David Starr Jordan had reason to fear scandal.
Stanford University was still young.
It had opened only in 1891.
Its financial security had been uncertain after Leland Stanford's death.
Jane's fortune and continued support had helped keep the institution alive.
She was not a symbolic founder.
Her money mattered enormously.
So did the legal status of the wealth she had transferred to the university.
A sensational murder investigation involving the founder could become dangerous.
If questions arose about Jane's state of mind, her financial decisions or the validity of transfers to Stanford, the consequences could reach far beyond newspaper embarrassment.
Richard White and other historians have argued that protecting the university gave Jordan a powerful incentive to suppress the murder narrative, regardless of whether he had anything to do with the poisoning itself. Stanford's Department of History now describes White's research as showing both a murder and a subsequent cover-up.
Jordan also had a personal problem.
Jane had been increasingly dissatisfied with him.
The two had clashed over faculty and the university's direction.
According to later research, shortly before her death Jane had discussed removing him.
Her death eliminated that threat.
That made Jordan an obvious figure of suspicion when historians later reopened the case.
But motive is not opportunity.
Jordan was not in Jane's hotel room.
He was not in Hawaii when she took the poisoned bicarbonate.
He had not been physically present during the San Francisco attempt either.
Even Richard White, whose research strongly criticizes Jordan, does not identify him as the person who personally administered the poison.
White's argument is more complicated.
Jordan benefited from Jane's death and then helped bury the homicide investigation afterward.
That does not mean he killed her.
In Honolulu, however, Jordan acted aggressively.
He hired Ernest Waterhouse.
Waterhouse prepared a report suggesting Jane's death could be explained naturally.
Jordan promoted it.
He attacked the doctors who had treated Jane.
He challenged chemical findings.
The story gradually shifted.
A woman who had survived strychnine poisoning six weeks earlier, then consumed strychnine again and died displaying textbook symptoms, was now publicly described as a victim of heart failure.
Stanford's institutional history carried versions of that natural-death explanation for decades.
The Hawaiian verdict became a historical footnote.
The murder faded.
That success is one of the strangest parts of the entire case.
The Honolulu medical evidence did not disappear.
The coroner's verdict did not disappear.
The first poisoning did not disappear.
But the narrative changed anyway.
Power can affect an investigation without physically destroying evidence.
Sometimes it is enough to make another explanation louder.
Jane's body was returned to California.
A funeral was held at Stanford.
She was placed in the family mausoleum alongside Leland Stanford and their son.
The institution continued.
Jordan remained its president until 1913.
The poisoner, whoever that person was, was never prosecuted.
For much of the twentieth century, accounts of Jane Stanford's life routinely repeated the idea that she had died from natural causes.
Then researchers began returning to the original documents.
Doctors.
Toxicology.
Newspapers.
Letters.
The coroner's inquest.
The differences between the official Stanford narrative and the evidence from Honolulu became increasingly difficult to ignore.
In 2003, two scholars independently published work challenging the old story.
Stanford neurologist Robert Cutler produced The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford.
Stanford professor W. Bliss Carnochan also revisited the case.
Both concluded that the poisoning evidence was persuasive and that Jordan had helped suppress it.
Then historian Richard White reopened the mystery even further.
If Jane was murdered, there was still an unanswered question.
Who could reach her in both San Francisco and Honolulu?
The first poisoning happened inside her mansion.
The second happened thousands of miles away.
Most of her original household staff had remained behind.
Elizabeth Richmond, initially suspected after the first incident, was no longer employed by Jane when the second poisoning occurred.
David Starr Jordan was in California.
The suspect therefore had to satisfy an unusual requirement.
Access to Jane before she left.
And access again after she crossed the Pacific.
When historians compared the people surrounding Jane during both incidents, one person stood out.
Bertha Berner.
Jane's secretary.
Her companion of nearly two decades.
The woman who tasted the poisoned water with her in January.
And the woman who personally prepared the bicarbonate Jane swallowed on the night she died.