million in honor of their dead child’s “beyond-the-grave” instruction to educate the citizens of California. But by the time Leland died in 1893 he left the university only $2.5 million in cash.
The history professor decided these questions could serve as the organizing principle for a class, because “there’s nothing like having the founder of the university murdered to get students interested in why they should do research in the archives.” White taught the archival research class in 2014 and 2015, but found there was a limit to what students could uncover in 10 weeks.
White explains in the book’s preface that he intended to write a history of the Gilded Age centering on Jane Stanford’s 1905 murder, but ended up “writing a detective story that could fit into the true crime genre.” That approach works well because Jane Stanford was poisoned not once, but twice: the first time in her 19-bedroom Nob Hill mansion; and the second time at the Moana Hotel on Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach.